We discuss how leverage can be monitored for institutions, individuals, and assets. While traditionally the interest rate has been regarded as the important feature of a loan, we argue that leverage is sometimes even more important. Monitoring leverage provides information about how risk builds...

This is the graduation speech I gave on receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Athens Economics and Business School. I talk about my Greek family, about how I got interested in economics, and then how in the 1990s I came to think about default, collateral, and leverage as the...

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage bubble and then to the crash of 2007-2009. We show why tranching and leverage first raised asset prices and why CDS lowered them afterwards. This may seem puzzling, since it implies that creating a derivative...

I study the stability analysis of the solutions for the dynamical system of nonlinear asset flow differential equations (AFDEs) in three versions. I show that the previous two versions are not structurally stable mathematically because there are infinitely many critical points. It is important...

In our model, cross-currency basis, which captures the deviations from covered interest rate parity (CIP), reflects the relative value of the scarcer currency (US dollar) as collateral in funding constraints. Our empirical evidence shows that measures of dollar shortage derived from ECB tenders,...

We introduce a leverage-constrained financial intermediaries and market incompleteness into a three-period pure exchange economy with ex ante homogeneous households. Market incompleteness generates ex post heterogeneity in households' consumption and wealth distributions and arbitrage...

Wary consumers overlook gains but not losses in remote sets of dates or states. As preferences are upper but not lower, Mackey semi-continuous, Bewleyʼs (1972) [4] result on existence of equilibrium whose prices are not necessarily countably additive holds. Wariness is related to lack of myopia...

We study a simple static economy with collateralized loan contracts and an incomplete asset market. We study whether economic forces operate to keep asset price equal to fundamentals in this economy. We find that asset prices may be higher than the valuation of any agent in the economy, i.e.,...

A dynamic pure-exchange general equilibrium model with uncertainty is studied. Fundamentals are supposed to depend continuously on states of nature. It is shown that: 1. if financial markets are complete, then asset prices vary continuously with states of nature, and; 2. if financial markets are...