Financial Institutions

Post-2008 financial regulatory changes largely have been a failure. They have produced high compliance costs, while constructing regulatory mechanisms that are unlikely to achieve their intended objectives. Furthermore, financial regulation increasingly has adopted processes that are inconsistent with adherence to the rule of law, which not only threaten the fundamental norms on which our democracy is founded but also undermine the effectiveness of regulation.

This paper introduces a novel empirical approach to estimate the effects of an informational friction limiting the reallocation of credit after a shock to banks. Because lenders rely on private information when deciding which relationship to end, borrowers looking for a new lender are adversely selected. I show how to identify private information separately from information common to all lenders, but unobservable to the econometrician, by using bank shocks within a discrete-choice model of relationships. Applying this approach to the U.S.

The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards market timing or stock picking skills as immutable attributes of a manager or fund. Yet, measures of these skills appear to vary over the business cycle. This paper offers a rational explanation, arguing that timing and picking are tasks. A skilled manager can choose how much of each task to attend to. Using tools from the rational inattention literature, we show that in booms, a manger should pick stocks and in recessions, he should pay more attention to his market timing.

This paper investigates financial attention using novel panel data on daily investor online account logins. We find support for selective attention to portfolio information. Account logins fall by 9.5% after market declines. Investors also pay less attention when the VIX volatility index is high. The level of attention and the attention/return correlation are strongly related to investor demographics (gender, age) and financial position (wealth, holdings). Using a new statistical decomposition, we show how aggregate and individual household trading are related to investor attention.

Regulatory changes are transforming the multitrillion dollar swaps market from a network of bilateral contracts to one in which swaps are cleared through central counterparties (CCPs). The stability of the new framework depends on the CCPs’ resilience. Margin requirements are a CCP’s first line of defense against the default of a counterparty. To capture liquidity costs at default, margin requirements need to increase superlinearly in position size.

It is not every day that one is asked a question that is so critical to the sustenance and well-being of such a material percentage of the developed world.  Over the last century, it can be said that western society has evolved to incorporate the notion of a pension as an ideal. Just this past summer it was not inconceivable that Greece would leave the European Union. Why?