Collateral plays a very important role in financial markets. Without easy access to high-quality collateral, dealers and market participants would find it more costly to trade, with a negative impact on market liquidity and the real economy through increased financing costs. The role of...

A natural liquidity mismatch emerges when liquid exchange traded funds (ETFs) hold relatively illiquid assets. We provide a theory and empirical evidence showing that this liquidity mismatch can reduce market efficiency and increase the fragility of these ETFs. We focus on corporate bond ETFs...

In both the subprime crisis and the euro-area crisis, regulators imposed bans on short sales, aimed mainly at preventing stock price turbulence from destabilizing financial institutions. Contrary to the regulators' intentions, financial institutions whose stocks were banned experienced greater...

Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees that resemble out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to tail risk. Using the U.S. life insurance industry as a laboratory, we present a model in which variable annuity (VA) guarantees and associated hedging operate within the regulatory...

This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Micro-database Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a...

While some credit booms are followed by economic underperformance, many are not. Can lending standards help separate good credit booms from bad credit booms contemporaneously? To observe lending standards internationally, I use information from primary debt capital markets. I construct the...

It is challenging to explain the collapse in the price of subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) during the Financial Crisis of 2008, using the existing models of fire-sale. I present amodel to demonstrate that fire-sales may happen evenwhen there is a relatively sizable pool of natural...

Brunnermeier et al. (2017) propose the introduction of sovereign bond-backed securities (SBBS) in the euro area. That and other papers assess how the securitisation would insulate senior bond holders from actual default-related losses. This paper generalises the assessment by using the VAR-based...

The risk reducing benefits of the sovereign bond-backed security (SBBS) proposal of Brunnermeier et al (2011, 2016, 2017) have been assessed in terms of the likely losses that different kinds of holders would suffer under simulated default scenarios. However, the effects of mark-to-market losses...

There are competing arguments about the likely effects of Sovereign Bond-Backed Securitisation on the liquidity of sovereign bond markets. By analysing hedging and diversification opportunities, this paper shows that positive liquidity spillovers would dominate or at least constrain the extent...