期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2012
卷号:109
期号:45
页码:18338-18343
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1213767109
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:The global financial crisis has precipitated an increasing appreciation of the need for a systemic perspective toward financial stability. For example: What role do large banks play in systemic risk? How should capital adequacy standards recognize this role? How is stability shaped by concentration and diversification in the financial system? We explore these questions using a deliberately simplified, dynamic model of a banking system that combines three different channels for direct transmission of contagion from one bank to another: liquidity hoarding, asset price contagion, and the propagation of defaults via counterparty credit risk. Importantly, we also introduce a mechanism for capturing how swings in "confidence" in the system may contribute to instability. Our results highlight that the importance of relatively large, well-connected banks in system stability scales more than proportionately with their size: the impact of their collapse arises not only from their connectivity, but also from their effect on confidence in the system. Imposing tougher capital requirements on larger banks than smaller ones can thus enhance the resilience of the system. Moreover, these effects are more pronounced in more concentrated systems, and continue to apply, even when allowing for potential diversification benefits that may be realized by larger banks. We discuss some tentative implications for policy, as well as conceptual analogies in ecosystem stability and in the control of infectious diseases.