Knowledge that Transforms

We empirically examine the hypothesis that access to deposits with inelastic rates (core deposits) permits a bank to make contractual agreements with borrowers that are infeasible if the bank must pay market rates for its funds. Access to core deposits insulates a bank's costs of funds from exogenous shocks, allowing the bank to insulate its borrowers against exogenous credit shocks. We find that, controlling for competitive conditions in loan markets, banks funded more heavily with core deposits provide more smoothing of loan rates in response to exogenous changes in aggregate credit risk. This suggests that a distinctive feature of bank lending is that firms and banks form multiperiod lending relationships in which loans need not break even period by period. It also partially explains the declining share of bank loans (or near substitutes for bank loans) in credit markets. As banks have increasingly been forced to pay market rates for an increasing share of their funds, multiperiod relationship lending has become increasingly less feasible and bank loans have lost some of their comparative advantage over securities. Our results suggest that access to core deposits is one of the foundations of relationship lending.

I consider the costs and benefits of introducing a new security in a standard framework where uninformed traders with hedging needs interact with risk-averse informed traders, Opening a new market may make everyboby worse off, even when the new security is traded in equilibrium, This article emphasizes cross-market links between hedging and speculative demands: risk-averse arbitrageurs can use the new market to hedge their positions in the preexisting security, which cart affect liquidity in the old market. More generally, the availability of such hedging opportunities will influence the strategies to which traders will direct resources.

Constraints on the gamma of the replicating portfolio, constraints on portfolio amounts, and constraints on the number of shares are also considered.

A number of recent papers have used nonparametric density estimation or nonparametric regression to study the instantaneous spot interest rate, and to test term structure models. However, little is known about the performance of these methods when applied to persistent time-series, such as U.S. interest rates. This paper uses the Vasicek [1977] model to study the performance of kernel density estimates of the ergodic distribution of the instantaneous spot rate. The model's tractability allows me to analyze the MISE of the kernel estimate as a function of persistence, variance of the ergodic distribution, span of the data, sampling frequency, and kernel bandwidth. Our principle result is that persistence has an important impact on optimal bandwidth selection and on finite sample performance. We also find that sampling the data more frequently has little effect on estimator quality. We also examine one of Ait-Sahalia's [1996a] new nonparametric tests of parametric continuous-time Markov ...

In this article we study the effects of transaction costs on asset prices. We assume an overlapping generations economy with a riskless, liquid bond, and many risky stocks carrying proportional transaction costs. We obtain stock prices and turnover in closed form. Surprisingly, a stock's price may increase in transaction costs, and a more frequently traded stock may be less adversely affected by an increase in transaction costs. Calculations based on the “marginal” investor overestimate the effects of transaction costs. For realistic parameter values, transaction costs have very small effects on stock prices but large effects on turnover.