We study factors influencing individuals' decisions to purchase Citibank stock during the 1920s. Citibank stock had a very high price per share and was only an investment option for wealthy people. The willingness to own shares was encouraged by proximity to New York, but constraints related to...

Should regulators encourage the migration of trade from over-the-counter (OTC) to centralized markets? To address this question, we consider a model of equilibrium and socially optimal market participation of heterogeneous banks in an OTC market, in a centralized market, or in both markets at...

This paper studies the economic role of financial institutions in economies where agents' incomes are subject to privately observable, idiosyncratic random events. The information structure precludes conventional insurance arrangements. However, a financial institution -- perhaps best viewed as...

We investigate how banking relationships that combine lending and underwriting services affect the terms of lending, through both loan supply- and loan demand-side effects, and the underwriting costs of debt and equity issues. We capture and control for firm characteristics, including...

Over the last twenty years, the consensus view of systemic risk in the financial system that emerged in response to the banking crises of the 1930s and before has lost much of its relevance. This view held that the main systemic problem is runs on solvent banks leading to bank panics. But...

We use payroll data on 1.2 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sector to identify incentive pay in the critical banking segments of treasury/capital market management and investment banking for 66 banks. We document an economically significant correlation of...

We demonstrate that the funding value adjustments (FVAs) of major dealers are debt-overhang costs to their shareholders. In order to maximize shareholder value, dealer quotations therefore adjust for FVAs. Our case examples include interest-rate swap FVAs and violations of covered interest...

We empirically examine the order flows spillovers between Nasdaq and the Forex markets in 2008 and 2009. With emphasis on a role of high-frequency traders (HFTs) who aggregate information between the two markets as well as within each market, our results show that HFTs in Nasdaq trade...

Heightened counterparty risk during the recent financial crisis has raised questions about the role clearinghouses play in global financial stability. Empirical identification of the effect of centralized clearing on counterparty risk is challenging because of the co-incidence of macro-economic...