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Working Paper
Passive Ownership and Short Selling
We exploit quasi-exogenous variation in passive ownership around the Russell 1000/2000 cutoff to explore the causal effects of passive ownership on the securities lending market. We find that passive ownership causes an increase in lendable supply and short interest, while lending fees remain largely unchanged. The utilization ratio—i.e., the ratio of short interest over lendable supply—goes up, implying that shorting demand increases more than lendable supply. We argue that this additional demand results from an increase in the quality of lendable supply as passive funds are less likely ...
Report
Reference guide to U.S. repo and securities lending markets
This paper is intended to serve as a reference guide on U.S. repo and securities lending markets. It begins by presenting the institutional structure, and then describes the market landscape, the role of the participants, and other characteristics, including how repo and securities lending activity has changed since the 2007-09 financial crisis. The paper then discusses vulnerabilities in the repo and short-term wholesale funding markets and the efforts to limit potential systemic risks. It next provides an overview of existing data sources on securities financing markets and highlights ...
Report
The use of collateral in bilateral repurchase and securities lending agreements
We use unique data from U.S. bank holding company-affiliated securities dealers to study the use of collateral in bilateral repurchase and securities lending agreements. Market participants? use of collateral differs substantially across asset classes: for U.S. Treasury securities transactions, we find that haircuts are large enough to provide full protection from default, whereas the same is not usually true for equities transactions. Further, although most of the equities in our sample are each associated with a unique haircut, most of the U.S. Treasury securities are each associated with ...
Report
A pilot survey of agent securities lending activity
This paper reports aggregate statistics on securities lending activity based on a recently concluded pilot data collection by staff from the Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Federal Reserve System, and staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In its annual reports, the Financial Stability Oversight Council identified a lack of data about securities lending activity as a priority for the Council. This pilot data collection was a step toward addressing this critical data need. The voluntary pilot collection included end-of-day loan-level data for three non-consecutive ...
Working Paper
Securities Financing and Asset Markets: New Evidence
This paper presents new evidence on bilateral securities financing based on the Federal Reserve's Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey, which was launched in the wake of the financial crisis to provide a window into this otherwise opaque market. The survey asks large broker-dealers about terms at which they fund client positions, and the demand for such funding, across several different collateral types. Within asset classes, reported changes in spreads, haircuts, and other financing terms move closely together, and we show that they also covary with the state of the underlying cash ...