type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Financial intermediaries trade frequently in many markets using sophisticated models. Their marginal value of wealth should therefore provide a more informative stochastic discount factor (SDF) than that of a representative consumer. Guided by theory, we use shocks to the...</p>

We document that average stock returns can be largely explained by their covariance with shocks to the aggregate leverage of security broker-dealers. Our single-factor leverage model compares favorably with standard multi-factor models in the cross-section of size and book-to-market portfolios...

We use firms' decisions in the cross-section about their sources and uses of funds in order to make inferences about the aggregate cost of external finance. The basic intuition is as follows: Firms which raise costly external finance can invest the issuance proceeds in productive capital assets,...

We document the fact that at both the aggregate and the firm level, corporations tend to simultaneously raise external finance and accumulate liquid assets. For all but the very largest firms, the aggregate correlation between external finance raised and liquidity accumulation is 0.6, and the...

We present a dynamic contracting model in which the principal and agent disagree about the resolution of uncertainty, and we illustrate the contract design in an application with Bayesian learning. The disagreement creates gains from trade that the principal realizes by transferring payment to...

We complement the conditional CAPM by introducing unobservable long-run changes in risk factor loadings. In this environment, investors rationally 'learn' the long-level of factor loadings from the observation of realized returns. As a direct consequence of this assumption, conditional betas are...

Recent high correlations among hedge fund returns could suggest concentrations of risk comparable to those preceding the hedge fund crisis of 1998. A comparison of the current rise in correlations with the elevation before the 1998 event, however, reveals a key difference. The current increase...

The Federal Reserve collects data on the financing activities of the primary government securities dealers. Some market analysts argue that the data show a considerable rise in dealer leverage in recent years. However, a close reading of the data suggests that dealer borrowing involving...

A close look at how financial intermediaries manage their balance sheets suggests that these institutions raise their leverage during asset price booms and lower it during downturns - pro-cyclical actions that tend to exaggerate the fluctuations of the financial cycle. The authors of this study...

We present a dynamic contracting model in which the principal and agent disagree about the resolution of uncertainty, and we illustrate the contract design in an application with Bayesian learning. The disagreement creates gains from trade that the principal realizes by transferring payment to...