This paper provides the causes and symptoms of special repo rates in a competitive market for repurchase agreements. A repo rate is, in effect, an interest rate on loans collateralized by a specific instrument. A quot;specialquot; is a repo rate significantly below prevailing market riskless...

Empirical difficulties encountered by representative-consumer models are resolved in an economy with heterogeneity in the form of uninsurable, persistent, and heteroscedastic labor income shocks. Given the joint process of arbitrage-free asset prices, dividends, and aggregate income, satisfying...

We consider the problem faced by an issuer who wishes to design and issue a security backed by some exogenously given assets. The issuer has access to higher return investments and so has an incentive to raise capital by securitizing these assets. Because the issuer has private information...

This paper explores the information effect of financial risk management. Financial hedging improves the informativeness of corporate earnings as a signal of management ability and project quality by eliminating extraneous noise. Managerial and shareholder incentives regarding information...

This paper presents convenient reduced-form models of the valuation of contingent claims subject to default. A distinguishing feature of our approach is that losses at default are parameterized in terms of the fractional loss in market value. Under this assumption, and the assumption that...

The impact of credit quality on swap rates is determined under alternative netting assumptions. With counterparties of different default risk, swap valuation is non-linear in the underlying promised exchange of cash flows. The impact of credit risk asymmetry and of netting is presented through...

We develop a general and unified model in which a continuum of agents conduct directed random searches for counterparties. Our results provide the first probabilistic foundation for static and dynamic models of directed search (including the matching-function approach) that are common in...

Size-discovery trade mechanisms allow large quantities of an asset to be exchanged at a price that does not respond to price pressure. Primary examples include “workup” in Treasury markets, “matching sessions” in corporate bond and CDS markets, and block-trading “dark pools” in...

We characterize the price-transparency role of benchmarks in over-the-counter markets. A benchmark can, under conditions, raise social surplus by increasing the volume of beneficial trade, facilitating more efficient matching between dealers and customers, and reducing search costs. Although the...

Recent scandals over the manipulation of LIBOR, foreign exchange benchmarks, and other financial benchmarks have spurred policy discussions over their appropriate design. We characterize the optimal fixing of a benchmark as an estimator of a market value or reference rate. The fixing data are...