Ongoing regulatory reform efforts aim to make the over-the-counter derivatives market more transparent by introducing public reporting of transaction-level information, including price and volume of trades. However, to date there has been a scarcity of data on the structure of trading in this...

Since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began announcing its policy decisions in 1994, U.S. stock returns have on average been more than thirty times larger on announcement days than on other days. Surprisingly, these abnormal returns are accrued before the policy announcement. The excess...

The profit to a standard short-term return reversal strategy can be decomposed analytically into four components: 1) across-industry return momentum, 2) within-industry variation in expected returns, 3) under-reaction to within-industry cash flow news, and 4) a residual. Only the residual...

There is often speculation that the international roles of currencies may be changing. This paper presents the current status of these roles. The U.S. dollar continues to be the dominant currency across various uses. Yet, such a role may change over time. If this occurs, there could be...

This paper examines the ex post flexibility of U.S. labor contracts during the 1970-95 period by investigating whether unanticipated changes in inflation increase the likelihood of a contract being renegotiated prior to its expiration. We find strong empirical support for this hypothesis....

In response to the sharp decline in prices of financial stocks in the fall of 2008, regulators in a number of countries banned short selling of particular stocks and industries. Evidence suggests that these bans did little to stop the slide in stock prices, but significantly increased costs of...

Household surveys are the source of some of the most widely studied data on consumer balance sheets, with the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) generally cited as the leading source of wealth data for the United States. At the same time, recent research questions survey respondents’ propensity...

There is a longstanding debate about whether banking panics and other financial crises always have fundamental causes or are sometimes the result of self-fulfilling beliefs. Disagreement on this point would seem to present a serious obstacle to designing policies that promote financial...

We introduce liquidity frictions into an otherwise standard DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities, explicitly incorporating the zero bound on the short-term nominal interest rate. Within this framework, we ask: Can a shock to the liquidity of private paper lead to a collapse in short-term...

This paper examines how much capital banks should optimally hold. Our model encompasses different kinds of moral hazard studied in banking: asset substitution (or risk shifting, e.g., making risky, negative net present value loans), managerial rent seeking (e.g., shirking or investing in...