Topic: Interbank Runs: A Network Model of Systemic Liquidity Crunches

Speaker: Yinan Su, Ph.D. Candidate, Booth School of Business, The University of Chicago

Date: February 28th (Wednesday)

Time: 10:00-11:30am

Location: Building 4, Room 101

Language: English

Abstract:

I study how interbank lending network structures affect financial fragility. Interbank lending is beneficial but subject to coordination failure. With interbank wholesale funding, banks’ balance sheets become inflated, and give the senior retail depositors a sense of safety to allow more illiquid assets. In interbank runs, banks run on banks as they mutually reinforce each other to withdraw interbank lending. Banks’ individually precautionary liquidity hoarding strategies are connected by the pairwise lending relationships. Mean-field analysis extracts the systemic behavior from the network of strategic interactions. I show such dispersed and indirectly linked interactions also lead to discontinuous and system-wide liquidity crunches, as if the interactions are centralized. Local insolvency shocks trigger the interbank run if the network is unraveled beyond a critical point. The model is applied to identify the optimal capital injection targets of government bailouts, and study the systemic effects of the proposed regulations on restraining the highly connected banks.

About the speaker:

Yinan Su is a Ph.D. candidate in the Joint Program in Financial Economics at the University of Chicago. He will join the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School as an Assistant Professor of Finance from summer 2018. His primary research interests are banking and networks; secondary research interests are empirical asset pricing and financial econometrics. Tsinghua University is Yinan Su’s proud alma mater, from where he earned the bachelor’s degree in economics and finance (with honor).