We use credit-arbitrage asset-backed commercial paper vehicles as a laboratory to empirically examine financial institutions' motivations to take bad-tail systematic risk. By comparing the characteristics of global banks that sponsored credit-arbitrage vehicles prior to the global financial...

We empirically examine financial institutions' motivations to take systematic bad-tail risk in the form of sponsorship of credit-arbitrage asset-backed commercial paper vehicles. A run on debt issued by such vehicles played a key role in causing and propagating the liquidity crisis that began in...