Focusing on downgrades as stress events that drive the selling of corporate bonds, we document that the illiquidity of stressed bonds has increased after the Volcker Rule. Dealers regulated by the Rule have decreased their market-making activities while non-Volcker-affected dealers have stepped...

I develop a macroeconomic model with a financial sector, in which banks can finance risky projects (loans) and can affect their quality by exerting a costly screening effort. Informational frictions regarding the observability of loan characteristics limit the amount of external funds that banks...

This paper presents a model of repo rehypothecation in which dealers intermediate funds and collateral between cash lenders (e.g., money market funds) and prime brokerage clients (e.g., hedge funds). Dealers take advantage of their position as intermediaries, setting different repo terms with...

Leveraged term loans are typically arranged by banks but distributed to institutional investors. Using novel data, we find that to elicit investors' willingness to pay, arrangers expose themselves to pipeline risk: They have to retain larger shares when investors are willing to pay less than...

Dealers in over-the-counter securities form networks to mitigate search frictions. The audit trail for municipal bonds shows the dealer network has a core-periphery structure. Central dealers are more efficient at matching buyers and sellers than peripheral dealers, which shortens intermediation...

I compare the timing of information acquisition among institutional investors and sell-side analysts, and I show that hedge fund trades predict the direction of subsequent analyst ratings change reports while other investors' trades do not. In addition, hedge funds reverse trades after analyst...

Many U.S. corporations have frozen defined benefit (DB) pension plans, replacing new DB promises with contributions to defined contribution (DC) plans. We estimate expected DB accruals from the age-service and salary distributions of a large sample of U.S. corporate pension plans with more than...

We examine the relation between changes in hedge fund stock holdings and measures of informational efficiency of equity prices derived from transactions data, and find that, on average, increased hedge fund ownership leads to significant improvements in the informational efficiency of equity...

This paper studies Leveraged and Inverse Exchange Traded Funds (LETFs) from a financial stability perspective. Mechanical positive-feedback rebalancing of LETFs resembles the portfolio insurance strategies, which contributed to the stock market crash of October 19, 1987 (Brady Report, 1988). I...

Bilateral financial contracts typically require an assessment of counterparty risk. Central clearing of these financial contracts allows market participants to mutualize their counterparty risk, but this insurance may weaken incentives to acquire and to reveal information about such risk. When...