Spreads of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) vary significantly in the cross section and over time, but the sources of this variation are not well understood. We document that, in the cross section, MBS spreads adjusted for the prepayment option show a pronounced smile with respect to the...

This paper considers the problem of information acquisition in an intermediated market, where the specialists have access to superior technology for acquiring information. These informational advantages of specialists relative to households lead to disagreement between the two groups, changing...

Faced with the problem of pricing complex contingent claims, investors seek to make their valuations robust to model uncertainty. We construct a notion of a modeluncertainty-induced utility function and show that model uncertainty increases investors' effective risk aversion. Using this utility...

We evaluate the impact of the Federal Reserve corporate credit facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF). A third of the positive effect on prices and liquidity occurred on the announcement date. We document immediate pass through into primary markets, particularly for eligible issuers. Improvements continue...

Do regulations decrease dealer incentives to intermediate trades? Using a unique data set of dealer-bond-level transactions, we construct the dealer-specific market liquidity metrics for the U. S. corporate bond market. Unlike prior studies, the transactions that we observe are uncapped in size...

We discover a novel monetary policy shock that has a widespread impact on aggregate financial conditions. Our shock can be summarized by the response of long-horizon yields to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements; not only is it orthogonal to changes in the near-term path of policy...

We explore the term structures of claims to a variety of cash flows: U.S. government bonds (claims to dollars), foreign government bonds (claims to foreign currency), inflation-adjusted bonds (claims to the price index), and equity (claims to future equity indexes or dividends). Average term...

We study the conditional distribution of future liquidity in the secondary market for corporate bonds as a function of current liquidity. Increases in liquidity are persistent for investment-grade bonds and flighty for high-yield bonds. Greater liquidity of high-yield bonds is associated with...

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...

This paper considers the problem of information acquisition in an intermediated market, where the specialists have access to superior technology for acquiring information. These informational advantages of specialists relative to households lead to disagreement between the two groups, changing...