Knowledge that Transforms

Recent studies provide strong evidence that credit default swap (CDS) markets play a leading role in information intermediation. This paper proposes a model to rationalize the information transmission mechanism between the CDS and equity markets. In our model, informed traders with an informational advantage obtained from monitoring credit markets engage in capital structure arbitrage and trade strategically to exploit mispricings between individual stocks and CDS. In line with our model’s prediction, our empirical results provide evidence of a contemporaneous channel transmitting structural CDS shocks to equities. A positive shock to CDS decreases stock returns contemporaneously and over the long run. This credit-to-equity channel dominates the reverse transmission channel from stocks to CDS. Robustness tests confirm the role of the CDS market as a preferred venue for informed trading, independently of credit rating events or business sectors.

Firms’ currency exposure can lead to financial distress and macroeconomic instability. Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives provided by financial institutions are the primary risk management tool for nonfinancial firms. However, the role of financial institutions in providing these derivatives remains underexplored in the literature. Using novel loan and derivatives microdata, we examine how lending relationships influence access to foreign exchange (FX) OTC derivatives. We find that firms are more likely to trade derivatives with their lending relationship banks than with other banks, with a stronger preference for their main lender. These effects are more pronounced for small firms and first-time derivatives users, highlighting how lending relationships reduce informational and search costs, thereby facilitating access to hedging. Additionally, derivatives prices are lower when traded with the firms’ main lender and lenders providing loans in foreign currency, indicating that banks encourage hedging to reduce risks in their loan portfolios.

We present a model of the maturity of a bank’s uninsured debt. The bank borrows to invest in a long-term asset with endogenous and nonverifiable risk. This moral hazard problem leads to excessive risk-taking. Short-term debt may have a disciplining effect on risk-taking, but it may lead to overborrowing and/or inefficient liquidation. We characterize the conditions under which short- and long-term debt are feasible, and show circumstances where only short-term debt is feasible and where short-term debt dominates long-term debt when both are feasible. The results are consistent with some features of the period preceding the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.

We examine whether U.S. banks whose uninsured deposits were subject to greater risk of loss prior to the March 2023 banking crisis used institutional mechanisms to expand their deposit insurance or accessed government funding after the crisis. We construct a bank-level measure of pre-crisis uninsured depositor risk incorporating financial statements, unrealized security losses, and estimates of unrealized loan losses that predicts a bank’s post-crisis loss of uninsured deposits. We find that riskier small and midsize banks tended to utilize reciprocal, sweep, and brokered deposits, but not listing service deposits, to attract more insured deposits. Riskier small and midsize banks temporarily accessed FHLB advances while only risky midsize banks borrowed from the Discount Window. Risk did not predict banks’ use of Fed BTFP funding. Riskier banks, particularly small and midsize ones, paid relatively higher interest rates on many types of deposits.

We use bank-firm matched data to study how the capital buffers that large U.S. banks must satisfy to “pass” the Federal Reserve's stress tests impact banks’ lending and firms’ loan volumes, overall debt, investment, and employment. We find that larger stress-test capital buffers lead to reductions in banks’ lending, modest increases in loan rates and spreads, and reductions in new loan originations. However, we do not find an impact of higher capital buffers on firms’ overall debt, investment, and employment, suggesting that firms find other credit sources to substitute for the reduction in loans from banks that participate in the stress tests.

Banks take costly actions (such as capitalization, liquidity holding, and advanced risk management) to avoid financial distress and creditor runs. While directly affecting a bank’s risks, such actions can also signal the bank’s fundamentals. We show that prudential regulations have an informational impact: sufficiently tight regulations can eliminate inefficient separating equilibria in banks’ signaling game, thereby changing the information available to creditors and their incentives to run. When accounting for this informational impact, tightening regulations can improve banks’ payoffs and be considered bank incentive-compatible. We support this novel, information-based rationale for regulations with evidence from the US liquidity requirement.

Low monetary policy rates lower the cost of capital for firms, thereby spurring productive investment. Low interest rates however can also induce the private sector to enter into risky carry trades when they imply that the earned carry more than offsets liquidity risk. Such carry trades and productive investment compete for funds, so much so that the former may crowd out the latter. Below an endogenous lower bound, monetary easing generates only limited capital expenditures that come at the cost of large and destabilizing financial risk-taking. Absent the ability to regulate carry trades, monetary easing must be complemented with a restrictive emergency-lending policy in the form of higher lending rates so as to discourage risk-taking by relatively illiquid firms. Monetary easing, tepid investment response, and rollover risk for liquid firms then arise jointly (and optimally) in equilibrium.

Lenders’ simultaneous equity holdings introduce conflicts of interest among members of syndicated loans. We argue that lenders address such within-syndicate conflicts with financial covenant design to improve contracting efficiency. We show that loans with higher conflicts rely less on performance-based covenants, which serve as tripwires to facilitate ex-post control transfer and require coordination among syndicate members. Instead, high-conflict loans rely more on capital-based covenants to align shareholder-creditor interest ex-ante and incentivize shareholder monitoring. Overall, these results suggest that such conflicts can reduce capital flexibility and renegotiation efficiency for the borrowers.