We use a long history of global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to estimate the conditional joint evolution of temperature and CO2 at a millennial frequency. We document three basic facts. First, the temperature–CO2 dynamics are non-linear, so that large...

We estimate the evolution of the conditional joint distribution of economic and financial conditions. While the joint distribution is approximately Gaussian during normal periods, sharp tightenings of financial conditions lead to the emergence of additional modes. The U.S. economy has...

We propose the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI) to quantify corporate bond market dislocations in real time. The index takes a preponderance-of-metrics perspective to combine a broad set of measures of market functioning from primary and secondary markets but not driven by any one...

Which markets do institutions use to change exposure to credit risk? Using a unique data set of transactions in corporate bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) by large financial institutions, we show that simultaneous transactions in both markets are rare, with an average institution having an...

We establish key stylized facts about the post-crisis evolution of trading and pricing of credit default swaps. Using supervisory contract-level data, we document that dealers become net buyers of credit protection starting in the second half of 2014, both through reducing the amount of...

This paper considers the problem of information acquisition in an intermediated market, where the specialists have access to superior technology for acquiring information. These informational advantages of specialists relative to households lead to disagreement between the two groups, changing...

We develop a theory of financial intermediary leverage cycles in the context of a dynamic model of the macroeconomy. The interaction between a production sector, a financial intermediation sector, and a household sector gives rise to amplification of fundamental shocks that affect real economic...

Faced with the problem of pricing complex contingent claims, an investor seeks to make her valuations robust to model uncertainty. We construct a notion of a model-uncertainty-induced preference functional and extend the "No Good Deals" methodology of Cochrane and Sa a-Requejo (2000) to compute...

We document the cyclical properties of the balance sheets of different types of intermediaries. While the leverage of the bank sector is highly procyclical, the leverage of the nonbank financial sector is acyclical. We propose a theory of a two-agent financial intermediary sector within a...

We study how the risks to future liquidity flow across corporate bond, Treasury, and stock markets. We document distribution “flight-to-safety” effects: a deterioration in the liquidity of high-yield corporate bonds forecasts an increase in the average liquidity of Treasury securities and a...