Over the last twenty years, the consensus view of systemic risk in the financial system that emerged in response to the banking crises of the 1930s and before has lost much of its relevance. This view held that the main systemic problem is runs on solvent banks leading to bank panics. But...

While gold objects have existed for thousands of years, gold's role in diversified portfolios is not well understood. We critically examine popular stories such as 'gold is an inflation hedge'. We show that gold may be an effective hedge if the investment horizon is measured in centuries. Over...

We examine the extent to which markets enable the provision of housing finance across a wide range of countries. Housing is a major purchase requiring long-term financing, and the factors that are associated with well functioning housing finance systems are those that enable the provision of...

This paper examines the use of credit derivatives by US bank holding companies from 1999 to 2003 with assets in excess of one billion dollars. Using the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Bank Holding Company Database, we find that in 2003 only 19 large banks out of 345 use credit derivatives....

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. We extend our earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks' assets and liabilities, including during the recent...

We study how a mortgage reform that exogenously increased access to credit had an impact on entrepreneurship, using individual-level micro data from Denmark. The reform allows us to disentangle the role of credit access from wealth effects that typically confound analyses of the collateral...

I consider four policies created to address the financial crisis: (1) the ability-to-repay requirement in mortgage underwriting; (2) reform of rating agency compensation, (3) risk retention in securitization, and (4) mandatory loan renegotiation. I show that according to standard models,...

This paper examines the effects of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation's (RFC) loan and preferred stock programs on bank failure rates in Michigan during the period 1932-1934, which includes the important Michigan banking crisis of early 1933 and its aftermath. Using a new database on...

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...