We examine the effect of teenage childbearing on the adult outcomes of a sample of women who gave birth, miscarried or had an abortion as teenagers. If miscarriages are (conditionally) random, then if all miscarriages occur before teenagers can obtain abortions, using the absence of a...

Many have claimed that credit default swaps (CDSs) have lowered the cost of debt financing to firms by creating new hedging opportunities and information for investors. This paper evaluates the impact that the onset of CDS trading has on the spreads that underlying firms pay to raise funding in...

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. In this paper, we document the significant role played by the FHLB...

Using plausibly exogenous variation in demand for federal funds created by daily shocks to reserve balances, we identify the supply curve facing a bank borrower in the inter-bank market, and study how access to overnight credit is affected by changes in public and private measures of borrower...

The rapid growth of the market-based financial system since the mid-1980s has changed the nature of financial intermediation. Within the system, “shadow banks” have served a critical role, especially in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. Shadow banks are financial intermediaries that...

In contrast to existing research, I find that tougher capital requirements were probably not responsible for the increase in capital ratios throughout the 1980s. Banks with low capital ratios tended to mean-revert well before any change in policy, and did not raise their capital ratios any...

Liquidity hoarding by banks and extreme volatility of the fed funds rate have been widely seen as severely disrupting the interbank market and the broader financial system during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Using a dataset of intraday Federal Reserve bank account balances and Fedwire interbank...

In the second half of 2008, the issuance of auto, credit card, and student loan asset-backed securities (ABS) all but stopped while secondary market spreads on AAA-rated tranches of consumer ABS reached historical levels. If sustained, the break-down of the originate-to-distribute model for...