Staff working papers

We propose a novel theory of financial contagion. We study global coordination games of regime change in two regions with an initially uncertain correlation of regional fundamentals.

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification.

Following theory, we check that funding risk connects illiquidity, volatility and returns in the cross-section of stocks. We show that the illiquidity and volatility of stocks increase with funding shocks, while contemporaneous returns decrease with funding shocks.

Plain vanilla options have a single underlying asset and a single condition on the payoff at the expiration date. For this class of options, a well-known result of Duffie, Pan and Singleton (2000) shows how to invert the characteristic function to obtain a closed-form formula for their prices.

This paper studies how banks simultaneously manage the two sides of their balance sheet and its implications for bank risk taking and real economic activity. First, we analyze how changes in funding affect the supply of bank loans.

This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous investment projects and asymmetric information about the quality of securitized assets. I show that when retaining part of the risk, the issuer of securitized assets may credibly signal its quality.

Empirical work on the underlying causes of the recent dislocations in bank-intermediated trade finance has been limited by the poor availability of hard data. This paper analyzes the key determinants of bank-intermediated trade finance using a novel data set covering ten banking jurisdictions.

This paper studies the use of information for incentives and risk sharing in agency problems. When the principal is risk neutral or the outcome is contractible, risk sharing is unnecessary or completely taken care of by a contract on the outcome.

In this paper, a quarterly growth-accounting data set is built for the Canadian business sector with the top-down approach of Diewert and Yu (2012). Inputs and outputs are measured and used to estimate the quarterly total factor productivity (TFP).

We assess the motivations for changing capital controls and their effectiveness in India, a country with extensive and long-standing controls. We focus on the controls on foreign borrowing that can, in principle, be motivated by macroprudential concerns.