How strong are strategic complementarities in price setting across firms? In this paper, we provide a direct empirical estimate of firms' price responses to changes in prices of their competitors. We develop a general framework and an empirical identification strategy to estimate the...

Theories of systemic risk suggest that financial intermediaries’ balance-sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We provide supportive evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals and a component...

"Although currency invoicing in international trade transactions is central to the transmission of monetary policy, the forces motivating the choice of currency have long been debated. We introduce a model wherein agents involved in international trade can invoice in the exporter's currency, the...

In responding to the severity and broad scope of the financial crisis that began in 2007, the Federal Reserve has made aggressive use of both traditional monetary policy instruments and innovative tools in an effort to provide liquidity. In this paper, I examine the Fed’s actions in light of...

The Capital Assistance Program (CAP) was created by the U.S. government in February 2009 to provide backup capital to large financial institutions unable to raise sufficient capital from private investors. Under the terms of the CAP, a participating bank receives contingent capital by issuing...

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives have been blamed for increasing systemic risk. Although OTC derivatives were not a central cause of the crisis, the complexity and limited transparency of the market reinforced the potential for excessive risk-taking,...

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...

This paper examines the impact of the financial crisis of 2008, specifically the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, on the federal funds market. Rather than a complete collapse of lending in the presence of a market-wide shock, we see that banks became more restrictive in their choice of...

We describe a set of six design principles for the reorganization of the U.S. housing finance system and apply them to one model for replacing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that has so far received frequent mention but little sustained analysis – the lender cooperative utility. We discuss the...

We investigate whether the “stress test,” the extraordinary examination of the nineteen largest U.S. bank holding companies conducted by federal bank supervisors in 2009, produced information demanded by the market. Using standard event study techniques, we find that the market had largely...