We adapt structural models of default risk to take into account the special nature of bank assets. The usual assumption of log-normally distributed asset values is not appropriate for banks. Typical bank assets are risky debt claims, which implies that they embed a short put option on the...

Can central banks defuse rising stability risks in financial booms by leaning against the wind with higher interest rates? This paper studies the state-dependent effects of monetary policy on financial stability. Based on the near-universe of advanced economy financial cycles since the 19th...

Using evidence from Russia, we explore the effect of the introduction of deposit insurance on bank risk. Drawing on variation in the ratio of firm deposits to total household and firm deposits before the announcement of deposit insurance, so as to capture the magnitude of the decrease in market...

How can tax policy improve financial stability? Recent studies suggest large stability gains from eliminating the debt bias in corporate taxation. It is well known that this reform reduces bank leverage. This paper analyzes a novel, complementary channel: risk taking. We model banks’ portfolio...

This paper investigates the impact of banking prudential regulation on sovereign risk. We show that prudential regulation reduces sovereign risk and induces governments to spend more. As a result, countries with tight prudential regulation have lower primary budget balances and accumulate more...

We develop a method for directly modeling cointegrated multivariate time series that are observed in mixed frequencies. We regard lower-frequency data as regularly (or irregularly) missing and treat them with higher-frequency data by adopting a state-space model. This utilizes the structure of...

In this article we use a stochastic model with one representative firm to study business tax policy under default risk. We will show that, for a given tax rate, the government has an incentive to reduce (increase) financial instability and default costs if its objective function is welfare (tax...

This short article studies the tax effects on a start-up investment decision under uncertainty. Since the representative firm can decide both when to invest and how much to borrow, the distortive effects are twofold. We thus show that the deadweight loss (namely, the ratio between the welfare...

This paper introduces a new test of the predictive performance and market timing for categorical forecasts based on contingency tables when the user has non-categorical loss functions. For example, a user might be interested in the return of an underlying variable instead of just the direction....

Using a novel dataset that contains qualitative firm survey data on sales forecasts as well as balance-sheet data on realized sales, we document that only major forecast errors are predictable and display autocorrelation. This result is a particular violation of the Full Information Rational...