The moral hazard incentives of the bank safety net predict that distressed banks take on more risk and higher leverage. Since many factors reduce these incentives, including charter value, regulation, and managerial incentives, the net economic effect of these incentives is an empirical...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

Alan Greenspan’s paper (March 2010) presents his retrospective view of the crisis. His theme has several parts. First, the housing price bubble, its subsequent collapse and the financial crisis were not predicted either by the market, the FED, the IMF or the regulators in the years leading to...

This paper provides direct evidence of leverage-induced fire sales leading to a major stock market crash. Our analysis uses proprietary account-level trading data for brokerage- and shadow-financed margin accounts during the Chinese stock market crash in the summer of 2015. We find that margin...

Using newly available data on hedge fund leverage that specifies the type of leverage employed (e.g. gross or net), we examine the potential for a credit spiral and financial fragility in hedge funds. We find that funds belonging to fund families that are highly levered, have multiple prime...

High expected returns are attractive but are associated with high risk. Ultimately, risk shows up as volatility. Volatility is a fundamental feature of a business but can be increased through firm or investor leverage. Volatility without leverage significantly reduces long term return. Leverage...

During the October 9, 2007-March 9, 2009 period, the U.S. stock market experienced the worst bear market in its history since the Great Depression. Empirical studies show that exchange-traded country index funds can provide portfolio diversification benefits to investors in bull markets....

We study risk and return characteristics of CDOs using the market standard models. We find that fair spreads on CDO tranches are much higher than fair spreads on similarly-rated corporate bonds. Our results imply that credit ratings are not sufficient for pricing, which is surprising given their...

In attempting to promote international financial stability, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2006) provided a framework that sought to control the amount of tail risk that large banks around the world would take in their trading books relative to their corresponding minimum capital...

This paper describes the effects of the 2009 global financial crisis on firms' access to financing for investment projects. The analysis uses data from the Latin American and Caribbean Enterprise Surveys 2006 and 2010, demonstrating that during the crisis, the availability of internal sources...