Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value, reducing the efficiency of trade. This need for opacity...

Human beings want to believe that good outcomes in the future are more likely, but also want to make good decisions that increase average outcomes in the future. We consider a general equilibrium model with complete markets and show that when investors hold beliefs that optimally balance these...

The history of the financing of the American corporation can be described along many dimensions. One dimension of that history that underlies various measures of historical change in corporate finance is the range of feasible relationships between corporations and intermediaries. Intermediaries...

Financial institutions have both investors and customers. Investors, such as those who invest in stocks and bonds or private/public-sector guarantors of institutions, expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return in exchange for the financing and risk-bearing that they provide. Customers of a...

I provide a quantitative interpretation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years. Measuring separately the cost of intermediation and the production of financial services, I find that: (i) the quantity of intermediation varies a lot over time; (ii) intermediation is...

This paper assesses the potential impact of FinTech on the finance industry, focusing on financial stability and access to services. I document first that financial services remain surprisingly expensive, which explains the emergence of new entrants. I then argue that the current regulatory...

We study rollover risk and collateral value in a dynamic asset pricing model with endogenous debt financing by extending the framework of Geanakoplos (2009) with a generic binomial tree and time-varying heterogeneous beliefs. Optimistic borrowers face rollover risk if the belief dispersion...