This paper shows that the risk-bearing capacity of U.S. securities brokers and dealers is a strong determinant of risk premia in commodity markets. Commodity derivatives are the principal instrument used by producers and consumers of commodities to hedge against commodity price risk....

There have been widespread claims that credit derivatives such as the credit default swap (CDS) have lowered the cost of firms’ debt financing by creating for investors new hedging opportunities and information. However, these instruments also give banks an opaque means to sever links to their...

Vesting of equity payments to an entrepreneur, which is a form of time-contingent compensation, is very common in venture capital contracts. Empirical research suggests that vesting is used to help overcome asymmetric information and agency problems. We show in a theoretical model that vesting...

Banks hold liquid and illiquid assets. An illiquid bank that receives a liquidity shock sells assets to liquid banks in exchange for cash. We characterize the constrained efficient allocation as the solution to a planner's problem and show that the market equilibrium is constrained inefficient,...

Why does the market discipline that banks face seem too weak during good times and too strong during bad times? This paper shows that using rollover risk as a disciplining device is effective only if all banks face purely idiosyncratic risk. However, if banks' assets are correlated, a two-sided...

Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...

We construct a new systemic risk measure that quantifies vulnerability to fire-sale spillovers using detailed regulatory balance sheet data for U.S. commercial banks and repo market data for broker-dealers. Even for moderate shocks in normal times, fire-sale externalities can be substantial. For...

This paper examines how risk in trading activity can affect the volatility of asset prices. We look for this relationship in the behavior of interest rate swap spreads and in the volume and interest rates of repurchase contracts. Specifically, we focus on convergence trading, in which...

Using data on U.S. Treasury dealer positions from 1990 to 2006, we find evidence of a significant role for dealers in the intertemporal intermediation of new Treasury security supply. Dealers regularly take into inventory a large share of Treasury issuance so that dealer positions increase...

In the wake of the dot.com collapse, investor sentiment toward initial public offerings (IPOs) has turned negative. To many investors, IPOs have come to symbolize the insider abuses and stock market excesses of the Internet bubble period; to others, investing in IPOs is inherently fraught with...