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 show that nearly 100% of the U.S. equity premium is earned over a window around the opening hours of European markets when U.S. cash markets are closed. We explore two potential complementary explanations. First, consistent with predictions from dealer inventory risk models, we find (i) a...

We construct risks around consensus forecasts of real GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation. We find that risks are time-varying, asymmetric, and partly predictable. Tight financial conditions forecast downside growth risk, upside unemployment risk, and increased uncertainty around the...

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...

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...

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...

The use of order flow information by financial firms has come to the forefront of the regulatory debate. A central question is: Should a dealer who acquires information by taking client orders be allowed to use or share that information? We explore how information sharing affects dealers,...