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Rollover risk as market discipline: a two-sided inefficiency
Why does the market discipline that financial intermediaries face seem too weak during booms and too strong during crises? This paper shows in a general equilibrium setting that rollover risk as a disciplining device is effective only if all intermediaries face purely idiosyncratic risk. However, if assets are correlated, a two-sided inefficiency arises: Good aggregate states have intermediaries taking excessive risks, while bad aggregate states suffer from costly fire sales. The driving force behind this inefficiency is an amplifying feedback loop between asset values and market discipline. ...
Working Paper
Wholesale Banking and Bank Runs in Macroeconomic Modeling of Financial Crises
There has been considerable progress in developing macroeconomic models of banking crises. However, most of this literature focuses on the retail sector where banks obtain deposits from households. In fact, the recent financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession featured a disruption of wholesale funding markets, where banks lend to one another. Accordingly, to understand the financial crisis as well as to draw policy implications, it is essential to capture the role of wholesale banking. The objective of this paper is to characterize a model that can be seen as a natural extension of ...
Working Paper
International Reserves and Rollover Risk
We study the optimal accumulation of international reserves in a quantitative model of sovereign default with long-term debt and a risk-free asset. Keeping higher levels of reserves provides a hedge against rollover risk, but this is costly because using reserves to pay down debt allows the government to reduce sovereign spreads. Our model, parameterized to mimic salient features of a typical emerging economy, can account for a significant fraction of the holdings of international reserves, and the larger accumulation of both debt and reserves in periods of low spreads and high income. We ...