A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...

In this paper we discuss how several macroeconomic features of the 2001-2009 period may have resulted from a process in which financial markets were trying to allocate risk between heterogeneous agents when productive investment opportunities are scarce. We begin by showing how heterogeneity in...

Discussions of financial risk often fail to distinguish between risks that are consciously borne and those that are not. To understand the breeding conditions for financial crises the prime focus of concern should not be simply on large risk-taking per se, but on the unintended, or unanticipated...

We present a model of optimal intervention in a flight to quality episode. The reason for intervention stems from a collective bias in agents' expectations. Agents in the model make risk management decisions with incomplete knowledge. They understand their own shocks, but are uncertain of how...

The investment fund sector has expanded dramatically since the crisis of 2008-2009. As the sector grows, so do the implications of its risk-taking for the wider financial system and real economy. This paper provides empirical evidence for the existence of wide- spread risk-taking incentives in...

Using variance decompositions in vector auto-regressions (VARs) we model a high-dimensional network of European CDS spreads to assess the transmission of credit risk to the non-financial corporate sector. Our findings suggest a sectoral clustering in the CDS network, where financial institutions...

Using variance decompositions in vector auto-regressions (VARs) we model a high-dimensional network of European CDS spreads to assess the transmission of credit risk to the non-financial corporate sector. Our findings suggest a sectoral clustering in the CDS network, where financial institutions...

We propose a novel mechanism, “financial dampening,” whereby loan retrenchment by banks attenuates the effectiveness of monetary policy. The theory unifies an endogenous supply of illiquid local loans and risk-sharing among subsidiaries of bank holding companies (BHCs). We derive an...

We investigate the extent to which various structural risks exacerbate the materialization of cyclical risk. We use a large database covering all sorts of cyclical and structural features of the financial sector and the real economy for a panel of 30 countries over the period 2006Q1-2019Q4. We...

By providing liquidity to depositors and credit line borrowers, banks are exposed to doubleruns on assets and liabilities. For identification, we exploit the 2007 freeze of the European interbank market and the Italian Credit Register. After the shock, there are sizeable, aggregate double-runs....