The 30-year fixed-rate fully amortizing mortgage (or "traditional fixed-rate mortgage") was a substantial innovation when first developed during the Great Depression. However, it has three major flaws. First, because homeowner equity accumulates slowly during the first decade, homeowners are...

Recent accounting changes, for the first time, permit the use of fair value in the primary financial statements for held-to-maturity (HTM) bank loans. While the use of fair value has historically attracted significant discussion and debate, there is little information in the public domain on how...

We study how banks manage their default risk to optimally negotiate quantities and prices of contracts in over-the-counter markets. We show that costly actions exerted by banks to reduce their default probabilities are inefficient. Negative externalities due to counterparty concentration may...

We quantify the effect of refinancing risk on euro area money market spreads, a major factor driving spreads during the financing crisis. With the advent of the crisis, market participants' perception of their ability to refinance over a given period of time changed radically. As a result,...

To attract retail time deposits, over 7,000 FDIC insured U.S. commercial banks publicly post their yield offers. I document an economically sizable and highly pro-cyclical cross-sectional dispersion in these yield offers during the period 1997-2011. Banks adjusted their yields rigidly and...

This paper considers various ways of using balance sheet policy (BSP) to provide monetary policy stimulus, including the BSPs put in place by the Federal Reserve in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, the choice between fixed-size and flow-based asset purchase programs, policies targeting...

We estimate an equilibrium asset pricing model in which agents' preferences have an unobserved external habit using the efficient method of moments (EMM). Given the estimated structural parameters we examine the cyclical behavior of expected stock returns in the model. We find that the estimated...

We test the widely held assumption that longer restructurings are more costly. In contrast to earlier studies, we use instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of restructuring time and creditor return. Instrumenting proves critical to our finding that creditor recovery rates...

Nominal forward rates are sensitive at surprisingly long horizons to macroeconomic news and monetary-policy surprises. This paper takes advantage of affine term-structure modelling to demonstrate that movements in term premia, not expected future short rates, account for most of the reaction of...

The discount function, which determines the value of all future nominal payments, is the most basic building block of finance and is usually inferred from the Treasury yield curve. It is therefore surprising that researchers and practitioners do not have available to them a long history of...