Since the end of the Great Recession, growth in health care spending has declined to historically low levels. There is disagreement over whether this decline was caused by falling incomes during the Great Recession (and therefore is likely to reverse once the recovery is complete) or whether the...

This paper investigates how the network of relationships between dealers shapes their trading behavior in the corporate bond market. We show that dealers tend to provide liquidity during periods of distress to the counterparties with whom they have the strongest tie. However, highly connected...

This paper investigates the ways in which the network of relationships between dealers shapes their trading behavior in the corporate bond market. They charge lower spreads to dealers with whom they have the strongest ties, and this effect is all the more pronounced at times of market turmoil....

This paper explores how speculators can destabilize financial markets by amplifying negative shocks. During periods of turmoil created by an uncertainty shock, speculators react to declining asset prices by liquidating their holdings in hopes of buying them back later at a gain, despite the...

This paper provides new evidence about the behavior of hedge funds during the disruptions that occurred in the Treasury market in March 2020. In contrast to some recent policy papers arguing that hedge funds were a major amplifier of those disruptions, we show that aggregate Treasury positions...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

This paper distils three lessons for bank regulation from the experience of the 2009-12 euro-area financial crisis. First, it highlights the key role that sovereign debt exposures of banks have played in the feedback loop between bank and fiscal distress, and inquires how the regulation of...