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SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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We develop a model of financial crises with both a financial amplification mechanism, via frictional intermediation, and a role for sentiment, via time-varying beliefs about an illiquidity state. We confront the model with data on…
This paper studies the optimal design of corporate taxes when firms have private information about future investment opportunities and face financial constraints. A government whose goal is to efficiently raise a given amount of…
Violations of no-arbitrage conditions measure the shadow cost of intermediary constraints. Intermediary asset pricing and intertemporal hedging together imply that the risk of these constraints tightening is priced. We describe a…
We evaluate the quantitative effect of ESG divestitures on the cost of capital of affected firms. We derive a simple expression for the change in the cost of capital as a function of three inputs: (1) the fraction of socially…
How can we assess whether macro-prudential regulations are having their intended effects? If these regulations are optimal, their marginal benefit of addressing externalities should equal their marginal cost of distorting risk-…
Decisions take time, and the time taken to reach a decision is likely to be informative about the cost of more precise judgments. We formalize this insight in the context of a dynamic model of optimal evidence accumulation. We…
The Federal Reserve’s “balance-sheet normalization,” which reduced aggregate reserves between 2017 and September 2019, increased repo rate distortions, the severity of rate spikes, and intraday payment timing stresses, culminating…
This paper analyzes bond convenience yields in a currency union. The intertemporal government budget constraint requires member countries’ bond convenience yields and default spreads to adjust in response to shocks to their…
We introduce convenience yields on dollar bonds into an incomplete-markets equilibrium model of exchange rates and interest rates. The convenience yield enters as a stochastic wedge in the Euler equation for exchange rate…
We show that lenders face more uncertainty when assessing default risk of historically under-served groups in US credit markets and that this information disparity is a quantitatively important driver of inefficient and unequal…
This paper analyzes non-fundamental volatility and efficiency in a class of large games (including e.g. linear-quadratic beauty contests) that feature strategic interaction and endogenous information acquisition. We adopt the…
Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. Faced with lower returns on financial wealth, households with high levels of financial wealth must increase savings…
Using MBA textbook finance, we look at three simple examples to illustrate why the r-g measure of the fiscal cost of deficits is incomplete. We start by considering the case of risky government debt. Second, we consider the case…
We study a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the…
When debt is priced fairly, governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government decides to fully insure bondholders by manufacturing risk-free debt, then it cannot insure taxpayers against…
PRELIMINARY
This note presents a preliminary approach to the design of an across-the-curve credit spread index (AXI). The index is a measure of the recent average cost of wholesale unsecured debt funding for publicly…
We explain how the common practice of size-discovery trade detracts from overall financial market efficiency. At each of a series of size-discovery sessions, traders report their desired trades, generating allocations of the asset…
We develop a theory that links the U.S. dollar’s valuation in FX markets to foreign investors’ demand for U.S. safe assets. When the convenience yield that foreign investors derive from holding U.S. safe assets increases, the U.S…