On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers Inc. announced their filing for bankruptcy. The reaction of Lehman's competitors and market participants to this bankruptcy filing announcement provides a unique field experiment of how the insolvency spills over to other financial institutions and how...

We develop a dynamic model of liquidity provision, in which hedgers can trade multiple risky assets with arbitrageurs. We compute the equilibrium in closed form when arbitrageurs' utility over consumption is logarithmic or risk-neutral with a non-negativity constraint. Liquidity is increasing in...

We develop a model of financially constrained arbitrage, and use it to study the dynamics of arbitrage capital, liquidity, and asset prices. Arbitrageurs exploit price discrepancies between assets traded in segmented markets, and in doing so provide liquidity to investors. A collateral...

We consider a moral hazard setup wherein leveraged firms have incentives to take on excessive risks and are thus rationed when they attempt to borrow in order to meet liquidity shocks. The rationed firms can optimally pledge cash as collateral to borrow more, but in the process must liquidate...

We show that direct investments by consumers without the use of financial intermediaries can efficiently allocate financial capital to firms seeking funding for production of a novel consumption good. In our setting, consumers are also investors, and their privately known consumption preferences...

We propose a model of delegated portfolio management with career concerns. Investors hire fund managers to invest their capital either in risky bonds or in riskless assets. Some managers have superior information on the default risk. Looking at the past performance, investors update beliefs on...

We explore the consequence for taxation and regulation of bonus pay when investors are protected by taxpayers from downside risk. The paper develops a model where workers in financial sector firms make decisions about effort and risk-taking which are influenced by the structure of bonus pay....

We examine the validity of a macroeconomic version of the Modigliani-Miller theorem. For this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model with two production sectors, risk-averse households and financial intermediation by banks. Banks are funded by deposits and (outside) equity and monitor...

We consider the effects of central-bank purchases of a risky asset, financed by issuing riskless nominal liabilities (reserves), as an additional dimension of policy alongside “conventional” monetary policy (central-bank control of the riskless nominal interest rate), in a...

The financial crisis of 2007-08 has underscored the importance of adverse selection in financial markets. This friction has been mostly neglected by macroeconomic models of financial frictions, however, which have focused almost exclusively on the effects of limited pledgeability. In this paper,...