While the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) broadens the regulatory reach to reduce systemic risks to the U.S. financial system, it does not address some important risks that could migrate to or emanate from entities outside the federal safety net. At the same time, it limits the types of interventions by...

In recent years, U.S. banks have increasingly relied on deposits from financial intermediaries, especially money market funds (MMFs), which collect funds from large institutional investors and lend them to banks. In this paper, we show that intermediation through MMFs allows investors to limit...

Technology-based (“FinTech”) lenders increased their market share of U.S. mortgage lending from 2 percent to 8 percent from 2010 to 2016. Using market-wide, loan-level data on U.S. mortgage applications and originations, we show that FinTech lenders process mortgage applications about 20...

We identify and track over time the factors that make the financial system vulnerable to fire sales by constructing an index of aggregate vulnerability. The index starts increasing quickly in 2004, before most other major systemic risk measures, and triples by 2008. The fire-sale-specific...

Like the United States, Denmark relies heavily on capital markets for funding residential mortgages, and the Danish covered bond market bears a number of similarities to U.S. agency securitization. In this paper we describe the key features of the Danish mortgage finance system and compare and...

We use confidential and novel data to measure the benefit to broker-dealers of being affiliated with a bank holding company and the resulting access to internal sources of funding. We accomplish this by comparing the balance sheets of broker-dealers that are associated with bank holding...

This paper characterizes the run behavior of sophisticated (institutional) and unsophisticated (retail) investors by studying the runs on prime money market funds (MMFs) of March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. For both U.S. and European institutional prime MMFs, the runs were...

Money market funds (MMFs) are popular around the world, with over $9 trillion in assets under management globally. From their origins in the 1970s, MMFs have operated in a niche between the capital markets and the banking system, as investment funds that offer private money-like assets with...

This paper uses new data to provide a comprehensive view of repo activity during the 2007-09 financial crisis for the first time. We show that activity declined much more in the bilateral segment of the market than in the tri-party segment. Surprisingly, we find that a large share of the decline...

Most mortgages in the U.S. are securitized in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Yield spreads on these securities are thus a key determinant of homeowners' funding costs. We study variation in MBS spreads over time and across securities, and document a cross-sectional smile pattern in MBS...