In June 2022, the Federal Reserve started reducing the size of its balance sheet, which had expanded to just under $9 trillion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, whereas banks' reserves at the Federal Reserve have decreased, the investment of money market funds (MMFs) at the Federal...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which an increase in the dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints predicts a "bubble," or a rise in a stock's price above its fundamental value. Our model predicts that managers respond to...

We study the implications of increased price flexibility on aggregate output volatility in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. First, using a simplified version of the model, we show analytically that the results depend on the shocks driving the economy and the systematic...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that changes in inventory management were an important contributor to volatility reductions during the Great Moderation. It documents how changes in inventory behavior contributed to the stabilization of the U.S. economy within the durable goods sector, in...

This paper reports aggregate statistics on securities lending activity based on a recently concluded pilot data collection by staff from the Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Federal Reserve System, and staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In its annual reports, the...

The 2007-09 financial crisis highlighted the vulnerability of financial institutions linked by a complex web of credit default swap (CDS) contracts, sparking a wave of regulatory changes to the structure of the market. In this paper, we provide broad evidence on the evolution of the CDS market...

We investigate the factor structure of the term structure of interest rates and argue that characterizing the minimal dimension of the data-generating process is more challenging than currently appreciated. To circumvent these difficulties, we introduce a novel nonparametric bootstrap that is...

We present a microfounded New Keynesian model that features financial vulnerabilities. Financial intermediaries' occasionally binding value-at-risk constraints give rise to variation in the pricing of risk that generates time-varying risk in the conditional mean and volatility of the output gap....

This paper is intended to serve as a reference guide on U.S. repo and securities lending markets. It begins by presenting the institutional structure, and then describes the market landscape, the role of the participants, and other characteristics, including how repo and securities lending...

Market participants and policymakers alike were surprised by the large, prolonged dislocations in credit market arbitrage trades during the second half of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. In this paper, we examine three explanations proposed by market participants: increased idiosyncratic...