In standard Walrasian macro-finance models, pecuniary externalities such as fire sales lead to overinvestment in illiquid assets or underprovision of liquidity. We investigate whether imperfect competition (Cournot) improves welfare through internalizing the externality and find that this is far...

We summarize and evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, which have been used since 2013 to shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private sector investors. We argue that the CRT programs have been successful in reducing the...

In August of 2007, banks faced a freeze in funding liquidity from the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity in response to this freeze and its implications for corporate borrowing. Commercial banks in the United States raised deposits and...

We examine the financial conditions of dealers that participated in two of the Federal Reserve's lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facilities -- the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) -- that provided liquidity against a range of assets during...

This paper studies a recent tick size reduction in the U.S. Treasury securities market and identifies its effects on the market's liquidity and price efficiency. Employing difference-indifference regressions, we find that the bid-ask spread narrows significantly after the change, even for large...

Agency mortgage backed securities (MBS) with diverse characteristics are traded in parallel with individualized contracts in the specified pool (SP) market and with standardized contracts in the to-be-announced (TBA) market. We find that this unique parallel trading environment significantly...

The small decline in the value of mortgage-related assets relative to the large total losses associated with the financial crisis suggests the presence of financial amplification mechanisms, which allow relatively small shocks to propagate through the financial system. We review the literature...

We show a significant loss in U.S. Treasury market functionality when intensive use of dealer balance sheets is needed to intermediate bond markets, as in March 2020. Although yield volatility explains most of the variation in Treasury market liquidity over time, when dealer balance sheet...

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local governments were among the sectors expected to experience the most severe distress. The combination of a sharply deteriorating revenue picture, a pressing need for additional expenditures, delays in the receipt of substantial taxes owed, and...