In response to the sharp decline in prices of financial stocks in the fall of 2008, regulators in a number of countries banned short selling of particular stocks and industries. Evidence suggests that these bans did little to stop the slide in stock prices, but significantly increased costs of...

The Term Auction Facility (TAF), the first auction-based liquidity initiative by the Federal Reserve during the global financial crisis, was aimed at improving conditions in the dollar money market and bringing down the significantly elevated London interbank offered rate (Libor). The...

Financial institutions around the world expected the millennium date change (Y2K) to cause an aggregate liquidity shortage. Responding to concerns about this liquidity shortage, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York auctioned Y2K options to primary dealers. The options gave the dealers the right...

In September 2008, a six-year-old article about the 2002 bankruptcy of United Airlines' parent company resurfaced on the Internet and was mistakenly believed to be reporting a new bankruptcy filing by the company. This episode caused the company's stock price to drop by as much as 76 percent in...

We provide robust evidence of deviations from the Covered Interest Parity (CIP) relation since the onset of the crisis in August 2007. The CIP deviations exist with respect to different dollar interest rates and exchange rate pairs of the dollar vis-à-vis other currencies. The results show that...

Using plausibly exogenous variation in demand for federal funds created by daily shocks to reserve balances, we identify the supply curve facing a bank borrower in the inter-bank market, and study how access to overnight credit is affected by changes in public and private measures of borrower...

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local governments were among the sectors expected to experience the most severe distress. The combination of a sharply deteriorating revenue picture, a pressing need for additional expenditures, delays in the receipt of substantial taxes owed, and...

This paper studies the effects of a recent tick size reduction in the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find significantly narrower bid-ask spreads, increased trading activity, improveddepth within one old tick despite lower overall market depth, and improved price efficiency.Moreover, slow...

We examine the economic mechanisms that limited arbitrage between the cash and forward markets of agency MBS, and whether asset purchases of the Federal Reserve (Fed) alleviated price dislocations. We find that the cash-forward basis, or the price difference between the cash and forward markets...

We estimate the option value of municipal liquidity by studying bond market activity and public sector hiring decisions when government budgets are severely distressed. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, we exploit lending eligibility population cutoffs introduced by the federal...