The 2010s saw a profound shift towards jumbo mortgage lending by large banks that are regulated under the Dodd-Frank Act. Using data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, we show that the "jumbo shift" is correlated with being subject to the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR)...

We investigate the drivers of daily changes in the exchange value of the Chinese currency (CNY) since early 2016, when a new regime was introduced for setting the fix - the midpoint of the CNY's daily trading range against the U.S. dollar. Daily changes in the fix, which is announced just prior...

In this paper, we seek to produce forecasts of commodity price movements that can systematically improve on naïve statistical benchmarks. We revisit how well changes in commodity currencies perform as potential efficient predictors of commodity prices, a view emphasized in the recent...

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

We propose a novel estimator for the dynamic panel model, which solves the failure of strict exogeneity by calculating the bias in the first-order conditions as a function of the autoregressive parameter and solving the resulting equation. We show that this estimator performs well as compared...

In addition to realized earnings and employment shocks, forward-looking individuals are presumed to condition their consumption and labor supply decisions on their subjective beliefs about future labor market risks. This paper analyzes these perceptions of earnings and employment risks using...

We propose a new, computationally-efficient way to approximate the "grouped fixed-effects" (GFE) estimator of Bonhomme and Manresa (2015), which estimates grouped patterns of unobserved heterogeneity. To do so, we generalize the fuzzy C-means objective to regression settings. As the...

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...

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. In this paper, we document the significant role played by the FHLB...

The current financial crisis has highlighted the growing importance of the “shadow banking system,” which grew out of the securitization of assets and the integration of banking with capital market developments. This trend has been most pronounced in the United States, but it has had a...