The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift from active to passive investment strategies. We examine how this shift affects financial stability through its impacts on: (i) funds' liquidity and redemption risks, (ii) asset-market volatility, (iii) asset-management industry...

This paper develops a framework for measuring digital services in the face of ongoing innovations in the delivery of content to consumers. We capture what Brynjolfsson and Saunders (2009) call "free goods" as the capital services generated by connected consumers' stocks of IT digital goods; this...

Detractors have warned that Private Equity (PE) funds tend to over-lever their portfolio companies because of an option-like payoff, building up default risk and debt overhang. This paper argues PE-ownership leads to substantially higher levels of optimal (value-maximizing) leverage, by reducing...

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...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of unconventional monetary policy on firm financial constraints. It focuses on the Federal Reserve's maturity extension program (MEP), intended to lower longer-term rates and flatten the yield curve by reducing the supply of long-term government debt....

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...

Banks, life insurers, and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) lenders originate the vast majority of U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) loans. While these lenders compete in the same market, they differ in how they are funded and regulated, and therefore specialize in loans with...

The Credit Card Accountability and Disclosure Act (CARD Act) of 2009 restricted several risk management practices of credit card issuers. Using a quasi-experimental design with credit bureau data on consumer lending, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the act's restrictions on...

We present the first micro-level evidence of the transmission of shocks through financial networks. Using the network of credit default swap (CDS) transactions between banks, we identify bank CDS returns attributable to counterparty losses. A bank's own CDS spread increases whenever...