We document that the percentage of all U.S. assets that are “safe” has remained stable at about 33 percent since 1952. This stable ratio is a rare example of calm in a rapidly changing financial world. Over the same time period, the ratio of U.S. assets to GDP has increased by a factor of...

We survey the literature on securitization and lay out a research program for its open questions. Securitization is the process by which loans, previously held to maturity on the balance sheets of financial intermediaries, are sold in capital markets. Securitization has grown from a small amount...

The sale and repurchase (repo) market played a central role in the recent financial crisis. From the second quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2009, net repo financing provided to U.S. banks and broker-dealers fell by about $900 billion – more than half of its pre-crisis total....

We survey the literature on securitization and lay out a research program for its open questions. Securitization is the process by which loans, previously held to maturity on the balance sheets of financial intermediaries, are sold in capital markets. Securitization has grown from a small amount...

This paper surveys the role of the Federal Reserve within the financial regulatory system, with particular attention to the interaction of the Fed's role as both a supervisor and a lender-of-last-resort (LOLR). The institutional design of the Federal Reserve System was aimed at preventing...

The “shadow” banking system played a major role in the financial crisis, but was not a central focus of the recent Dodd-Frank Law and thus remains largely unregulated. This paper proposes principles for the regulation of shadow banking and describes a specific proposal to implement those...

This paper analyzes the economics of the private equity fund compensation. We build a novel model to estimate the expected revenue to fund managers as a function of their investor contracts. In particular, we evaluate the present value of the fair-value test (FVT) carried interest scheme, which...

Shareholder rights vary across firms. Using the incidence of 24 unique governance rules, we construct a quot;Governance Indexquot; to proxy for the level of shareholder rights at about 1500 large firms during the 1990s. An investment strategy that bought firms in the lowest decile of the index...

This paper analyzes the economics of the private equity industry using a novel model and dataset. We obtain data from a large investor in private equity funds, with detailed records on 238 funds raised between 1993 and 2006. We build a model to estimate the expected revenue to managers as a...

This paper analyzes the economics of the private equity fund compensation. We build a novel model to estimate the expected revenue to fund managers as a function of their investor contracts. In particular, we evaluate the present value of the fair-value test (FVT) carried interest scheme, which...