2007 Fellowship Program fellows

Making Deposit Insurance Work for Transition: Form, Substance and Implementation /draft/

Hayk Zayimtsyan will investigate the need for deposit insurance, its features, alternative schemes, optimal organizational forms and implementation mechanisms in Armenia. He will conduct a comparative analysis of international best practices to determine the desired characteristics of a deposit insurance scheme in Armenia; a quantitative study to determine the efficiency and effectiveness (based on benchmarking techniques) of various deposit insurance schemes; as well as qualitative analysis techniques (focus groups with Central Bank of Armenia (CBA) and Armenian Deposit Guarantee Fund (ADGF) specialists, and interviews among international experts) to supplement the quantitative methods. The researcher will also address the problems of moral hazard and adverse selection accompanying deposit insurance. This research may allow Hayk Zayimtsyan to identify optimal forms of deposit insurance and devise a general logic for determining such optimality for various socioeconomic population strata in Armenia. The findings of this research may be of interest to the policy makers, international organizations (such as the IMF, the World Bank and USAID, which implement projects in similar or interconnected areas), as well as a wider range of stakeholders (e.g. the Bankers Union of Armenia), other scientific institutions, think-tanks and research centers. Beyond international peer-review publication, the researcher intends to present the findings of this research to academia through participation at various conferences and seminars. He also plans on publishing his findings on various websites and in the publications of CBA and ADGF. Regulatory authorities, such as the Central Bank and the Armenian Deposit Guarantee Fund, may in turn help to deliver the findings of the research to decision makers and trigger changes in policies related to deposit insurance.

E-mail: haykz@freenet.am