Liquidity, defined as the ease with which an asset may be marketed, has a self-fulfilling dimension. If investors in the primary market for a new asset fear an illiquid secondary market, the issuance does not take off thereby vindicating the initial concern about an illiquid secondary market....

The structure of securitization deals, referred to as ¶tranching¶, is standard.  In those transactions, claims on cash flows generated by the collateral are split into several classes of notes, at least 3 and possibly more than 5. Each class is called a tranche and has absolute priority in...

Banks operating under Value-at-Risk constraints give rise to a well-defined aggregate balance sheet capacity for the banking sector as a whole that depends on total bank capital. Equilibrium risk and market risk premiums can be solved in closed form as functions of aggregate bank capital. We...

Various markets, particularly NASDAQ, have been under pressure from regulators and market participants to introduce call auctions for their opening and closing periods. We investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close from a unique natural experiment provided by the...

Public information to financial markets often arrives through the disclosures of interested parties who have a material interest in the reactions of the market to the new information. When the strategic interaction between the sender and the receiver is formalized as a disclosure game with...

Risk is endogenous. Equilibrium risk is the fixed point of the mapping that takes perceived risk to actual risk. When risk-neutral traders operate under Value-at-Risk constraints, market conditions exhibit signs of fluctuating risk appetite and amplification of shocks through feedback effects....

Do large investors increase the vulnerability of a country to speculative attacks in the foreign exchange markets? To address this issue, we build a model of currency crises where a single large investor and a continuum of small investors independently decide whether to attack a currency based...

Risk management systems in current use treat the statistical relations governing asset returns as being exogenous, and attempt to estimate risk only by reference to historical data. These systems fail to take into account the feedback effect in which trading decisions impinge on prices. We...

Recent debate on the reform of the international financial architecture has highlighted the potentially important role of the official sector in crisis management. We examine how such public intervention in sovereign debt crises affects efficiency, exante and ex post. Our results shed light on...