We propose a simple model of the sovereign-bank diabolic loop, and establish four results. First, the diabolic loop can be avoided by restricting banks domestic sovereign exposures relative to their equity. Second, equity requirements can be lowered if banks only hold senior domestic sovereign...

This paper studies strategic decision making by a private currency ledger operator, which faces competition from public money and/or other ledgers. A monopoly ledger operator can incentivize contract enforcement across the financial sector by threatening exclusion, but it can also impose markups...

This paper investigates the tradeoff between competition and financial inclusion resulting from the vertical integration between mobile network and money operators. Joining newly assembled data on mobile money fees through the WayBack machine, with sources on network coverage and financials, we...

The price of a safe asset reflects not only the expected discounted future cash flows but also future service flows, since retrading allows partial insurance of idiosyncratic risk in an incomplete markets setting. This lowers the issuers' interest burden and allows the government to run a...

We use the German Crisis of 1931, a key event of the Great Depression, to study how depositors behave during a bank run in the absence of deposit insurance. We find that deposits decline by around 20% during the run and that there is an equal outflow of retail and non-financial wholesale...

This paper studies how a large increase in the price level is transmitted to the real economy through firm balance sheets. Using newly digitized macro- and micro-level data from the German inflation of 1919-1923, we show that inflation led to a large reduction in real debt burdens and...

We survey the growing literature emphasizing the role that supply-and-demand forces play in shaping the term structure of interest rates. Our starting point is the Vayanos and Vila (2009, 2021) model of the term structure of default-free bond yields, which we present in both discrete and...

We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...

We provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of the Greek Crisis of 2010. We first benchmark the crisis against all episodes of sudden stops, sovereign debt crises, and lending boom/busts in emerging and advanced economies since 1980. The decline in Greece's output, especially investment, is...

We develop a two-country model in which currency and bond markets are populated by different investor clienteles, and segmentation is partly overcome by global arbitrageurs with limited capital. Our model accounts for the empirically documented violations of Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP) and...