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Discussion Paper
Are Asset Managers Vulnerable to Fire Sales?
According to conventional wisdom, an open-ended investment fund that has a floating net asset value (NAV) and no leverage will never experience a run and hence never have to fire-sell assets. In that view, a decline in the value of the fund’s assets will just lead to a commensurate and automatic decline in the fund’s equity—end of story. In this post, we argue that the conventional wisdom is incomplete and then explore some of the systemic risk consequences of investment funds’ vulnerabilities to fire-sale spillovers.
Report
Tracing Bank Runs in Real Time
We use high-frequency interbank payments data to trace deposit flows in March 2023 and identify twenty-two banks that suffered a run, significantly more than the two that failed but fewer than the number that experienced large negative stock returns. The runs were driven by a small number of large depositors and were related to weak fundamentals. However, we find evidence for the importance of coordination because run banks were disproportionately publicly traded and many banks with similarly bad fundamentals did not suffer a run. Banks survived the run by borrowing new funds and raising ...
Working Paper
Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?
Stablecoins and money market funds both seek to provide investors with safe, money-like assets but are vulnerable to runs in times of stress. In this paper, we investigate similarities and differences between the two, comparing investor behavior during the stablecoin runs of 2022 and 2023 to investor behavior during the money market fund runs of 2008 and 2020. We document that, similar to money market fund investors, stablecoin investors engage in flight-to-safety, with net flows from riskier to safer stablecoins during run periods. However, whereas in money market funds run risk has ...
Report
The term structure of the price of variance risk
We empirically investigate the term structure of variance risk pricing and how it varies over time. We estimate the aversion to variance risk in a stochastic-volatility option pricing model separately for options of different maturities and find that variance risk pricing decreases in absolute value with maturity but remains significantly different from zero up to the nine-month horizon. We find consistent non-parametric results using estimates from Sharpe ratios of delta-neutral straddles. We further show that the term structure is downward sloping both during normal times and in times of ...
Discussion Paper
Have Dealers' Strategies in the GCF Repo® Market Changed?
In a previous post, “Mapping and Sizing the U.S. Repo Market,” our colleagues described the structure of the U.S. repurchase agreement (repo) market. In this post, we consider whether recent regulatory changes have changed the behavior of securities broker-dealers, who play a significant role in repo markets. We focus on the General Collateral Finance (GCF) Repo market, an interdealer market primarily using U.S. Treasury and agency securities as collateral. We find that some dealers use GCF Repo as a substantial source of funding for their inventories, while others primarily use GCF Repo ...
Report
Fragility of Safe Asset Markets
In March 2020, safe asset markets experienced surprising and unprecedented price crashes. We explain how strategic investor behavior can create such market fragility in a model with investors valuing safety, investors valuing liquidity, and constrained dealers. While safety investors and liquidity investors can interact symbiotically with offsetting trades in times of stress, liquidity investors’ strategic interaction harbors the potential for self-fulfilling fragility. When the market is fragile, standard flight-to-safety can have a destabilizing effect and trigger a “dash-for-cash” by ...
Report
Cyber Risk and the U.S. Financial System: A Pre-Mortem Analysis
We model how a cyber attack may be amplified through the U.S. financial system, focusing on the wholesale payments network. We estimate that the impairment of any of the five most active U.S. banks will result in significant spillovers to other banks, with 38 percent of the network affected on average. The impact varies and can be larger on particular days and geographies. When banks respond to uncertainty by liquidity hoarding, the potential impact in forgone payment activity is dramatic, reaching more than 2.5 times daily GDP. In a reverse stress test, interruptions originating from banks ...
Discussion Paper
Mission Almost Impossible: Developing a Simple Measure of Pass-Through Efficiency
Short-term credit markets have evolved significantly over the past ten years in response to unprecedentedly high levels of reserve balances, a host of regulatory changes, and the introduction of new monetary policy tools. Have these and other developments affected the way monetary policy shifts “pass through” to money markets and, ultimately, to households and firms? In this post, we discuss a new measure of pass‑through efficiency, proposed by economists Darrell Duffie and Arvind Krishnamurthy at the Federal Reserve’s 2016 Jackson Hole summit.
Discussion Paper
In a Relationship: Evidence of Underwriters’ Efforts to Stabilize the Share Price in the Facebook IPO
Stocks are usually offered in initial public offerings (IPOs) at a discount, leading to large first-day IPO returns. When there is a risk of a negative initial return, underwriters are known to actively support the aftermarket price of a stock through buying activities. In this post, we look at the trading book for Facebook stock on May 18, 2012, the day of its highly anticipated IPO. Using what we call a ?large integer?price bid? identification assumption to indirectly infer which investors are bidding, we find evidence of significant trading by underwriters seeking to stabilize the stock?s ...
Discussion Paper
What Makes a Bank Stable? A Framework for Analysis
One of the major roles of banks and other financial intermediaries is to channel funds from savings into valuable projects. In doing so, banks engage in “liquidity and maturity transformation,” since they finance long-term, illiquid projects while funding themselves with short-term, liquid liabilities. By performing this important role, banks expose themselves to the risk of runs: If depositors or other short-term creditors worry about their claims, they may withdraw funds en masse and cause the bank to fail. The recent financial crisis once again highlighted the fragility associated with ...