Search Results
Working Paper
A Portfolio-Balance Approach to the Nominal Term Structure
Explanations of why changes in the relative quantities of safe debt seem to affect asset prices often appeal informally to a ?portfolio balance? mechanism. I show how this type of effect can be incorporated in a general class of structural, arbitrage-free asset-pricing models using a numerical solution method that allows for a wide range of nonlinearities. I consider some applications in which the Treasury market is isolated, investors have mean-variance preferences, and the short-rate process is truncated at zero. Despite its simplicity, a version of this model incorporating inflation can ...
Journal Article
Derivatives and Collateral at U.S. Life Insurers
Although insurers represent a relatively small part of the derivatives markets, they are an interesting case study, in part because they report very detailed information about their derivatives positions and associated collateral in quarterly regulatory filings. The authors exploit these data to study how derivatives are used by insurers and analyze the likely impact of regulatory reforms on their business models.
Working Paper
Flow and stock effects of large-scale Treasury purchases
Using a panel of daily CUSIP-level data, we study the effects of the Federal Reserve's program to purchase $300 billion of U.S. Treasury coupon securities announced and implemented during 2009. This program represented an unprecedented intervention in the Treasury market and thus allows us to shed light on the price elasticities and substitutability of Treasuries, preferred-habitat theories of the term structure, and the ability of large-scale asset purchases to reduce overall yields and improve market functioning. We find that each purchase operation, on average, caused a decline in yields ...
Journal Article
Jumbo CDs play tiny role in policing risky banks ... so far
Reforms enacted after the S&L crisis have yet to persuade holders of jumbo CDs to monitor their banks' risky practices.
Working Paper
Securities Financing and Asset Markets: New Evidence
This paper presents new evidence on bilateral securities financing based on the Federal Reserve's Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey, which was launched in the wake of the financial crisis to provide a window into this otherwise opaque market. The survey asks large broker-dealers about terms at which they fund client positions, and the demand for such funding, across several different collateral types. Within asset classes, reported changes in spreads, haircuts, and other financing terms move closely together, and we show that they also covary with the state of the underlying cash ...
Journal Article
Profits and balance sheet developments at U.S. commercial banks in 2007
Reviews recent developments in the balance sheets and in the profitability of U.S. commercial banks. The article discusses how developments in the U.S. banking industry in 2007 and early 2008 were related to changes in financial markets and in the broader economy.
Working Paper
Distress in the financial sector and economic activity
This paper explores the relationship between the health of the financial sector and the rest of the economy. We develop an index of financial sector health using a distance-to-default measure based on a Merton-style option pricing model. Our index spans over three decades and appears to capture periods when financial sector institutions were strong and when they were weak. We then use vector autoregressions to assess whether our index of financial-sector health affects the real economy, in particular non-residential investment. The results indicate that our index has a considerable impact. ...
Working Paper
One Asset Does Not Fit All: Inflation Hedging by Index and Horizon
We examine the inflation-hedging properties of various financial assets and portfolios by estimating simple time-series models of the joint dynamics of each asset-inflation pair, for multiple inflation indices and at horizons from one month to 30 years. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to inflation hedging: the optimal hedge depends on the particular types of prices that an investor is exposed to and at which horizons. For example, food and energy prices are easy to hedge with commodities and certain stock portfolios, while non-housing service prices and wages are not highly correlated ...
Working Paper
Capital Constraints and Risk Shifting: An Instrumental Approach
When firms approach distress, whether they engage in asset substitution (risk shifting) or rebuild equity (risk management) may depend on their access to capital markets. The property-casualty insurance industry has two features that make it ideal for testing this hypothesis: (1) the main losses for insurers are exogenous events like hurricanes that provide a strong instrument for financial distress; and (2) many insurers are organized as mutual companies, which cannot issue stock. Consistent with the importance of capital constraints, stock companies issue new equity following a negative ...
Working Paper
Expectation and Duration at the Effective Lower Bound
I study unconventional monetary policy in a structural model of risk-averse arbitrage, augmented with an effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal rates. The model exposes nonlinear interactions among short-rate expectations, bond supply, and term premia that are absent from models that ignore the ELB, and these features help it replicate the recent behavior of long-term yields, including event-study evidence on the responses to unconventional policy. When the model is calibrated to long-run moments of the yield curve and subjected to shocks approximating the size of the Federal Reserve?s ...