Publications
Publications
- September 2015
- Journal of Financial Economics
Banks as Patient Fixed-Income Investors
By: Samuel G. Hanson, Andrei Shleifer, Jeremy C. Stein and Robert W. Vishny
Abstract
We examine the business model of traditional commercial banks when they compete with shadow banks. While both types of intermediaries create safe "money-like" claims, they go about this in different ways. Traditional banks create money-like claims by holding illiquid fixed-income assets to maturity, and they rely on deposit insurance and costly equity capital to support this strategy. This strategy allows bank depositors to remain "sleepy": they do not have to pay attention to transient fluctuations in the market value of bank assets. In contrast, shadow banks create money-like claims by giving their investors an early exit option requiring the rapid liquidation of assets. Thus, traditional banks have a stable source of funding, while shadow banks are subject to runs and fire-sale losses. In equilibrium, traditional banks have a comparative advantage at holding fixed-income assets that have only modest fundamental risk but are illiquid and have substantial transitory price volatility, whereas shadow banks tend to hold relatively liquid assets.
Keywords
Citation
Hanson, Samuel G., Andrei Shleifer, Jeremy C. Stein, and Robert W. Vishny. "Banks as Patient Fixed-Income Investors." Journal of Financial Economics 117, no. 3 (September 2015): 449–469. (Internet Appendix Here.)