According to most theories of financial intermediation, intermediaries diversify risk, transform maturity or liquidity, and screen or monitor borrowers. In U.S. Treasury auctions, none of these rationales apply. Intermediaries submit their customer bids without transforming liquidity or...

We define CoVaR as the value at risk (VaR) of financial institutions conditional on other institutions being in distress. The increase of CoVaR relative to VaR measures spillover risk among institutions. We estimate CoVaR using quantile regressions and document significant CoVaR increases among...

This paper studies the connection between risk taking and executive compensation in financial institutions. A theoretical model of shareholders, debtholders, depositors, and an executive suggests that 1) in principle, excessive risk taking (in the form of risk shifting) may be addressed by...