The financial crisis provides a natural experiment for testing theoretical predictions of the equity underwriter’s role following an initial public offering. Clients of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia saw their stock prices fall almost 5 percent, on average, on the...

This paper examines how risk in trading activity can affect the volatility of asset prices. We look for this relationship in the behavior of interest rate swap spreads and in the volume and interest rates of repurchase contracts. Specifically, we focus on convergence trading, in which...

Motivated by individuals' emotional response to risk at different time horizons, we model an 'anxious' agent - one who is more risk averse with respect to imminent risks than distant risks. Such preferences describe well-documented features of 1) individual behavior, 2) equilibrium prices, and...

We study general equilibrium asset prices in a multi-period endowment economy when agents' risk aversion is allowed to depend on the maturity of the risk. We find horizon-dependent riskaversion preferences generate a decreasing term structure of risk premia if and only if volatility is...

Corporate credit lines are drawn more heavily when funding markets are more stressed. This covariance elevates expected bank funding costs. We show that credit supply is dampened by the associated debtoverhang cost to bank shareholders. Until 2022, this impact was reduced by linking the interest...

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...

In a market-based financial system, banking and capital market developments are inseparable, and funding conditions are closely tied to fluctuations in the leverage of market-based financial intermediaries. Offering a window on liquidity, the balance sheet growth of broker-dealers provides a...

We present evidence that the funding liquidity aggregates of U.S. financial intermediaries forecast exchange rate growth—at weekly, monthly, and quarterly horizons, both in-sample and out-of-sample, and for a large set of currencies. We estimate prices of risk using a cross-sectional asset...

We address two questions: (i) Are bank capital structure and value correlated in the cross section, and if so, how? (ii) If bank capital does affect bank value, how are the components of bank value affected by capital? We first develop a dynamic model with a dissipative cost of bank capital that...

This paper shows that the risk-bearing capacity of U.S. securities brokers and dealers is a strong determinant of risk premia in commodity markets. Commodity derivatives are the principal instrument used by producers and consumers of commodities to hedge against commodity price risk....