Financial intermediaries issue the majority of liquid securities, and nonfinancial firms have become net savers, holding intermediaries' debt as cash. This paper shows that intermediaries' liquidity creation stimulates growth -- firms hold their debt for unhedgeable investment needs -- but also...

Using a news-based index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), we find that EPU is positively associated with credit default swap (CDS) spreads and negatively associated with the number of liquidity providers in the CDS market. A 10% increase in EPU leads to an 8.4% increase in CDS spreads and a...

We study the debt-stabilizing properties of indexing debt to GDP using a consumption-based macro-finance model. Three results stand out: (i) GDP-linked bond prices would embed sizeable and time-varying risk premiums of about 40 basis points, (ii) for a fixed budget surplus, issuing GDP-linked...

The biggest and most well-known unsolved problem in academic finance is famously referred to as the Equity Premium Puzzle. It refers to the unexplained phenomenon that for over 100 years the average return on a well-diversified portfolio of equities has far outperformed that of risk-free,...

We estimate the option value of municipal liquidity by studying bond market activity and public sector hiring decisions when government budgets are severely distressed. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, we exploit lending eligibility population cutoffs introduced by the Federal...

As the debt ceiling episode unfolds, we highlight a sharp increase in activity across the U.S. credit default swaps (CDS) market and infer the likelihood of a U.S. default from these market prices. Beginning in January 2023, we document a significant increase in U.S. CDS trading activity and...

This paper constructs a simple general equilibrium model to analyse the interactions between the financial and the real sector in an environment where liquidity holdings is an input of the credit/investment process. The supply of liquidity is constrained in that income pledgeability limits...

The Euro area has a unique monetary authority that governs money creation, but several individual-countries’ sovereign debts that differ in terms of safety. We analyse: i) the interactions between the financial and real sector in such an environment; ii) the role of government bonds as...

The policy initiatives taken by the Brazilian authorities since the beginning of the decade have helped markedly improve the structure of government debt and the overall liquidity of fixed income and related derivatives markets. Despite this progress, there is room for improvement in the...

This paper constructs a simple general equilibrium model to analyse the interactions between the financial and the real sector in an environment where liquidity holdings is an input of the credit/investment process. The supply of liquidity is constrained in that income pledgeability limits...