This article develops a model that studies how the presence of a lender of last resort (LOLR) affects the ex ante investment incentives of banks. We show that a perfectly informed LOLR induces a first-best outcome for small and medium sized banks but causes moral hazard in larger banks given the...

Should central banks lend against low quality collateral? We characterize efficient central bank collateral policy in a model where a bank borrows from the interbank market or the central bank. Collateral has favorable incentive effects but is costly to transfer to lenders who value the...

The paper develops an early-warning model for predicting vulnerabilities leading to distress in European banks using both bank and country-level data. As outright bank failures have been rare in Europe, the paper introduces a novel dataset that complements bankruptcies and defaults with state...

The Federal Reserve’s AMLF program was designed to provide liquidity to money market funds (MMFs). Between September 2008 and May 2009, the program made $217 billion in non-recourse loans to depository institutions and bank holding companies to purchase asset-backed commercial paper from MMFs....

We measure the commonality in hedge fund returns, identify its main driving factor and analyze its implications for financial stability. We find that hedge funds’ commonality increased significantly from 2003 until 2006. We attribute this rise mainly to the increase in hedge funds’ exposure...

Tracing the SEC ban on the short selling of financial stocks in September 2008, this paper investigates whether such selling activity before the 2008 short ban reflected financial companies’ risk exposure in the subprime crisis. Evidence suggests that short sellers sold short stocks that had...

Compared to matched conventional mutual funds, socially responsible mutual funds outperform during periods of market crises. This dampening of downside risk comes at the cost of underperforming during non-crisis periods. Investors seeking downside protection would value the asymmetry of these...

We employ a comprehensive data set and a variety of methods to provide evidence on the magnitude of large banks’ funding advantage in Canada in addition to the extent to which market discipline exists across different securities issued by the Canadian banks. The banking sector in Canada...

This paper studies the consequences of a regulatory pay cap in proportion to assets on bank risk, bank value, and bank asset allocations. The cap is shown to lower banks’ risk and raise banks’ values by acting against a competitive externality in the labour market. The risk reduction is...

The global financial crisis highlighted that the financial system can be most vulnerable when it seems most stable. This paper models non-linear dynamics in banking. Small shocks can lead from an equilibrium with few bank defaults straight to a full freeze. The mechanism is based on...