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Working Paper
Interest Spreads and Margins in Collateral Equilibrium with Heterogeneous Beliefs
There continues to be substantial interest in models combining heterogeneous beliefs about asset values with leverage generated by loans from pessimists to the optimistic natural buyers of the asset. This paper determines the size of the interest spread and margin on the loan as a function of the downside risk perceived by the lender, and the amount of risk capital put forward by the borrower. We show that in a continuous state version of a model of collateral equilibrium with high initial leverage, most of the burden of adjustment to increases in such risk are borne by an increase in the ...
Journal Article
The global saving glut and the fall in U.S. real interest rates: A 15-year retrospective
The authors revisit Ben Bernanke’s global saving glut (GSG) hypothesis from 2005—which links low long-term real interest rates in the United States to excess saving in a number of non-Western countries, including, but not limited to, China. Using an analytical framework and empirical data, they find that the ability of the GSG hypothesis to explain the fall in long-term real rates between 2002 and 2006 is likely much greater than its ability to account for the further fall in these rates from the Great Recession onward.
Working Paper
Interest Rates or Haircuts? Prices Versus Quantities in the Market for Collateralized Risky Loans
Markets for risky loans clear on two dimensions - an interest rate (or equivalently a spread above the riskless rate) and a specification of the amount of collateral per dollar of lending. The latter is summarized by the margin or "haircut" associated with the loan. Some key models of endogenous collateral constraints imply that the primary equilibrating force will be in the form of haircuts rather than movements in interest rate spreads. Indeed, an important benchmark model, derived in a two-state world, implies that haircuts will adjust to render all lending riskless, and that a loss of ...