Prior to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, economists thought that no such crisis could or would ever happen again in the United States, that financial events of such magnitude were a thing of the distant past. In fact, observers of that distant past--the period from the half century prior to...

Commodity futures risk premiums vary across commodities and over time depending on the level of physical inventories. The convenience yield is a decreasing, nonlinear function of inventories. Price measures, such as the futures basis, prior futures returns, prior spot returns, and spot price...

Originally written for a conference of the Federal Reserve, Gary Gorton's "The Panic of 2007" garnered enormous attention and is considered by many to be the most convincing take on the recent economic meltdown. Now, in Slapped by the Invisible Hand, Gorton builds upon this seminal work,...

We study an infinite-horizon Lucas tree model where a manager is hired to tend to the trees and is compensated with a fraction of the treesʼ output. The manager trades shares with investors and makes an effort that determines the distribution of the output. When the manager is less (more)...

Secondary loan participations, or loan sales, are a recent innovation in banking. In a secondary loan participation, or loan sale, a bank makes a loan and then sells the cash stream from the loan without explicit contractual recourse, guarantee, insurance, or other credit enhancement, to a third...

We model the demand for transactions services and liquidity in an economy with asymmetrically informed agents. It is shown that informed agents can systematically take advantage of agents who are relatively uninformed but who have unexpected needs to trade. This causes certain financial...

There has been a long-running debate whether stock market prices are determined by fundamentals. To date no consensus has been reached. An important issue in this debate concerns the circumstances in which deviations from fundamentals are consistent with rational behavior. A continuous-time...

To end a financial crisis, the central bank is to lend freely, against good collateral, at a high rate, according to Bagehot’s Rule. We argue that in theory and in practice there is a missing ingredient to Bagehot’s Rule: secrecy. Re-creating confidence requires that the central bank lend in...