Three essays in the microeconomics of finance and banking.

Summary This thesis includes three theoretical papers whose aim is to take into account institutional or regulatory frictions to explain certain market failures, from temporary episodes of illiquidity to financial crises. This research program, associated with what is sometimes called institutional finance, is developed here in three applications: bank regulation, information aggregation in financial markets, and the dynamics of limit order markets. The common theme of these three articles is to show how financial markets are affected by the interaction of frictions and strategic behavior and, eventually, to study possible remedies.