Bornstein, Gideon.

Moral Hazard Misconceptions: the Case of the Greenspan Put / Gideon Bornstein, Guido Lorenzoni. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w24050 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24050. .

November 2017.

Policy discussions on financial market regulation tend to assume that whenever a corrective policy is used ex post to ameliorate the effects of a crisis, there are negative side effects in terms of moral hazard ex ante. This paper shows that this is not a general theoretical prediction, focusing on the case of monetary policy interventions ex post. In particular, we show that if the central bank does not intervene by monetary easing following a crisis, this creates an aggregate demand externality that makes borrowing ex ante inefficient. If instead the central bank follows the optimal discretionary policy and intervenes to stabilize asset prices and real activity, we show examples in which the aggregate demand externality disappears, reducing the need for ex ante intervention.




System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.