Mechanism design teaches us that a mediator can strictly improve the chances of peace between two opponents even when the mediator has no independent resources, is less informed than the two parties, and has no enforcement power. We test the theory in a lab experiment where two subjects...

We study disruptions in debt markets during the COVID-19 crisis. The safer end of the credit spectrum experienced significant losses that are hard to fully reconcile with standard default or risk premium channels. Corporate bonds traded at a large discount to their corresponding CDS, and this...

US data display aggregate external financing and savings waves. Firms can allocate costly external finance to productive capital, or to liquid assets with low physical returns. If firms raise costly external finance and accumulate liquidity, either the cost of external finance is relatively low,...

Managed portfolios that take less risk when volatility is high produce large alphas, substantially increase factor Sharpe ratios, and produce large utility gains for mean-variance investors. We document this for the market, value, momentum, profitability, return on equity, and investment factors...

We study the behavior of credit and output across a financial crisis cycle using in- formation from credit spreads and credit growth. We show the transition into a crisis occurs with a large increase in credit spreads, indicating that crises involve a dramatic shift in expectations and are a...

In the face of the Lucas Critique, economic history can be used to evaluate policy. We use the experience of the U.S. National Banking Era to evaluate the most important bank regulation to emerge from the financial crisis, the Bank for International Settlement's liquidity coverage ratio (LCR)...

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using...

We provide evidence that agents have slow-moving beliefs about stock market volatility that lead to initial underreaction to volatility shocks followed by delayed overreaction. These dynamics are mirrored in the VIX and variance risk premiums which reflect investor expectations about volatility...

We propose a measure for systemic risk: CoVaR, the value at risk (VaR) of the financial system conditional on institutions being under distress. We define an institution's contribution to systemic risk as the difference between CoVaR conditional on the institution being under distress and the...

We provide an overview of the data required to monitor repo and securities lending markets for the purposes of informing policymakers and researchers about firm-level and systemic risk. We start by explaining the functioning of these markets and argue that it is crucial to understand the...