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Working Paper
Funding Liquidity Risk and the Cross-section of MBS Returns
This paper shows that funding liquidity risk is priced in the cross-section of excess returns on agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). We derive a measure of funding liquidity risk from dollar-roll implied financing rates (IFRs), which reflect security-level costs of financing positions in the MBS market. We show that factors representing higher net MBS supply are generally associated with higher IFRs, or higher funding costs. In addition, we find that exposure to systematic funding liquidity shocks embedded in the IFRs is compensated in the cross-section of expected excess returns| agency ...
Working Paper
Do Sustainable Investment Strategies Hedge Climate Change Risks? Evidence from Germany's Carbon Tax
It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of investment strategies that screen companies based on environmental criteria to hedge climate change risk because physical risks have not yet fully materialized and policies to combat climate change are usually widely anticipated. This paper sidesteps these limitations by analyzing the stock market response to plausibly exogenous changes in expectations about the level of a carbon tax in Germany. The risk-adjusted return on two sustainable investment approaches---screening companies based on environmental scores and on firms' carbon ...
Working Paper
The Demand for Short-Term, Safe Assets and Financial Stability: Some Evidence and Implications for Central Bank Policies
A number of researchers have recently argued that the growth of the shadow banking system in the years preceding the recent U.S. financial crisis was driven by rising demand for "money-like" claims--short-term, safe instruments (STSI)--from institutional investors and nonfinancial firms. These instruments carry a money premium that lowers their yields. While government securities are an important part of the supply of STSI, financial intermediaries also take advantage of this money premium when they issue certain types of low-risk, short-term debt, such as asset-backed commercial paper or ...
Working Paper
Volatility, labor heterogeneity and asset prices
This paper shows that a firm's reliance on skilled labor is an underlying determinant of its exposure to aggregate volatility risk. I present a model in which firms make hiring and firing decisions in an environment of time-varying aggregate volatility, and face linear adjustment costs that increase with the skill of a worker. In the model, an increase in aggregate volatility slows a firm's labor demand reaction to changes in economic conditions, reducing its ability to smooth cash flows. The rise in aggregate volatility has a more pronounced impact on firms with a high share of skilled labor ...
Working Paper
International Yield Spillovers
This paper investigates spillovers from foreign economies to the U.S. through changes in longterm Treasury yields. We document a decline in the contribution of U.S. domestic news to the variance of long-term Treasury yields and an increased importance of overnight yield changes—a rough proxy for the contribution of foreign shocks to U.S. yields—over the past decades. Using a model that identifies U.S., Euro area, and U.K. shocks that move global yields, we estimate that foreign (non-U.S.) shocks account for at least 20 percent of the daily variation in long-term U.S. yields in recent ...