According to most theories of financial intermediation, intermediaries diversify risk, transform maturity or liquidity, and screen or monitor borrowers. In U.S. Treasury auctions, none of these rationales apply. Intermediaries submit their customer bids without transforming liquidity or...

This paper examines the investments and performance of community development venture capital (CDVC). We find substantial differences between CDVC and traditional venture capital (VC) investments: CDVC investments are far more likely to be in nonmetropolitan regions and in regions with little...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the subprime mortgage securitization process and the seven key informational frictions that arise. We discuss the ways that market participants work to minimize these frictions and speculate on how this process broke down. We continue with a complete...

Shadow banks conduct credit intermediation without direct, explicit access to public sources of liquidity and credit guarantees. Shadow banks contributed to the credit boom in the early 2000s and collapsed during the financial crisis of 2007-09. We review the rapidly growing literature on shadow...

Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the firm's assets. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the...

In this paper, we use methods from social network analysis to assess the relative importance of financial centers around the world. Using data from virtually the entire universe of global equity activity, we present two sets of complete rankings for up to forty-five separate locations for the...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the extent to which people in different occupations locate near one another, or coagglomerate. We construct pairwise Ellison-Glaeser coagglomeration indices for U.S. occupations and use these measures to investigate the factors influencing the...

This paper analyzes the effect of a redrawing of political boundaries on voting patterns and investigates whether it leads to closer conformity of an electorate’s voting patterns with its political preferences. We study these issues in the context of a reorganization of states in India. In...

This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation. Insurance take-up is found to be decreasing in basis risk...

We provide aggregate statistics on U.S. dealers' bilateral repurchase agreements and economically equivalent securities lending activities. The data were collected from the U.S.-affiliated securities dealers of nine bank holding companies under a voluntary pilot program run by the Office of...