Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

Economic growth involves metamorphosis of the financial system. Forms of banks and bank money change. These changes, if not addressed, leave the banking system vulnerable to crisis. There is no greater challenge in economics than to understand and prevent financial crises. The financial crisis...

We analyze a variant of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model of banking in which savers can use a bank to invest in a risky project operated by an entrepreneur. The savers can buy equity in the bank and save via deposits. The bank chooses to invest in a safe asset or to fund the entrepreneur. The...

The U.S. Federal Reserve used the Term Auction Facility (TAF) to provide term funding to eligible depository institutions from December 2007 to March 2010. According to the Fed, the purpose of TAF was to inject term funds through a broader range of counterparties and against a broader range of...

We use the unique circumstances that led to the Panic of 1907 to analyze its impact on economic activity. The panic was fuelled by runs on the 'shadow banks' of the time, New York's trust companies. But the shock that triggered the runs was unrelated to the nonfinancial corporations affiliated...

Since June 2007, the creditworthiness of structured finance products has deteriorated rapidly. The number of downgrades in November 2007 alone exceeded 2,000 and many downgrades were severe, with 500 tranches downgraded more than 10 notches. Massive downgrades continued in 2008. More than 11,000...

We present a model of shadow banking in which financial intermediaries originate and trade loans, assemble these loans into diversified portfolios, and then finance these portfolios externally with riskless debt. In this model: i) outside investor wealth drives the demand for riskless debt and...