Using survey data on secured funding arrangements provided by broker–dealers for their clients—a class of contracts that includes bilateral repo—we document that financing rates, collateral haircuts, lending maturities, and position limits move strongly together over time and across asset classes. Liquidity of the underlying securities, as opposed to their volatility or credit risk, is the main driver of this behavior, with dealer balance-sheet constraints also playing a role in the funding of less-liquid security types. A simple model of dealer–client interaction rationalizes these findings. Instrumenting with changes in market conventions, we find that funding conditions had little effect on cash securities markets between 2011 and 2019, but the tightening of terms during the market stress of early 2020 likely impaired liquidity and reduced asset returns to some degree.

With risk-averse arbitrageurs and an effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal rates, nonlinear interactions among short-rate expectations, bond supply, and term premia emerge in equilibrium. These interactions, which are absent from affine models, help explain the observed behavior of the yield curve near the ELB, including evidence about unconventional monetary policy. The impact of both short-rate expectations and bond supply are attenuated at the ELB. However, in simulations of the post-crisis experience in the U.S., shocks to investors’ duration-risk exposures have much smaller effects than shocks to the anticipated path of short rates. The latter shocks matter, in part, because of the reduction in interest-rate volatility associated with a longer expected stay at the ELB—a novel channel of unconventional policy.

We provide results from an experiment designed to assess whether mandatory rotation and/or retention of auditors increases auditors' independence by reducing their willingness to issue reports biased in favor of management. Auditors' reporting is compared across the following four regimes: one that does not require either rotation or retention, a second that requires retention only, a third that requires rotation only, and a fourth that requires both rotation and retention. We find that the rotation requirements in the third and fourth regimes decreased auditor‐subjects' willingness to issue biased reports, relative to the two regimes in which rotation was not imposed. In these other two regimes, however, many manager‐subjects voluntarily retained the same auditor‐subjects over multi‐periods. While the long running interactions between manager‐ and auditor‐subjects resulted in more favorable reports by auditor‐subjects (a lower level of independence), the established relationships also induced manager‐subjects to make higher investments.

Band-pass filters are useful in a wide range of economic contexts. This paper develops a set of approximate band-pass filters and illustrates their application to measuring the business-cycle component of macroeconomic activity. Detailed comparisons are made with several alternative filters commonly used for extracting business-cycle components.

The Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) is a new Basel III liquidity requirement designed to limit funding risk arising from maturity mismatches between bank assets and liabilities. This study explains the NSFR and estimates this ratio for banks in 15 countries. Banks below the ratio need to increase stable sources of funding and to reduce assets requiring funding. The most cost-effective strategies to meet the NSFR are to increase holdings of higher-rated securities and to extend the maturity of wholesale funding. These changes reduce net interest margins by 70–88 basis points on average, or around 40% of their year-end 2009 values. Universal banks with diversified funding sources and high trading assets are penalized most by the NSFR.

We use the staggered deregulation of interstate banking in the U.S. to show that CEOs who have gained career experience at multiple banks are more likely to pursue acquisitions when competition intensifies. Acquisitions completed by these CEOs perform better than those led by CEOs whose career experience is confined to a single institution. Analyzing the sources of performance gains, we find that CEOs with greater across-bank experience are more effective at identifying and integrating dissimilar targets. Our findings cannot be explained by other formative CEO experiences or a CEO general ability. The results highlight the importance of externally versus internally acquired experience in explaining how managers respond to a competitive shock.

Widespread bank losses during the financial crisis have raised concerns that equity-based compensation for bank CEOs causes excessive risk-taking. Debt-based compensation, so-called inside debt, aligns the interests of CEOs with those of external creditors. We examine whether inside debt induces CEOs to pursue less risky acquisitions. Consistent with this, we show that acquisitions announced by CEOs with high inside debt incentives are associated with a wealth transfer from equity to debt holders. After the completion of a deal, banks where acquiring CEOs have high inside debt incentives display lower market measures of risk and lower loss exposures for taxpayers.