Established in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy to stabilize severe disruptions in the commercial paper market, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) allowed the Federal Reserve to act as a lender of last resort for issuers of commercial paper, thereby effectively addressing...

How does the belief that policymakers will bail out investors in the event of a crisis affect the allocation of resources and the stability of the financial system? I study this question in a model of financial intermediation with limited commitment. When a crisis occurs, the efficient policy...

We provide a framework for monitoring the shadow banking system. The shadow banking system consists of a web of specialized financial institutions that conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation without direct, explicit access to public backstops. The lack of such access to sources...

Remarks at the ACI 2010 World Congress, Sydney, Australia.

Remarks at the Third Annual Connecticut Bank and Trust Company Economic Outlook Breakfast, Hartford, Connecticut.

We develop a theory of financial intermediary leverage cycles in the context of a dynamic model of the macroeconomy. The interaction between a production sector, a financial intermediation sector, and a household sector gives rise to amplification of fundamental shocks that affect real economic...

We derive equilibrium pricing implications from an intertemporal capital asset pricing model where the tightness of financial intermediaries’ funding constraints enters the pricing kernel. We test the resulting factor model in the cross-section of stock returns. Our empirical results show that...

Central banks have a variety of tools for implementing monetary policy, but the tool that has received the most attention in the literature has been the overnight interest rate. The financial crisis that erupted in the summer of 2007 has refocused attention on other channels of monetary policy,...

This paper develops a model of financial institutions that borrow short-term and invest in long-term marketable assets. Because these financial intermediaries perform maturity transformation, they may be vulnerable to runs. We endogenize the profits of an intermediary and derive distinct...

Remarks at the ACI 2010 World Congress, Sydney, Australia.