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...

Market disruptions in response to the COVID pandemic spurred calls for the consideration of marketwide central clearing of Treasury securities, which might better enable dealers to intermediate large customer trading flows. We assess the netting efficiencies of increased central clearing using...

We explore the capital structure and governance of a mortgage-insuring securitization utility operating with government reinsurance for systemic or “tail” risk. The structure we propose for the replacement of the GSEs focuses on aligning incentives for appropriate pricing and transfer of...

Banks hold liquid and illiquid assets. An illiquid bank that receives a liquidity shock sells assets to liquid banks in exchange for cash. We characterize the constrained efficient allocation as the solution to a planner's problem and show that the market equilibrium is constrained inefficient,...

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...

Although bank capital regulation permits a bank to choose freely between equity and subordinated debt to meet capital requirements, lenders and investors view debt and equity as imperfect substitutes. It follows that the mix of debt in regulatory capital should isolate the role that the market...

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 examine the properties of a method for fixing Libor rates that is based on transactions data and multi-day sampling windows. The use of a sampling window may mitigate problems caused by thin transaction volumes in unsecured wholesale term funding markets. Using two partial data sets of loan...

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...

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...