The recent credit crisis of 2007/08 has raised a debate about the so-called knife-edge properties of financial markets. The paper contributes to the debate shedding light on the controversial relation between risk-diversification and financial stability. We model a financial network where assets...

This paper develops a micro-founded general equilibrium model of the financial system composed of ultimate borrowers, ultimate lenders and financial intermediaries. The model is used to investigate the impact of uncertainty about the likelihood of governmental bailouts on leverage, interest...

Now that Congress has passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, regulators promulgating the rules under this new bill must tackle a major problem that the reform bill addresses only indirectly. This is the problem of excessive “leverage” – financing with too...

We analyze the behavior of an array of financial assets around European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy decisions. We document that European and U.S. equities accumulate sizeable excess returns in the week ahead of an announcement. Pre-ECB announcement returns are stronger from the...

Housing is by far the most important asset in households’ balance sheets across many countries including China, and the policy relevance of the housing sector has been increasingly recognized (as evident by the inclusion of the housing cost into ECB’s inflation measure proposed in its new...

Housing is by far the most important asset in Chinese households' balance sheets. However, despite forceful and frequent government interventions, the rise in Chinese housing prices has not been contained as much as intended, a trend that has not been reversed by the COVID-19 shock. In this...

I review the literature on financial speculation driven by belief disagreements from a macroeconomics perspective. To highlight unifying themes, I develop a stylized macroeconomic model that embeds several mechanisms. With short-selling constraints, speculation can generate overvaluation and...

For markets to work efficiently, buyers and sellers must be able to transact easily. People must have access to a marketplace such as a supermarket or a stock exchange with adequate liquidity. Further, people must have confidence that such a well-functioning marketplace will also exist in the...

The paper deals with institutional arrangement of financial supervision in the Czech Republic. Financial markets are composed of partial financial segments specialized in individual types of financial instruments and individual customer groups. Financial institutions gradually transform into...