Research Lab

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a proposal to require some companies to disclose information relating to the risks they face from climate change. But the agency is coming under pressure to scrap or water down the proposal because of a recent Supreme Court decision.

Banks strategically choose and dynamically restructure deposits and nondeposit debt in response to the minimum requirements on total capital and tangible equity. We derive the optimal strategic liability structure and show that it minimizes the protection for deposits conditional on capital requirements. Although, given any liability structure, regulators can set capital requirements high enough to remove the incentive for risk substitution, the strategic response to the capital requirements always preserves this incentive.

Equity investors have been shifting away from actively managed funds to passive strategies for decades. Passification, if that is a word, has been slower to take off in fixed-income strategies, though.

We investigate banks' benefits and costs of having access to LOLR. Integrating novel data sets we estimate the borrowing capacities of euro area banks at the ECB. Controlling for ratings, we find that banks with more fragile funding are likely to borrow more from the ECB during the great financial and euro area sovereign debt crises. We develop a dynamic model of a bank and calibrate it to our empirical estimates. A bank with access to LOLR has higher equity value and makes larger investments in new loans, but it is more leveraged, pays more dividends and issues less equity.

Working from home resulted in a sharp contraction in office demand. We built a valuation model to find that the office stock lost about 45% in value. More for low-quality buildings and in cities with a larger IT sector and less for trophy buildings. We discuss the implications for mortgage lenders and the vitality of cities.

Although businesses and investors stand to make a lot of money if they can properly navigate the new risk environment, no one seems to have a good explanation for why we are where we are. Climate risks, in particular, have been systematically underestimated, and thus mispriced, for decades.

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 was the most serious since the Great Depression and severely impacted the global economy. Yet more than 10 years after the crisis, we still lack clear understanding of its cause. Accounts point to some elements of fact but tend to be fragmented and sometimes contradictory. More than ever, we need an account that can put the puzzle pieces together and help us understand how to prevent a crisis like this from happening again.