"This paper develops a model that speaks to the goals and methods of financial-stability policies. There are three main points. First, from a normative perspective, the model defines the fundamental market failure to be addressed, namely that unregulated private money creation can lead to an...

Research on leverage and asset-price fluctuations focuses on the direct effect of lax bank lending enabling financially-constrained investors to take excessive risks. Ignored are unconstrained investors speculating on higher prices during credit booms. To identify these two effects, we utilize...

Motivated by the recent subprime mortgage crisis, we explore whether speculative bubble models of equity based on investor disagreement and short-sales constraints can also provide an explanation for the overvaluation of debt contracts. We find that this is unlikely. Equity bubbles are loud:...