Yale Hosts Deposit Insurance Conference, Offering New Perspectives on Research and Policy
Deposit Insurance is the most significant explicit government guarantee to the financial sector, and in the wake of recent bank failures, there have been multiple proposals to reform the deposit insurance system in the United States.
To advance our understanding of the trade-offs and considerations that shape the design of deposit insurance schemes, Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy and the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation recently convened over 60 leading researchers and policymakers for the ‘Rethinking Optimal Deposit Insurance’ Conference.
The full day conference featured researcher presentations on bank fragility and failure, as well as new approaches to deposits and insurance. According to conference organizers Eduardo Dávila (Yale) and Itay Goldstein (Wharton), the day brought about many fruitful debates on the optimal split between bank supervision and regulation, the desirability of insuring deposits used for business payment purposes, and the interaction between deposit insurance and lender-of-last-resort policies.
Paper presentations spanned many different methodologies, and combined both empirical work and theoretical modeling. Dávila noted several research highlights, including Jose Luis Peydro's presentation, which included new and detailed disaggregated data on the impact of changes in deposit insurance policies in Denmark, as well as Emil Verner's presentation, which leveraged historical data to determine the ultimate cause of bank failures and banking crises, and whether these can be appropriately predicted.
The keynote panel, titled ‘New Perspectives for Policy,’ brought together both research and policy viewpoints, and included discussion of the FDIC’s 2023 “Options for Deposit Insurance Reform” analysis, which outlines three options to reform the nation's deposit insurance system. The panel, as well as all thoughtful discussions of each of the papers, were designed to draw practical conclusions and present open questions for the design of deposit insurance policies.
Panelists, from left to right: Larry White (New York University), Eva Hüpkes (International Association of Deposit Insurers), Patrick Mitchell (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), Anna Kovner (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), Anil Kashyap (University of Chicago), Itay Goldstein (Wharton)
Participants spanned a diverse group of policy institutions, among them:
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)
- International Association of Deposit Insurers (IADI)
- Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation
- Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)
- Federal Reserve Board
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York
- Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
- Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
- Bank of England