Many commentators have argued that if the Federal Reserve had followed a stricter monetary policy earlier this decade when the housing bubble was forming, and if Congress had not deregulated banking but had imposed tighter financial standards, the housing boom and bust - and the subsequent...

Loan-level data on the uncollateralized overnight loan market is generated using payment data from Canada's Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) and a modified version of the methodology proposed in Furfine (1999). There were on average just under 100 loans extended in this market each day from...

In the post-crisis period, increased regulation of financial intermediaries led to a significant decline in corporate bond market liquidity. In order to stabilize these markets, policy makers recently proposed that the trading of corporate bonds should be more centralized. In this paper, we show...

What is the source of interest rate volatility? Why do low interest rates precede business cycle booms? Most observers tend to assume that monetary policy is largely responsible for it. Indeed, a standard real business cycle model delivers rather small fluctuations in real interest rates. Here,...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the role of trading frictions in over-the-counter financial markets. In our model, agents face idiosyncratic preference shocks and a financial market allows them to rebalance their portfolio composed of liquid and illiquid assets in...

We use a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the causal effects of the Federal Reserve's Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities (CCFs) on corporate bond credit spreads. In particular, we exploit the publication of the constituents of the SMCCF Broad Market Index to...

Since the global financial crisis Eurozone’s architectural flaws and risk segregating policies have raised an issue of euro sustainability for several member countries. This has often resulted in anti-Europeanist sentiments and rising consensus to populist parties. Italy, in particular, in...

Since ancient times, various psychological techniques such as fear and terror have been deliberately used by entities as non-combat weapons to bring about the enemy’s defeat. An effective use of fear as a weapon can sometimes achieve more than an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The...

We show that an intrinsic property of a large class of rational bubbles is their capacity to relax the agents’ debt limits. Any bubble that preserves the set of pricing kernels, or equivalently, the asset span, has effectively an identical effect on consumption and real interest rates as an...