High-quality producers in a vertically differentiated market can reap superior profits by charging higher prices, selling greater quantities, or both. If qualities are known by consumers and production costs are constant, then having a higher quality secures the producer both higher price and...

This paper estimates the profits to insiders when they trade their company's stock. We construct a rolling purchase portfolio' that holds all shares purchased by insiders over the previous year and an analogous sale portfolio' that holds all shares sold by insiders over the previous year. We...

This paper surveys the role of the Federal Reserve within the financial regulatory system, with particular attention to the interaction of the Fed's role as both a supervisor and a lender-of-last-resort (LOLR). The institutional design of the Federal Reserve System was aimed at preventing...

We survey the literature on securitization and lay out a research program for its open questions. Securitization is the process by which loans, previously held to maturity on the balance sheets of financial intermediaries, are sold in capital markets. Securitization has grown from a small amount...

The sale and repurchase (repo) market played a central role in the recent financial crisis. From the second quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2009, net repo financing provided to U.S. banks and broker-dealers fell by about $1.3 trillion - more than half of its pre-crisis total. Significant...

Why did the failure of Lehman Brothers make the financial crisis dramatically worse? The financial crisis was a process of a build-up of risk during the crisis prior to the Lehman failure. Market participants tried to preserve an option or exit by shortening maturities - the "flight from...

When "confidence" is lost, "liquidity dries up." We investigate the meaning of "confidence" and "liquidity" in the context of the current financial crisis. The financial crisis is a manifestation of an age-old problem with private money creation, banking panics. We explain this and provide some...

The Panic of 2007-2008 was a run on the sale and repurchase market (the "repo" market), which is a very large, short-term market that provides financing for a wide range of securitization activities and financial institutions. Repo transactions are collateralized, frequently with securitized...

Default options have an enormous impact on household choices.' Defaults matter because opting out of a default is costly and these costs change over time, generating an option value of waiting. In addition, people have a tendency to procrastinate. We develop a theory of optimal defaults based on...

Corporate-governance provisions related to takeover defenses and shareholder rights vary substantially across firms. In this paper, we use the incidence of 24 different provisions to build a 'Governance Index' for about 1,500 firms per year, and then we study the relationship between this index...