In a financial system in which balance sheets are continuously marked to market, asset price changes appear immediately as changes in net worth, eliciting responses from financial intermediaries who adjust the size of their balance sheets. We document evidence that marked-to-market leverage is...

In a financial system in which balance sheets are continuously marked to market, asset price changes appear immediately as changes in net worth, eliciting responses from financial intermediaries who adjust the size of their balance sheets. We document evidence that marked-to-market leverage is...

This paper studies the question of the economic scale of financial institutions. We show that banks actively smooth book equity by adjusting payouts to achieve a desired trajectory of book equity. The countercyclical nature of net payouts of financial institutions leads to procyclical book...

A growing literature (i.e. Jaffee, Lynch, Richardson, and Van Nieuwerburgh, 2009, Acharya and Schnabl, 2009) argues that securitization improves financial stability if the securitized assets are held by capital market participants, rather than financial intermediaries. I construct a quantitative...

One of the roots of the recent global financial crisis has been seen in the design of subprime mortgage contract leading to high sensitivity of such type of loans to house price changes. The market of subprime loans, especially in the last years preceding the crisis, has been highly financed by...

This paper explores the transmission of non-capital shocks through banking networks. We develop a methodology to construct non-capital (idiosyncratic) shocks, using labor productivity shocks to large firms. We document a change in the relationship between foreign idiosyncratic shocks and...

One of the roots of the recent global financial crisis has been seen in the design of subprime mortgage contract leading to high sensitivity of such type of loans to house price changes. The market of subprime loans, especially in the last years preceding the crisis, has been highly financed by...

The paper extends a standard two-country international real business cycle model to include financial intermediation by banks of loans and government bonds. Taking in household deposits from home and abroad, the loans are produced by the bank in a Cobb-Douglas production approach such that a...

We propose a new measure of financial intermediary constraints based on how the intermediaries manage their tail risk exposures. Using a unique dataset for the trading activities in the market of deep out-of-the-money S&P 500 put options, we identify periods when the variations in the net amount...

We document the cyclical properties of the balance sheets of different types of intermediaries. While the leverage of the bank sector is highly procyclical, the leverage of the nonbank financial sector is acyclical. We propose a theory of a two-agent financial intermediary sector within a...