Abstract Financial institutions may be vulnerable to predatory short selling. When the stock of a financial institution is shorted aggressively, leverage constraints imposed by short-term creditors can force the institution to liquidate long-term investments at fire sale prices. For financial institutions that are sufficiently close to their leverage constraints, predatory short-selling equilibria coexist with no-liquidation equilibria (the vulnerability region) or may even be the unique equilibrium outcome (the doomed region). Increased coordination among short sellers expands the doomed region, where liquidation is the unique equilibrium. Our model provides a potential justification for temporary restrictions on short selling of vulnerable institutions and can be used to assess recent empirical evidence on short-sale bans.

ABSTRACT This address reviews macrofinance from the perspective of resilience. It argues for a shift in mindset, away from risk management toward resilience management. It proposes a new resilience measure, and contrasts micro‐ and macro‐resilience. It also classifies macrofinance models in first‐ (log‐linearized) and second‐generation models, and links the important themes of macrofinance to resilience.

The 2020 COVID-19 crisis can spur research on firms' corporate finance decisions and their macroeconomic implications, similar to the wave of important research on banking and household finance triggered by the 2008 financial crisis. What are the relevant corporate finance mechanisms in this crisis? Modeling dynamics and timing considerations are likely important, as is integrating corporate financing considerations into modern quantifiable macroeconomics models. Recent empirical work, including articles in this special issue, on the drag from debt in the COVID-19 crisis provides a first glimpse into the new research agenda.

A reduction in in ation can fuel run-ups in housing prices if people suer from money illusion. For example, investors who decide whether to rent or buy a house by simply comparing monthly rent and mortgage payments do not take into account the fact that in ation lowers future real mortgage costs. We decompose the price-rent ratio into a rational component -meant to capture the "proxy eect" and risk premia -and an implied mispricing. We nd that in ation and nominal interest rates explain a large share of the time-series variation of the mispricing, and that the tilt eect is very unlikely to rationalize this nding.

ABSTRACT Why do some firms, especially financial institutions, finance themselves so short‐term? We show that extreme reliance on short‐term financing may be the outcome of a maturity rat race : a borrower may have an incentive to shorten the maturity of an individual creditor's debt contract because this dilutes other creditors. In response, other creditors opt for shorter maturity contracts as well. This dynamic toward short maturities is present whenever interim information is mostly about the probability of default rather than the recovery in default. For borrowers that cannot commit to a maturity structure, equilibrium financing is inefficiently short‐term.

Abstract This paper finds noninterest income is positively correlated with the total systemic risk for U.S. banks. Decomposing total systemic risk into three components, we find that noninterest income is positively related to a bank’s tail risk, positively related to a bank’s interconnectedness risk, and an insignificantly related to a bank’s exposure to macroeconomic and finance factors. We also find that noninterest income is more volatile and negatively related to interest income. Finally, we find trading and other noninterest income to be positively correlated with systemic risk. Other noninterest income, compared with trading income, has a slightly larger economic impact. (JEL G01, G18, G20, G21, G32, G38) Received October 31, 2019; editorial decision February 3, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul.

The price of a safe asset reflects not only the expected discounted future cash flows but also future service flows, since retrading allows partial insurance of idiosyncratic risk in an incomplete markets setting. This lowers the issuers’ interest burden. As idiosyncratic risk rises during recessions, so does the value of the service flows bestowing the safe asset with a negative β. The resulting exorbitant privilege resolves government debt valuation puzzles and allows the government to run a permanent (primary) deficit without ever paying back its debt, but the government faces a debt Laffer curve.

ABSTRACT This paper documents that hedge funds did not exert a correcting force on stock prices during the technology bubble. Instead, they were heavily invested in technology stocks. This does not seem to be the result of unawareness of the bubble: Hedge funds captured the upturn, but, by reducing their positions in stocks that were about to decline, avoided much of the downturn. Our findings question the efficient markets notion that rational speculators always stabilize prices. They are consistent with models in which rational investors may prefer to ride bubbles because of predictable investor sentiment and limits to arbitrage.

Is credit expansion a sign of desirable financial deepening or the prelude to an inevitable bust? We study this question in modern US data using a structural VAR model of 10 monthly frequency variables, identified by heteroskedasticity. Negative reduced-form responses of output to credit growth are caused by endogenous monetary policy response to credit expansion shocks. On average, credit and output growth remain positively associated. “Financial stress” shocks to credit spreads cause declines in output and credit levels. Neither credit aggregates nor spreads provide much advance warning of the 2008–2009 crisis, but spreads improve within-crisis forecasts. (JEL C51, E23, E31, E43, E44, E52, G01)

Abstract This article proposes a welfare criterion for economies in which agents have heterogeneously distorted beliefs. Instead of taking a stand on whose belief is correct, our criterion asserts that an allocation is belief-neutral efficient (inefficient) if it is efficient (inefficient) under any convex combination of agents’ beliefs. Although this criterion gives an incomplete ranking of social allocations, it can identify positive- and negative-sum speculation driven by conflicting beliefs in a broad range of economic environments.