This paper shows how the intraday allocation and pricing of overnight loans of federal funds reflect the decentralized interbank market in which these loans are traded. A would-be borrower or lender typically finds a counterparty institution by direct bilateral contact. Once in contact, the two counterparties to a potential trade negotiate terms that reflect their incentives for borrowing or le...

We study the problem of optimal investment by embedding it in the general conjugate duality framework of convex analysis. This allows for various extensions to classical models of liquid markets. In particular, we obtain a dual representation for the optimum value function in the presence of portfolio constraints and nonlinear trading costs that are encountered e.g. in modern limit order market...

Regulatory changes are transforming the multitrillion dollar swaps market from a network of bilateral contracts to one in which swaps are cleared through central counterparties (CCPs). The stability of the new framework depends on the CCPs’ resilience. Margin requirements are a CCP’s first line of defense against the default of a counterparty. To capture liquidity costs at default, margin requi...