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Report
COVID Response: The Primary and Secondary Corporate Credit Facilities
The Federal Reserve introduced the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF) and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) in response to the severe disruptions in corporate bond markets triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic shutdowns. The Corporate Credit Facilities (CCFs) were designed to work together to restore functioning of credit markets, with an overarching goal of facilitating credit provision to the non-financial corporate sector of the U.S. economy. This paper provides an overview of the CCFs, including detailing the facilities’ design, ...
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.
Report
Measuring Corporate Bond Market Dislocations
We link bond market functioning to future economic activity through a new measure, the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI). The CMDI coalesces metrics from primary and secondary markets in real time, offering a unified measure to capture access to capital markets credit. The index correctly identifies periods of distress and predicts future realizations of commonly used measures of market functioning, while the converse is not the case. We show that disruptions in access to corporate bond markets have an economically material, statistically significant impact on the real economy, even ...
Report
The Long and Short of It: The Post-Crisis Corporate CDS Market
We establish key stylized facts about the post-crisis evolution of trading and pricing of credit default swaps. Using supervisory contract-level data, we document that dealers become net buyers of credit protection starting in the second half of 2014, both through reducing the amount of protection they sell in the single-name market and through switching to buying protection in the index market. More generally, we argue that considering simultaneous positions in different types of credit derivatives is crucial for understanding institutions? participation decisions and how these decisions ...
Journal Article
An Introduction to Web3 with Implications for Financial Services
Web3 is used to describe the next iteration of the internet in which decentralized services are automated on blockchains. This paper describes the elements of Web3 including blockchains and tokens. It describes the largest decentralized finance protocols and some specific services where blockchain and tokens can be used. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some regulatory challenges.
Report
Information acquisition and financial intermediation
Informational advantages of specialists relative to households lead to disagreement between the two in an intermediated market. Although households can acquire additional signals to reduce the informational asymmetry, the additional information is costly, making it rational for households to limit the accuracy of the signals they observe. I show that this leads the equity capital constraint to bind more frequently, making the asset prices in the economy more volatile unconditionally. When disagreement between households and specialists is high, however, return volatility decreases. I find ...
Report
Counterparty risk in material supply contracts
This paper explores the sources of counterparty risk in material supply relationships. Using long-term supply contracts collected from SEC filings, we test whether three sources of counterparty risk?financial exposure, product quality risk, and redeployability risk?are priced in the equity returns of linked firms. Our results show that equity holders require compensation for exposure to all three sources of risk. Specifically, offering trade credit to counterparties and investing in relationship-specific assets increase the firm?s exposure to counterparty risk. Further, we show that contracts ...
Working Paper
Identity, Identification and Identifiers : The Global Legal Entity Identifier System
Identity is a critical concept in the rational interactions of any set of objects involving subject-object relationships. The objects must be distinguished according to some framework in order for such relationships to have meaning. In the world of economic systems, relationships such as ownership and responsibility require specific parties to be fixed with a high degree of certainty. This need is particularly strong in financial markets, where transactions can take place in nanoseconds. This paper discusses a particular framework for defining economic actors, the Global Legal Entity ...
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
The scarcity value of Treasury collateral: Repo market effects of security-specific supply and demand factors
In the special collateral repo market, forward agreements are security-specific, which may magnify demand and supply effects. We quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the impact of security-specific demand and supply factors on the repo rates of all outstanding U.S. Treasury securities. We find an economically and statistically significant scarcity premium. This scarcity effect is quite persistent, passes through to Treasury market prices, and explains a significant portion of the flow-effects of LSAP programs, providing additional evidence for the scarcity channel ...