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Working Paper
Information Externalities, Funding Liquidity, and Fire Sales
We develop a theory of learning in a model of fire sales and collateralized debt to study how beliefs about fundamentals are shaped by market conditions. Agents exchange short-term debt contracts to invest in a long-term risky asset, and receive shocks to the opportunity cost of funds (cost shocks) and news about the fundamental of the asset, both of which are private information. Asset prices play a dual role of clearing markets and conveying agents' private information, but markets are informationally inefficient: Agents can partially, but never fully, infer their counterparties' private ...
Working Paper
Settlement Speed and Financial Stability
This paper investigates how settlement speed affects financial stability in payment networks, accounting for netting benefits, liquidity costs, and counterparty risks. Faster settlement reduces crisis likelihood but amplifies crisis severity. The net welfare effect depends on network topology and proximity to default threshold points—settlement times at which the number of defaulting agents changes discontinuously. The optimal settlement speed is not universal: it depends on payment network structure and liquidity conditions. Deteriorating liquidity shifts the optimum toward slower ...
Working Paper
Collateral Reuse and Financial Stability
The isolated effects of collateral reuse on financial stability are ambiguous and understudied. While greater collateral reuse can guarantee more payments with fewer assets, it can also increase the exposure to potential drops in collateral price. To analyze these tradeoffs, we develop a financial network model with endogenous asset pricing, multiple equilibria, and equilibrium selection. We find that more collateral reuse decreases the likelihood of the worst equilibrium (crisis), with varying effects depending on the network structure. Therefore, collateral reuse can unambiguously improve ...
Working Paper
Financial Stability Implications of CBDC
A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a form of digital money that is denominated in the national unit of account, constitutes a direct liability of the central bank, and can be distinguished from other central bank liabilities. We examine the positive and negative implications for financial stability of a CBDC under different design options. We base our analysis on the lessons derived from historical case studies as well as on analytical frameworks useful to characterize the mechanisms through which a CBDC can affect financial stability. We further discuss various policy tools that can ...
Working Paper
Rewiring repo
We develop a model of the repo market with strategic interactions among dealers who compete for funding in a decentralized over-the-counter market and have access to a centrally cleared interdealer market. We show that such “wiring” of the repo market combined with imperfect competition in dealer funding results in market inefficiencies and instability. The model allows us to disentangle supply and demand factors, and we use these factors to estimate supply and demand elasticities. Our estimates suggest that the instability of the market in September 2019 was driven by a large supply ...
Working Paper
Contagion in Debt and Collateral Markets
This paper investigates contagion in financial networks through both debt and collateral markets. We find that the role of collateral is mitigating counterparty exposures and reducing contagion but has a phase transition property. Contagion can change dramatically depending on the amount of collateral relative to the debt exposures. When there is an abundance of collateral (leverage is low), then collateral can fully cover debt exposures, and the network structure does not matter. When there is an adequate amount of collateral (leverage is moderate), then collateral can mitigate counterparty ...