We investigate the channel through which fluctuations in the market liquidity of real-sector repo collateral cause arbitrage crashes and failure of systemically important intermediaries during the global financial crisis. Intermediaries pledge productive capital as repo collateral to fund the...

I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: "normal times", periods of modest investment, and "booms", periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur when the...

This paper shows that the effect of inflation on asset prices and real aggregates depends on the financial intermediation sector. When firms finance using nominal long-term debt issued by financial intermediaries, unexpected changes in inflation lead to a wealth transfer across sectors. Higher...

Regulators aiming to ward off the next financial market failure need to implement rules to smooth the boom-bust cycle in margin requirements and haircuts used in securities financing and derivative transactions, which seriously exacerbated the last financial crisis. In this study, the author...

The classic Arrow-Debreu framework requires a very large number of specific securities to reach Pareto optimality. The present paper shows that financial intermediation can play an important role in maintaining a more parsimonious market framework while still obtaining Pareto optimality. In the...

Alvarez and Jermann (2000) show that the constrained efficient allocations of endowment economies with imperfect risk sharing due to limited commitment can be decentralized as competitive equilibria with endogenous debt constraints that are not too tight. These are the loosest possible borrowing...

We model the opacity of over-the-counter (OTC) markets in a setup where agents share risks, but have incentives to default and their financial positions are not mutually observable. We show that there is "excess leverage" in that parties take on short OTC positions that lead to levels of default...