In a financial system in which balance sheets are continuously marked to market, asset price changes appear immediately as changes in net worth, eliciting responses from financial intermediaries who adjust the size of their balance sheets. We document evidence that marked-to-market leverage is...

In this paper, using the rich household panel data of urban and rural Ethiopia that covers the period from 1994 to 2000, we attempted to establish the link between finance and poverty in Ethiopia. Our results show that access to finance is an important factor in consumption smoothing and hence...

Asia faces very large infrastructure funding demands, estimated at around US$750 billion per year for energy, transport, telecommunications, water, and sanitation during 2010-2020 (ADB/ADBI 2009). Asia has large savings, significant international reserves, and rapid accumulations of funds that...

In responding to the severity and broad scope of the financial crisis that began in 2007, the Federal Reserve has made aggressive use of both traditional monetary policy instruments and innovative tools in an effort to provide liquidity. In this paper, I examine the Fed's actions in light of the...

We propose a measure for systemic risk: CoVaR, the value at risk (VaR) of financial institutions conditional on other institutions being in distress. We define an institution's (marginal) contribution to systemic risk as the difference between CoVaR and the financial system's VaR. From our...

We provide an overview of the data requirements necessary to monitor repurchase agreements (repos) and securities lending markets for the purposes of informing policymakers and researchers about firm-level and systemic risk. We start by explaining the functioning of these markets, then argue...

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...

Structured finance instruments represent a form of securitization technology which can be defined by the characteristics of pooling of financial assets, delinking of the credit risk of the asset pool from the credit risk of the originating intermediary, and issuance of tranched liabilities...

We present a dynamic microstructure model where a dealer market (DM) and a crossing network (CN) interact. Sequentially arriving traders with different valuations for an asset maximise their profits either by trading on a DM or by submitting an order for (possibly) uncertain execution via a CN....

This paper reports aggregate statistics on securities lending activity based on a recently concluded pilot data collection by staff from the Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Federal Reserve System, and staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In its annual reports, the...