Secondary loan participations, or loan sales, are a recent innovation in banking. In a secondary loan participation, or loan sale, a bank makes a loan and then sells the cash stream from the loan without explicit contractual recourse, guarantee, insurance, or other credit enhancement, to a third...

We model the demand for transactions services and liquidity in an economy with asymmetrically informed agents. It is shown that informed agents can systematically take advantage of agents who are relatively uninformed but who have unexpected needs to trade. This causes certain financial...

There has been a long-running debate whether stock market prices are determined by fundamentals. To date no consensus has been reached. An important issue in this debate concerns the circumstances in which deviations from fundamentals are consistent with rational behavior. A continuous-time...

Secondary loan participations, or loan "stripping," is a recent innovation in banking. In a secondary loan participation, or loan sale, a bank makes a loan and then sells the loan, without recourse, to a third party. Bank loans hitherto were nonmarketable securities which could only be removed...

The usual approach to determine if market prices of uninsured bank liabilities reflect the risk of default is to regress the yield spread of bank debt against accounting measures of bank risk. To date these results have been mixed. Here we argue that this is because previous investigations lack...

In the last two decades U.S. banks have become systematically less profitable and riskier as nonbank competition has eroded the profitability of banks’ traditional activities. Bank failures, insignificant from 1934, the date the Glass-Steagall Act was passed, until 1980, rose exponentially in...

Banking panics are the central event informing and rationalizing government intervention into the banking industry. In the last decade progress has been made in understanding the origins of panics. This essay reviews recent theoretical and empirical work on the origins of banking panics. New...

In the last ten to fifteen years financial derivative securities have become an important, and controversial, product for commercial banks. The controversy concerns whether the size, complexity, and risks associated with these securities, the difficulties with accurately reporting timely...

The existence of nominal wage and debt contracts is a puzzle. In a model with strategic complementarities, where imperfectly competitive firms inefficiently underinvest, nominal wage or debt contracts are shown to be preferred to indexed contracts. Nominal contracts are an optimal arrangement...

In a model with incomplete markets, and agents privately producing a circulating media of exchange to coordinate trade, it is shown that closing another market can be Pareto-improving. Producing private money is costly because contracts with the money issuers must be enforced, creating agency...