General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

Index funds are one of the most common ways investors access financial markets and are perceived to be a transparent and low-cost alternative to active investment management. Despite these purported virtues of index fund investing and the introduction of new products and competitors, many funds...

Studies of intermediated arbitrage argue that bank balance sheets are an important consideration, yet little evidence exists on banks' positioning in this context. Using confidential supervisory data (covering $25 trillion in daily notional exposures) we examine banks' positions in connection...

Using tax filings from 374,351 U.S. nonprofit organizations from 2008 to 2020, we provide the first large-scale analysis of endowment prevalence, function, asset allocation, and returns. Endowment use varies systematically across sectors and revenue models. Organizations with endowments scale...

Stablecoins are cryptoassets which are designed to be pegged to the dollar, but are backed by imperfectly liquid USD assets. We show that stablecoins feature concentrated arbitrage: the largest issuer, Tether, only allows 6 agents in an average month to redeem stablecoins for cash. We argue that...

We study the relation between bank funding costs and the financial sophistication of bank customers. In doing this, we make use of a natural experiment that allows us to identify banks that--either intentionally or unintentionally--price time deposits in a way that can result in...

Motivated by the recent National Association of Realtors (NAR) settlement, this note examines the effects of reduced real estate agent commissions on home prices, housing turnover, and consumer welfare. Using a calibrated dynamic structural search model of the housing market, we explore how...

Congressional intent concerning the independence of the Federal Reserve matters because it protects the public from the politicization of monetary policy. Attempts to subordinate monetary policy to the President could easily end up in front of the Supreme Court. The outcome of such a case would...

Migrant remittances are significant but remain relatively costly to send. Policymakers have argued that fintech, specifically, comparison websites like kayak.com but for sending money, can boost financial inclusion and reduce remittance prices. Yet, little is known about how migrants with...

Liquidity provision is often attributed to debt-issuing intermediaries like banks. We develop a unified theoretical framework and empirically show that mutual funds issuing demandable equity also provide an economically significant amount of liquidity by insuring against idiosyncratic liquidity...