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Working Paper
Financial intermediaries, markets, and growth.
We build a model in which financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against a liquidity shock. Households can also invest directly on a financial market if they pay a cost. In equilibrium, the ability of intermediaries to share risk is constrained by the market. This can be beneficial because intermediaries invest less in the productive technology when they provide more risk-sharing. Our model predicts that bank-oriented economies should grow slower than more market-oriented economies, which is consistent with some recent empirical evidence. We show that the mix of ...
Report
Macro news, risk-free rates, and the intermediary: customer orders for thirty-year Treasury futures
Customer order flow correlates with permanent price changes in equity and non-equity markets. We examine macro news events in the thirty-year Treasury futures market to identify causality from customer flow to risk-free rates. We remove the positive feedback trading effect and establish that, in the fifteen minutes subsequent to the news, intermediaries rely on customer orders to determine a substantial part of the announcement?s effect on risk-free rates?about one-third relative to the instantaneous effect. Intermediaries appear to benefit from privately observing informed customers, since ...
Report
The changing nature of financial intermediation and the financial crisis of 2007-09
The financial crisis of 2007-09 highlighted the changing role of financial institutions and the growing importance of the "shadow banking system," which grew out of the securitization of assets and the integration of banking with capital market developments. This trend was most pronounced in the United States, but it also had a profound influence on the global financial system as a whole. In a market-based financial system, banking and capital market developments are inseparable, and funding conditions are tied closely to fluctuations in the leverage of market-based financial intermediaries. ...
Report
Monetary cycles, financial cycles, and the business cycle
One of the most robust stylized facts in macroeconomics is the forecasting power of the term spread for future real activity. The economic rationale for this forecasting power usually appeals to expectations of future interest rates, which affect the slope of the term structure. In this paper, we propose a possible causal mechanism for the forecasting power of the term spread, deriving from the balance sheet management of financial intermediaries. When monetary tightening is associated with a flattening of the term spread, it reduces net interest margin, which in turn makes lending less ...
Conference Paper
Taking intermediation seriously
Speech
Some observations and lessons from the crisis
Remarks at the Third Annual Connecticut Bank and Trust Company Economic Outlook Breakfast, Hartford, Connecticut.
Speech
Regulatory reform of the global financial system
Remarks hosted by the Institute of Regulation & Risk North Asia, Hong Kong
Discussion Paper
Private money and reserve management in a random-matching model
In this paper, we develop a model of money and reserve-holding banks. We allow for private liabilities to circulate as media of exchange in a random-matching framework. Some individuals, which we identify as banks, are endowed with a technology to issue private notes and to keep reserves with a clearinghouse. Bank liabilities are redeemed according to a stochastic process that depends on the endogenous trades. We find conditions under which note redemptions act as a force that is sufficient to stabilize note issue by the banking sector.
Working Paper
Financing development: the role of information costs
To address how technological progress in financial intermediation affects the economy, a costly state verification framework is embedded into the standard growth model. The framework has two novel ingredients. First, firms differ in the risk/return combinations that they offer. Second, the efficacy of monitoring depends upon the amount of resources invested in the activity. A financial theory of firm size results. Undeserving firms are over financed, deserving ones under funded. Technological advance in intermediation leads to more capital accumulation and a redirection of funds away from ...
Working Paper
Quantifying the impact of financial development on economic development
How important is financial development for economic development? A costly state verification model of financial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match facts about the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the firm-size distribution for the years 1974 and 2004. It is then used to study the international data, using cross-country interest-rate spreads and per-capita GDP. The analysis suggests a country like Uganda could increase its output by 140 to 180 percent if it could adopt the world?s best practice in the financial sector. Still, ...