When a bank experiences a negative shock to its equity, one way to return to target leverage is to sell assets. If asset sales occur at depressed prices, then one bank's sales may impact other banks with common exposures, resulting in contagion. We propose a simple framework that accounts for...

The massive rise in U.S. stockholding during the early twentieth century resulted in the deepening of securities markets, the spread of investment banks, and the expansion of publicly held corporations. This paper makes use of a unique panel database of South Dakota bank stockholders from...

Is the pricing of sovereign risk linear during bearish episodes? Or can initial shocks on economic fundamentals be exacerbated by endogenous factors that create nonlinearities? We test for nonlinearities in the sovereign bond market of European peripheral countries during the debt crisis and...

This paper investigates the impact of credit rating changes on the sovereign spreads in the European Union and investigates the macro and financial factors that account for the time varying effects of a given credit rating change. We find that changes of ratings are informative, economically...

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

We introduce liquidity frictions into an otherwise standard DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities and ask: Can a shock to the liquidity of private paper lead to a collapse in short-term nominal interest rates and a recession like the one associated with the 2008 U.S. financial crisis? Once...