The paper analyzes the financial crisis of through the lens of market failures and regulatory failures. We present a case that there were four primary failures contributing to the crisis: excessive risk-taking in the financial sector due to mispriced government guarantees; regulatory focus on...

The headline numbers appear to show that even as banks and financial intermediaries suffered large credit losses in the financial crisis of 2007-09, they raised substantial amounts of new capital, both from private investors and through government-funded capital injections. However, on closer...

The paper analyzes the financial crisis of 2007-2009 through the lens of market failures and regulatory failures and presents a case that there were four primary failures contributing to the crisis: excessive risk-taking in the financial sector due to mispriced government guarantees; regulatory...

The global imbalance explanation of the financial crisis of 2007-09 suggests that demand for riskless assets from countries with current account surpluses created fragility in countries with current account deficits, most notably, in the United States. We examine this explanation by analyzing...

In the August of 2007, banks faced a freeze in funding liquidity from the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity in response to this freeze and its implications for the real economy. Commercial banks in the United States raised deposits and...

The global imbalance explanation of the financial crisis of 2007-09 suggests that demand for riskless assets from countries with current account surpluses created fragility in countries with current account deficits, most notably, in the United States. We examine this explanation by analyzing...

We present an economic model of systemic risk and show that each financial institution's contribution to systemic risk can be measured as its systemic expected shortfall (SES), i.e., its propensity to be undercapitalized when the system as a whole is undercapitalized. SES increases in the...

We analyze asset-backed commercial paper conduits which played a central role in the early phase of the financial crisis of 2007-09. We document that commercial banks set up conduits to securitize assets while insuring the newly securitized assets using credit guarantees. The credit guarantees...

What is the effect of financial crises and their resolution on banks' choice of liquidity? When banks have relative expertise in employing risky assets, the market for these assets clears only at fire-sale prices following a large number of bank failures. The gains from acquiring assets at...