A bank or other financial institution is potentially subject to at least four types of risk: (1) Credit risk -- defaults or delays in repayments. (2) Fraud -- embezzlement or insider abuse. (3) Liquidity risk -- or high cost of obtaining needed cash. (4) Interest rate risk -- differential...

International data suggests that fluctuations in the level and volatility of the world interest rate (as measured by the US treasury bill rate) are positively correlated with both the level and volatility of sovereign spreads in emerging economies. We incorporate an estimated time-varying...

We study a novel policy tool--interest rate uncertainty--that can be used to discourage inefficient capital inflows and to adjust the composition of external accounts between short-term securities and foreign direct investment (FDI). We identify the trade-offs faced in navigating between...

The 1980s S&L debacle is generally viewed as the result of: (1) sharply rising interest rates eliminating the net worth of thrifts funding fixed-rate loans with short-term deposits and (2) thrifts responding by taking even greater interest-rate and credit risks. The question investigated in this...

We show that maturity transformation does not expose banks to significant interest rate risk--it actually hedges banks' interest rate risk. We argue that this is driven by banks' deposit franchise. Banks incur large operating costs to maintain their deposit franchise, and in return get...

We use the term structure of bank CD rates to examine whether maturity-transformation risk is priced into the rates banks offer customers. We find that depositors pay a significant cost for the liquidity provided by bank deposits. This cost is strongly related to the amount of...

We present an econometric method for estimating the parameters of a diffusion model from discretely sampled data. The estimator is transparent, adaptive, and inherits the asymptotic properties of the generally unattainable maximum likelihood estimator. We use this method to estimate a new...