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...

We summarize and evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, which have been used since 2013 to shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private sector investors. We argue that the CRT programs have been successful in reducing the...

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...

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the asset-backed securities (ABS) market, resulting in higher spreads on ABS and briefly halting the issuance of some ABS. On March 23, 2020, the Federal Reserve established the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to support the flow of credit to...

Productive firms can access credit markets directly by issuing corporate bonds or by borrowing through financial intermediaries. In this paper, we study the cyclical properties of corporate credit provision through these two types of debt instruments in major advanced economies. We argue that...

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...

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...

We propose a measure for systemic risk: CoVaR, the value at risk (VaR) of the financial system conditional on institutions being in distress. We define an institution's contribution to systemic risk as the difference between CoVaR conditional on the institution being in distress and CoVaR in the...

Hedgers and a risk-neutral informed trader choose between a broker who takes a position in the asset (a capital broker) and a broker who does not (a discount broker). The capital broker exploits order flow information to mimic informed trades and offset hedgers' trades, reducing informed profits...

In standard Walrasian macro-finance models, pecuniary externalities due to fire sales lead to excessive borrowing and insufficient liquidity holdings. We investigate whether imperfect competition (Cournot) improves welfare through internalizing the externality and find that this is far from...