We present evidence that the growth of U.S.-dollar-denominated banking sector liabilities forecasts appreciations of the U.S. dollar, both in-sample and out-of-sample, against a large set of foreign currencies. We provide a theoretical foundation for a funding liquidity channel in a global...

This paper studies the question of the economic scale of financial institutions. We show that banks actively smooth book equity by adjusting payouts to achieve a desired trajectory of book equity. The countercyclical nature of net payouts of financial institutions leads to procyclical book...

Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the firm's assets. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the...

The financial crisis of 2007-09 has sparked keen interest in models of financial frictions and their impact on macro activity. Most models share the feature that borrowers suffer a contraction in the quantity of credit. However, the evidence suggests that although bank lending contracted during...

We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing...