The broad economic damage of the COVID-19 pandemic poses the first major test of the bank regulatory reforms put in place after the Global Financial Crisis. Our study assesses the U.S. regulatory framework, with an emphasis on capital and liquidity requirements. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis,...

Economics

There is increasing interest in applying lessons learned from household finance to the design of regulation, both within and across international borders. However, household financial decisions are complex, interdependent, and heterogeneous, and central to the functioning of the financial...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of hedge funds on asset markets. We construct a simple measure of the aggregate illiquidity of hedge fund portfolios, and show that it has strong in- and out-of-sample forecasting power for 72 portfolios of international equities, corporate...

The relative popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) varies considerably both across countries and over time. We ask how movements in current and expected future interest rates affect the share of ARMs in total mortgage issuance. Using a nine-country panel...

Historical time-series data is short relative to the frequency of political and economic crises. This makes it difficult to use pure time-series methods to identify the impacts of safe haven demand on asset prices, in the face of confounding effects from a wide range of alternative drivers. We...

We analyze the reliability of voluntary disclosures of financial information, focusing on widely-employed publicly available hedge fund databases. Tracking changes to statements of historical performance recorded at different points in time between 2007 and 2011, we find that historical returns...

We investigate the predictive information content in foreign exchange volatility risk premia for exchange rate returns. The volatility risk premium is the difference between realized volatility and a model-free measure of expected volatility that is derived from currency options, and reflects...

We investigate the role of trade credit links in generating cross-border return predictability between international firms. Using data from 43 countries from 1993 to 2009, we find that firms with high trade credit located in producer countries have stock returns that are strongly predictable...