Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...

We estimate the cost of capital for the banking industry and find that while the cost of capital soared for banks in the financial crisis, after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, the value-weighted cost of capital for banks fell differentially more than did the cost of capital for nonbanks. The...

The Basel I Accord introduced a discontinuity in required capital for undrawn credit commitments. While banks had to set aside capital when they extended commitments with maturities in excess of one year, short-term commitments were not subject to a capital requirement. The Basel II Accord...

Using a synthetic control research design, we find that "living will" regulation increases a bank's annual cost of capital by 22 basis points, or 10 percent of total funding costs. This effect is stronger in banks that were measured as systemically important before the regulation’s...

Better customer service provisions by banks - such as more branches and ATMs, longer business hours, and more personalized services - help attract more core deposits and increase funding stickiness by raising depositors' switching costs and enhancing their loyalty. Funding stickiness from...

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...

Do regulations decrease dealer ability to intermediate trades? Using a unique data set of dealer-bond-level transactions, we link changes in liquidity of individual U.S. corporate bonds to dealers’ transaction activity and balance sheet constraints. We show that, prior to the financial crisis,...

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 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is a widely used indicator of funding conditions in the interbank market. As of 2013, LIBOR underpins more than $300 trillion of financial contracts, including swaps and futures, in addition to trillions more in variable-rate mortgage and student loans....

This paper examines the over-the-counter (OTC) interest rate derivatives (IRD) market in order to inform the design of post-trade price reporting. Our analysis uses a novel transaction-level data set to examine trading activity, the composition of market participants, levels of product...