Search Results
Working Paper
Inducing agents to report hidden trades: a theory of an intermediary
When contracts are unobserved, agents may have the incentive to promise the same asset to multiple counterparties and subsequently default. The author constructs an optimal mechanism that induces agents to reveal all their trades voluntarily. The mechanism allows agents to report every contract they enter, and it makes public the names of agents who have reached some prespecified position limit. In some cases, an agent's position limit must be higher than the number of contracts he enters in equilibrium. The mechanism has some features of a clearinghouse. ; Supersedes Working Paper 09-10
Journal Article
Asset mispricing, arbitrage, and volatility
Market efficiency remains a contentious topic among financial economists. The theoretical case for efficient markets rests on the notion of risk-free, cost-free arbitrage. In real markets, however, arbitrage is not risk-free or cost-free. In addition, the number of informed arbitrageurs and the supply of financial resources they have to invest in arbitrage strategies is limited. This article builds on an important recent model of arbitrage by professional traders who need?but lack?wealth of their own to trade. Professional abitrageurs must convince wealthy but uninformed investors to entrust ...
Journal Article
Economic theory and asset bubbles
The author summarizes what economic theory tells us about when asset price bubbles can occur and what the welfare implications are from bursting them. In some cases, bursting a bubble may make society worse off by exacerbating the market distortions that give rise to the bubble in the first place.
Speech
The economic outlook and the Fed's balance sheet: the issue of \"how\" versus \"when\"
Remarks at the Association for a Better New York Breakfast Meeting, Grand Hyatt, New York.
Journal Article
A perspective on liability management and bank risk
Working Paper
Interpreting the volatility smile: an examination of the information content of option prices
This paper evaluates how useful the information contained in options prices is for predicting future price movements of the underlying assets. We develop an improved semiparametric methodology for estimating risk-neutral probability density functions (PDFs), which allows for skewness and intertemporal variation in higher moments. We use this technique to estimate a daily time series of risk-neutral PDFs spanning the late 1980's through 1999, for S&P 500 futures, U.S. dollar/Japanese yen futures and U.S. dollar/deutsche mark futures, using options on these futures. For the foreign exchange ...
Journal Article
Gap management: managing interest rate risk in banks and thrifts
Journal Article
Swaps
Conference Paper
The relationship between returns to risky lending and Gap management