An examination of U.S. banking history shows that economically efficient private bank money requires that information-revealing securities markets for bank liabilities be closed. That is, banks are optimally opaque, which is why they are regulated and examined. I show this by examining the...

We document that the percentage of all U.S. assets that are "safe" has remained stable at about 33 percent since 1952. This stable ratio is a rare example of calm in a rapidly changing financial world. Over the same time period, the ratio of U.S. assets to GDP has increased by a factor of 2.5,...

There is a demand for safe assets, either government bonds or private substitutes, for use as collateral. Government bonds are safe assets, given the government's power to tax, but their supply is driven by fiscal considerations, and does not necessarily meet the private demand for safe assets....

Current practice largely follows restrictive approaches to market risk measurement, such as historical simulation or RiskMetrics. In contrast, we propose exible methods that exploit recent developments in nancial econometrics and are likely to produce more accurate risk assessments, treating...

Stock market volatility clusters in time, appears fractionally integrated, carries a risk premium, and exhibits asymmetric leverage e®ects relative to returns. At the same time, the volatility risk premium, de¯ned by the di®erence between the risk-neutral and objective expectations of the...

We construct daily house price indices for ten major U.S. metropolitan areas. Our calculations are based on a comprehensive database of several million residential property transactions and a standard repeat-sales method that closely mimics the methodology of the popular monthly Case-Shiller...

Univariate dependencies in market volatility, both objective and risk neutral, are best described by long-memory fractionally integrated processes. Meanwhile, the ex post difference, or the variance swap payoff reflecting the reward for bearing volatility risk, displays far less persistent...

It is well known that high-frequency asset returns are fat-tailed relative to the Gaussian distribution, and that the fat tails are typically reduced but not eliminated when returns are standardized by volatilities estimated from popular ARCH and stochastic volatility models. We consider two...

We construct daily house price indexes for ten major U.S. metropolitan areas. Our calculations are based on a comprehensive database of several million residential property transactions and a standard repeat-sales method that closely mimics the procedure used in the construction of the popular...

The dynamic dependencies in financial market volatility are generally well described by a long-memory fractionally integrated process. At the same time, the volatility risk premium, defined as the difference between the ex-post realized volatility and the market’s ex-ante expectation thereof,...