We argue that buyout waves form in response to fluctuations in aggregate discount rates. In our model, discount rates alter the present value of cash flow improvements and the illiquidity premium demanded by buyout investors. We confirm our predictions empirically. Overall deal activity varies...

We provide an overview of data requirements necessary to monitor repurchase agreements (repos) and securities lending (sec lending) markets for the purposes of informing policymakers and researchers about firm-level and systemic risk. We start by explaining the functioning of these markets, and...

We develop a model of the market for federal funds that explicitly accounts for its two distinctive features: banks have to search for a suitable counterparty, and once they have met, both parties negotiate the size of the loan and the repayment. The theory is used to answer a number of positive...

We use an information-theoretic approach to describe changes in lending relationships between federal funds market participants around the time of the Lehman Brothers failure. Unlike previous work that conducts maximum-likelihood estimation on undirected networks, our analysis distinguishes...

Bank lending traditionally involves the extension of credit that is held by the originating bank until maturity. Loan sales allow banks to deviate from this pattern by transferring loans in part or in their entirety from their own books to those of another institution. This paper uses a new...

The medieval banks of continental Europe facilitated trade by serving as payment intermediaries. Depositors commonly would pay one another by transferring bank balances with the aid of overdraft credit. We model this process in an environment of intermediate good exchange with incomplete...

We use a large matched sample of individual loans, borrowers, and banks to investigate whether bank financial health affects terms of lending, holding constant proxies for borrower risk and information costs. In particular, we focus on measuring effects of borrower and bank characteristics on...

Do banks play a special role in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy? I use the presence of internal capital markets in bank holding companies to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in the financial constraints faced by subsidiary banks. In particular, I demonstrate that affiliated...

Using plausibly exogenous variation in demand for federal funds created by daily shocks to reserve balances, we identify the supply curve facing a bank borrower in the interbank market and study how access to overnight credit is affected by changes in public and private measures of borrower...

We conduct a systematic comparison of confidence intervals around estimated probabilities of default (PD), using several analytical approaches from large-sample theory and bootstrapped small-sample confidence intervals. We do so for two different PD estimation methods-cohort and duration...