Search Results
Working Paper
Transparency and Collateral: The Design of CCPs' Loss Allocation Rules
This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to study optimal clearing arrangements for bilateral financial contracts in which an assessment of counterparty risk is crucial for efficiency. The economy is populated by two types of agents: a borrower and lender. The borrower is subject to limited commitment and holds private information about the severity of such lack of commitment. The lender can acquire information at a cost about the commitment of the borrower, which affects the assessment of counterparty risk. When truthful revelation by the borrower is not incentive compatible, the ...
Working Paper
Dealers' Insurance, Market Structure, And Liquidity
We develop a parsimonious model to study the equilibrium structure of financial markets and its efficiency properties. We find that regulations aimed at improving market outcomes can cause inefficiencies. The welfare benefit of such regulation stems from endogenously improving market access for some participants, thus boosting competition and lowering prices to the ultimate consumers. Higher competition, however, erodes profits from market activities. This has two effects: it disproportionately hurts more efficient market participants, who earn larger profits, and it reduces the incentives of ...
Working Paper
Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Transformative Potential & Associated Risks
Decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to a set of newly emerging financial products and services that operate on decentralized platforms using blockchains to record and share data. DeFi products and services are conducted without a trusted central intermediary such as a bank, and they include payments, lending and borrowing, trading and investments, capital raising (crowdfunding), and insurance. An important innovation that allowed for the development of DeFi was the growth of programming capability on blockchains. This innovation allows for the creation of computer code called smart contracts ...
Working Paper
A model of banknote discounts
Prior to 1863, state-chartered banks in the United States issued notes - dollar-denominated promises to pay specie to the bearer on demand. Although these notes circulated at par locally, they usually were quoted at a discount outside the local area. These discounts varied by both the location of the bank and the location where the discount was being quoted. Further, these discounts were asymmetric across locations, meaning that the discounts quoted in location A on the notes of banks in location B generally differed from the discounts quoted in location B on the notes of banks in location A. ...
Working Paper
Banking panics and deflation in dynamic general equilibrium
This paper develops a framework to study the interaction between banking, price dynamics, and monetary policy. Deposit contracts are written in nominal terms: if prices unexpectedly fall, the real value of banks' existing obligations increases. Banks default, panics precipitate, economic activity declines. If banks default, aggregate demand for cash increases because financial intermediation provided by banks disappears. When money supply is unchanged, the price level drops, thereby providing incentives for banks to default. Active monetary policy prevents banks from failing and output from ...
Working Paper
Voluntary Reserve Targets
This paper updates the standard workhorse model of banks' reserve management to include frictions inherent to money markets. We apply the model to study monetary policy implementation through an operating regime involving voluntary reserve targets (VRT). When reserves are abundant, as is the case following the unconventional policies adopted during the recent financial crisis, operating regimes based on reserve requirements may lead to a collapse in interbank trade. We show that, no matter the relative abundance of reserves, VRT encourage market activity and support the central bank's control ...
Report
The Financial Stability Implications of Digital Assets
The value of assets in the digital ecosystem has grown rapidly amid periods of high volatility. Does the digital financial system create new potential challenges to financial stability? This paper explores this question using the Federal Reserve’s framework for analyzing vulnerabilities in the traditional financial system. The digital asset ecosystem has recently proven itself to be highly fragile. However, adverse digital asset market shocks have had limited spillovers to the traditional financial system. Currently, the digital asset ecosystem does not provide significant financial ...
Journal Article
Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Transformative Potential and Associated Risks
Financial services in the crypto finance world are provided by a combination of centralized finance (CeFi) organizations and decentralized finance (DeFi). CeFi's are roughly similar to traditional financial intermediaries, but DeFi seeks to provide services using smart contracts (computer code) rather than an intermediary. DeFi's unusual structure creates some interesting potential but also raises new risks in addition to those already inherent in blockchains and crypto finance. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and risks.