We study a production economy with multiple sectors financed by issuing securities to agents who face capital constraints. Binding capital constraints propagate business cycles, and a reduction of the interest rate can increase the required return of high-haircut assets since it can increase the...

Monetary policy is a blunt instrument with which to smooth aggregate volatility. I demonstrate that there is actually very little correlation between how much real state income responds to monetary policy and to shocks that prompt aggregate smoothing by the Federal Reserve. This mismatch turns...

Building on recent evidence concerning the functioning of internal capital markets in financial conglomerates, we conduct a novel test of the balance-sheet channel of monetary policy. Specifically, we investigate how the response of lending to monetary policy differs across small banks that are...

While systemic risk—the risk of wholesale failure of banksand other financial institutions—is generally consideredto be the primary reason for supervision and regulation of thebanking industry, almost all regulatory rules treat such risk inisolation. In particular, they do not account for...

In an investigation of banks' loan pricing policies in the United States over the past two decades, this study finds supporting evidence for the bank risk-taking channel of monetary policy. We show that banks charge lower spreads when they lend to riskier borrowers relative to the spreads they...

Loan funds are open-end mutual funds holding predominantly corporate leveraged loans. We document empirically that loan funds are significantly more susceptible to run risk than any other category of debt funds, including corporate bond funds. Most importantly, we establish a link between loan...

We take a macroprudential approach to analyze the optimal lending policy for the central bank, focusing on externalities that policy imposes on private markets. Lending against high-quality collateral protects central banks against losses but can adversely affect liquidity creation in markets...