The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage...

By combining (i) the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, (ii) behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders and (iii) the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions, the logperiodic power law (LPPL) model has been developed as a...

We show that financial risk-taking originates in preindustrial ancestral population diversity. We use data on immigrants residing in the United States and show that controlling for all known determinants of portfolio decisions, diversity positively affects stock market participation and asset...

Based on the insight that risk exposure as quantified in the consumption based asset pricing model (CCAPM) is linearly proportional to the cash flow growth rate, we introduce a discounted cash flow model with a time-varying expected return structure matching the implicitly assumed risk exposure...

We investigate whether bank performance during the recent credit crisis is related to chief executive officer (CEO) incentives before the crisis. We find some evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were better aligned with the interests of shareholders performed worse and no evidence...

This paper identifies simple conditions for monotone comparative statics of a unique equilibrium in the Akerlof-Wilson model. Separate conditions apply to trade volume and price. Trade volume increases when supply becomes both stronger and more elastic. In contrast, price decreases when supply...

We solve the problem of optimal securitization for an issuer facing heterogeneous investors with arbitrary time and risk preferences. We show that the optimal securitization is characterized by multiple nonlinear tranches, and each investor gets a portfolio of these tranches. In particular, when...

We identify frictions in the market for liquidity as well as bank-specific and market-wide factors that affect the prices that banks pay for liquidity, captured here by borrowing rates in repos with the central bank and benchmarked by the overnight index swap. We have price data at the...

We argue that there is a connection between the interbank market for liquidity and the broader financial markets, which has its basis in demand for liquidity by banks. Tightness in the interbank market for liquidity leads banks to engage in what we term “liquidity pull-back,” which involves...

A standard repurchase agreement between two counterparties is considered to examine the endogenous choice of collateral, the feasibility of secured lending, and welfare implications of the central bank's collateral framework. As an innovation, we allow for two-sided counterparty risk. In line...