Collateral plays a very important role in financial markets. Without easy access to high-quality collateral, dealers and market participants would find it more costly to trade, with a negative impact on market liquidity and the real economy through increased financing costs. The role of...

The correlation across US states in house price growth increased steadily between 1976 and 2000. This paper shows that the contemporaneous geographic integration of the US banking market, via the emergence of large banks, was a primary driver of this phenomenon. To this end, we first...

I develop a model where the sovereign debt capacity depends on the capitalization of domestic banks. Low-capital banks optimally tilt their government bond portfolio toward domestic securities, linking their destiny to that of the sovereign. If the sovereign risk is sufficiently high,...

This paper analyzes banks’ usage of CDS. Combining bank-firm syndicated loan data with a unique EU-wide dataset on bilateral CDS positions, we find that stronger banks in terms of capital, funding and profitability tend to hedge more. We find no evidence of banks using the CDS market for...

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to study the determinants of banks’ net interest margin with a particular focus on the role of maturity transformation, using a new measure of maturity mismatch; second, to analyse the implications for banks of the relaxation of a binding prudential...

The risk reducing benefits of the sovereign bond-backed security (SBBS) proposal of Brunnermeier et al. (2016) have been assessed in terms of the likely losses that different kinds of holders would suffer under simulated default scenarios. However, the effects of mark-to-market losses that may...

New regulatory data reveal extensive discriminatory pricing in the foreign exchange derivatives market, in which dealer-banks and their non-financial clients trade over-the-counter. After controlling for contract characteristics, dealer fixed effects, and market conditions, we find that the...

In both the subprime crisis and the euro-area crisis, regulators imposed bans on short sales, aimed mainly at preventing stock price turbulence from destabilizing financial institutions. Contrary to the regulators’ intentions, financial institutions whose stocks were banned experienced greater...

We build a moral hazard model to study incentives of financial intermediaries (shortly, bankers) facing a leverage-insurance trade-off in their investment choice. We demonstrate that the choice is affected by two recent transformations of the financial ecosystem bankers inhabit: (i) the rise of...

A natural liquidity mismatch emerges when liquid exchange traded funds (ETFs) hold relatively illiquid assets. We provide a theory and empirical evidence showing that this liquidity mismatch can reduce market efficiency and increase the fragility of these ETFs. We focus on corporate bond ETFs...