Search Results
Journal Article
Arbitrage: the key to pricing options
Arbitrage has become associated in popular attitudes with the most ruthless and profit-driven of human impulses, but the opposite reputation might be more well-deserved. The ability to arbitrage is essential for the efficient operation of markets. An interesting application of the principle of arbitrage arose when it provided the breakthrough insight in economists? solution to a formerly intractable problem: how to properly price the emergent financial instruments known as options.
Working Paper
Gambling for Dollars: Strategic Hedge Fund Manager Investment
Hedge fund managers differ in ability and investors want to distinguish good ones from bad. Via the design of their investment strategies, better fund managers want to ease this inference problem while worse fund managers want to complicate it. We impose only the minimal restrictions on the nature the investment strategies that, on average, returns reflect the hedge fund manager?s ability and that returns be bounded from below, and solve for the set of equilibria that emerge. We then show that under a variety of equilibrium refinements, a unique equilibrium obtains. In this equilibrium, ...
Journal Article
A simple model of money and banking
This article presents a simple environment that has banks creating and lending out money. The authors define money to be any object that circulates widely as a means of payment and a bank to be an agency that simultaneously issues money and monitors investments. While their framework allows private nonbank liabilities to serve as the economy's medium of exchange, they demonstrate that the cost-minimizing structure has a bank creating liquid funds. In practice, the vast bulk of the money supply consists of private debt instruments that are issued by banks. Thus, their model goes some way in ...
Working Paper
Bank runs without sequential service
Banking models in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) rely on sequential service to explain belief driven runs. But the run-like phenomena witnessed during the financial crisis of 2007-08 occurred in the wholesale shadow banking sector where sequential service is largely absent. This suggests that something other than sequential service is needed to help explain runs. We show that in the absence of sequential service runs can easily occur whenever bank-funded investments are subject to increasing returns to scale consistent with available evidence. Our framework is used to understand ...
Newsletter
What is clearing and why is it important?
In the financial market disruption of 2007?08, the once arcane topic of clearing of financial products took center stage in major policy debates. Generally speaking, clearing has to do with the nuts and bolts of the contractual performance of financial products after they have been traded.
Report
A note on labor contracts with private information and household production
A classic result in the theory of implicit contract models with asymmetric information is that ?underemployment? results if and only if leisure is an inferior good. We introduce household production into the standard implicit contract model and show that we can have underemployment at the same time that leisure is a normal good.
Journal Article
Clearing over-the-counter derivatives
Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the over-the-counter derivatives market was not required to ?clear? transactions. This changed with the signing of the new financial reform legislation, the Dodd?Frank Act on July 21, 2010. Going forward, most OTC derivatives will be cleared through a particular set of institutional arrangements: a regulated clearinghouse. This article provides an overview of how clearing works, the potential benefits of central clearing for OTC derivatives, and the optimal clearing structure.
Discussion Paper
The 2006 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, and Payments: an overview
This Policy Discussion Paper summarizes the papers presented at the 2006 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, and Payments. Every summer since 2002, some of the best researchers in the areas of theory, policy, and quantitative analysis relating to money, banking, and payments systems have met in Cleveland to discuss their latest work. The papers presented at the 2006 workshop cover a vast spectrum of issues and use a wide variety of methods. Still, there is an underlying theme, which is an effort to enhance our understanding of monetary economics, broadly defined, and to uncover new ways to ...
Journal Article
Infrastructure and the wealth of nations
Economies can?t grow without a sufficiently developed infrastructure, but how deep does the infrastructure have to be to make a difference? The authors take a look at some research from the Fraser Institute that examines the relationship between economic growth and economic infrastructure across 123 countries. They find that infrastructure is a bit of an all-or-nothing proposition.
Report
Monetary Policy Implementation with an Ample Supply of Reserves
We offer a parsimonious model of the reserve demand to study the trade-offs associated with various monetary policy implementation frameworks. Our model considers a reserve demand function that encompasses banks' preferences for reserves in the post 2007-2009 financial crisis world and incorporates shocks to the demand for and the supply of reserves. We find that the best policy implementation outcomes are realized when reserves are somewhere in between scarce and abundant. This outcome is consistent with the Federal Open Market Committee's 2019 announcement to implement monetary policy in a ...