While a rapidly growing body of research underscores the influence of social capital on financial decisions and economic developments, objective data-based measurements of social capital are lacking. We introduce average credit scores as an indicator of a community's social capital and present...

This paper answers two questions that help those analyzing FinTech understand its origins, growth, and potential to affect financial stability. First, it answers the question of why "FinTech" is happening right now. Many of the technologies that support FinTech innovations are not new, but...

We construct a new measure of mortgage credit availability that describes the maximum amount obtainable by a borrower of given characteristics. We estimate this "loan frontier" using mortgage originations data from 2001 to 2014 and show that it reflects a binding borrowing constraint. Our...

In electronic, liquid markets, traders frequently change their positions. The distribution of these trader position changes carries important information about liquidity demand in the market. From this distribution of trader position-changes, we construct a marketwide measure for intraday...

The convention in calculating trading costs in corporate bond markets is to assume that dealers provide liquidity to non-dealers (customers) and calculate average bid-ask spreads that customers pay dealers. We show that customers often provide liquidity in corporate bond markets, and thus,...

We study the term structure of default-free interest rates in a sticky-price model with an occasionally binding effective lower bound (ELB) constraint on interest rates and recursive preferences. The ELB constraint induces state-dependency in the dynamics of term premiums by affecting...

We investigate how market participants price and manage counterparty risk in the post-crisis period using confidential trade repository data on single-name credit default swap (CDS) transactions. We find that counterparty risk has a modest impact on the pricing of CDS contracts, but a large...

Among growing concerns about potential financial stability risks posed by the asset management industry, herding has been considered as an important risk amplification channel. In this paper, we examine the extent to which institutional investors herd in their trading of U.S. corporate bonds and...

We use exchange-traded options to identify risks relevant to capital structure adjustments in firms. These forward-looking market-based risk measures provide significant explanatory power in predicting net leverage changes in excess of accounting data. They matter most during contractionary...

We document strong U.S. stock and bond return predictability from several macroeconomic volatility series before 1982, and a significant decline in this predictability during the Great Moderation. These findings are robust to alternative empirical specifications and out-of-sample tests. We...