This paper addresses a basic, yet unresolved question: Do claims on private assets provide sufficient liquidity for an efficient functioning of the productive sector? Or does the State have a role in creating liquidity and regulating it either through adjustments in the stock of government...

This paper analyzes the possibility and the consequences of asset price overvaluation in a dynamic economy where financially constrained firms demand and supply liquidity. Bubbles are more likely to emerge, the scarcer the supply of outside liquidity and the more limited the pledgeability of...

The paper elicits a mechanism by which private leverage choices exhibit strategic complementarities through the reaction of monetary policy. When everyone engages in maturity transformation, authorities have little choice but facilitating refinancing. In turn, refusing to adopt a risky balance...

We explore the link between liquidity and investment in a an overlapping generation model with a standard asynchronicity between firms' access to and need for cash. Imperfect pledgeability hinders the capacity of capital markets to resolve this asynchronicity, resulting in credit rationing and a...

The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

This paper analyzes the possibility and the consequences of rational bubbles in a dy- namic economy where financially constrained firms demand and supply liquidity. Bub- bles are more likely to emerge, the scarcer the supply of outside liquidity and the more limited the pledgeability of...