The Home Owners' Loan Corporation purchased more than a million delinquent mortgages from private lenders between 1933 and 1936 and refinanced the loans for the borrowers. Its primary goal was to break the cycle of foreclosure, forced property sales and decreases in home values that was...

This paper examines the economic rationale for, historical experience of, and current pressures facing the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). The PBGC is the government entity which partially insures participants in private-sector defined benefit pension plans against the loss of...

Large publicly-held pools of assets are playing an increasingly prominent role in the global investment arena. We compare three distinct forms of such public funds, namely foreign exchange reserve funds, sovereign wealth funds, and public pension funds, to highlight their differences and...

In the United States today, the system of financial regulation is complex and fragmented. Responsibility to regulate the financial services industry is split between about a dozen federal agencies, hundreds of state agencies, and numerous industry-sponsored self-governing associations....

We study the relationship between compensation and risk-taking among finance firms using a neglected insight from principal-agent contracting with hidden action and risk-averse agents. If the sensitivity of pay to stock price or slope does not vary with stock price volatility, then total...

Using a novel data of institutional investors' bond holdings, we examine a transmission of the crisis of 2007-2008 from the securitized bond market to the corporate bond market via joint ownership of these bonds by investors. We posit that, ceteris paribus, corporate bonds held by investors with...

During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as –19 percent for annuities and –57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market...

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by nonprime loans played a central role in the recent financial crisis. Little is known, however, about the underlying forces that drove investor demand for these securitizations. Using micro-data on...

This chapter describes a system, called the LEADS system, for providing market participants, regulators, and households with information on the reallocation of resources within, from, and to the household sector in response to macroeconomic events. The household sector is both a propagator of...

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...