Financial Fragility 1 Franklin Allen Douglas Gale Department of Finance Department of Economics Wharton School New York University University of Pennsylvania 269 Mercer Street Philadephia, PA 19104 New York, NY 10003
[email protected] January 31, 2002 1Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Cowles Foundation Confer- ence on “The Future of American Banking: Historical, Theoretical, and Empirical Perspectives”, and at the University of Iowa. We are grateful to the participants for their comments, particularly Russell Cooper, Douglas Diamond and Stephen Morris. The financial support of the National Science Foundation, the Financial Institutions Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University are gratefully acknowledged. Abstract We study the relationship between sunspot equilibria and fundamental equi- libria in a model of financial crises. There are many sunspot equilibria. Only some of these are the limit of fundamental equilibria when the exogenous fundamental uncertainty becomes vanishingly small. We show that under certain conditions the only “robust” equilibria are those in which extrinsic uncertainty gives rise to financial crises with positive probability. JEL Classification: D5, D8, G2 1 Excess sensitivity and sunspots There are two traditional views of banking panics. One is that they are spontaneous events, unrelated to changes in the real economy. Historically, panics were attributed to “mob psychology” or “mass hysteria” (see, e.g., Kindleberger (1978)). The modern version of this view, developed by Bryant (1980), Diamond and Dybvig (1983), and others, replaces mob psychology and mass hysteria with an equilibrium model in which crises result from self-fulfilling expectations.