Broker-dealer leverage has recently proven to be strongly procyclical, exhibiting impressive explanatory power for a large cross-section of asset returns in the US. In this paper we add empirical evidence to this finding, showing that European and German broker-dealers actively manage their...

I present a dynamic general equilibrium model in which financial interconnectedness endogenously changes over the business cycle and shapes systemic risk. To share individual risks, banks become interconnected through holding overlapping asset portfolios. Diversification reduces individual...

This paper studies whether and how the central bank should prick asset price bubbles, if the effect of interest rate policy on bubbles can significantly vary across periods. For this purpose, I first construct a financial accelerator model with an agent-based financial market that can...

Endogenous movements in the wealth distribution can generate asset price booms in which financial intermediaries increasingly engage in moral hazard and originate low-quality assets that are excessively exposed to aggregate risk. Central to the mechanism is a pecuniary externality whereby buyers...

We present evidence that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and drive asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences. A single state variable drives the conditional cross-sectional...

This paper studies a modern monetary economy: trade in both goods and securities relies on money provided by intermediaries. While money is valued for its liquidity, its creation requires costly leverage. Inflation, security prices and the transmission of monetary policy then depend on the...

There is a large body of literature stressing the importance of developing financial markets, including stock markets, to enhance countries' growth. I argue that the relationship between stock markets and growth is exaggerated and that the simple act of opening a formal stock market is not a...

We study the state-dependent trading behavior of financial intermediaries in the oil futures market, using structural vector autoregressions with Markov switching in heteroskedasticity. We decompose changes in futures price volatility into changes in the slopes of traders' demand curves and in...

Canonical intermediary asset pricing models assume a representative intermediary with an SDF linear in its leverage. Yet the leverage of broker-dealers is procyclical whereas the leverage of banking holding companies is countercyclical. I propose an empirically testable heterogeneous...