This article provides the causes and symptoms of special repo rates in a competitive market for repurchase agreements. A repo rate is, in effect, an interest rate on loans collateralized by a specific instrument. A 'special' is a repo rate significantly below prevailing market riskless interest rates. This article shows that specials can occur when those owning the collateral are inhibited, whether from legal or institutional requirements or from frictional costs, from supplying collateral into repurchase agreements. Specialness increases the equilibrium price for the underlying instrument by the present value of savings in borrowing costs associated with the repo specials.

This article presents a model for valuing claims subject to default by both contracting parties, such as swaps and forwards. With counterparties of different default risk, the promised cash flows of a swap are discounted by a switching discount rate that, at any given state and time, is equal to the discount rate of the counterparty for whom the swap is currently out of the money (that is, a liability). The impact of credit-risk asymmetry and of netting is presented through both theory and numerical examples, which include interest rate and currency swaps.

Empirical difficulties encountered by representative-consumer models are resolved in an economy with heterogeneity in the form of uninsurable, persistent, and heteroscedastic labor income shocks. Given the joint process of arbitrage-free asset prices, dividends, and aggregate income, satisfying a certain joint restriction, it is shown that this process is supported in the equilibrium of an economy with judiciously modeled income heterogeneity. The Euler equations of consumption in a representative-agent economy are replaced by a set of Euler equations that depend not only on the per capita consumption growth but also on the cross-sectional variance of the individual consumers' consumption growth.

ABSTRACT This article provides the causes and symptoms of special repo rates in a competitive market for repurchase agreements. A repo rate is, in effect, an interest rate on loans collateralized by a specific instrument. A “special” is a repo rate significantly below prevailing market riskless interest rates. This article shows that specials can occur when those owning the collateral are inhibited, whether from legal or institutional requirements or from frictional costs, from supplying collateral into repurchase agreements. Specialness increases the equilibrium price for the underlying instrument by the present value of savings in borrowing costs associated with the repo specials.

This article provides the causes and symptoms of special repo rates in a competitive market for repurchase agreements. A repo rate is, in effect, an interest rate on loans collateralized by a specific instrument. A “special” is a repo rate significantly below prevailing market riskless interest rates. This article shows that specials can occur when those owning the collateral are inhibited, whether from legal or institutional requirements or from frictional costs, from supplying collateral into repurchase agreements. Specialness increases the equilibrium price for the underlying instrument by the present value of savings in borrowing costs associated with the repo specials.

ABSTRACT This article presents a model for valuing claims subject to default by both contracting parties, such as swaps and forwards. With counterparties of different default risk, the promised cash flows of a swap are discounted by a switching discount rate that, at any given state and time, is equal to the discount rate of the counterparty for whom the swap is currently out of the money (that is, a liability). The impact of credit‐risk asymmetry and of netting is presented through both theory and numerical examples, which include interest rate and currency swaps.

Empirical difficulties encountered by representative-consumer models are resolved in an economy with heterogeneity in the form of uninsurable, persistent, and heteroscedastic labor income shocks. Given the joint process of arbitrage-free labor prices, dividends, and aggregate income satisfying a certain joint restriction, it is shown that this process is supported in the equilibrium of an economy with judiciously modeled income heterogeneity. The Euler equations of consumption in a representative-agent economy are replaced by a set of Euler equations that depend not only on the per capita consumption growth but also on the cross-sectional variance of the individual consumers' consumption growth. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.