We show that maturity transformation does not expose banks to significant interest rate risk|it hedges it. This is due to banks' deposit franchise. The deposit franchise gives banks substantial market power over deposits, allowing them to pay deposit rates that are low and insensitive to market...

Between 2003 and 2006, the Federal Reserve raised rates by 4.25%. Yet it was precisely during this period that the housing boom accelerated, fueled by rapid growth in mortgage lending. There is deep disagreement about how, or even if, monetary policy impacted the boom. Using heterogeneity in...

We present a new channel for the transmission of monetary policy, the deposits channel. We show that when the Fed funds rate rises, banks widen the spreads they charge on deposits, and deposits flow out of the banking system. We present a model where this is due to market power in deposit...

Liquidity provision is a bet against private information: if private information turns out to be higher than expected, liquidity providers lose. Since information generates volatility, and volatility co-moves across assets, liquidity providers have a negative exposure to aggregate volatility...

We build a macroeconomic model that centers on liquidity transformation in the financial sector. Intermediaries maximize liquidity creation by issuing securities that are money-like in normal times but become illiquid in a crash when collateral is scarce. We call this process shadow banking. A...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has undergone a revolution. But have market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from current...

We show that financial sector bailouts and sovereign credit risk are intimately linked. A bailout benefits the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the financial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-financial sector to fund the bailout may be inefficient since it...

Short-rebate fees are a strong predictor of the cross-section of stock returns, both gross and net of fees. We document a large "shorting premium": the cheap-minus-expensive-to-short (CME) portfolio of stocks has a monthly average gross return of 1.43%, a net return of 0.91%, and a 1.53%...

Technology-based ("FinTech") lenders increased their market share of U.S. mortgage lending from 2% to 8% from 2010 to 2016. Using market-wide, loan-level data on U.S. mortgage applications and originations, we show that FinTech lenders process mortgage applications about 20% faster than other...

The global imbalance explanation of the financial crisis of 2007-09 suggests that demand for riskless assets from countries with current account surpluses created fragility in countries with current account deficits, most notably, in the United States. We examine this explanation by analyzing...