Title: Essays on Financial Economics
Description: This dissertation consists of two chapters. In the first chapter, I revisit the role of Central Banks, the principal entity responsible for economic and financial stability. I indicate that we can consider a universal role for a central bank instead of just a lender. I consider a model of the financial crisis and market rejuvenation where direct policies from the central bank are not efficient as the public authority lacks critical information about the status of the economy. In contrast, there exist agents who have superior information about the available assets and future projects of the economy. I show that the public authority can benefit from contracting the informed agents to the benefit of the society, where the central bank will trade off the benefit of higher financing from liquidity provision to informed agents for the cost of a public market contraction. Based on the insight of this chapter, I propose a proactive ``planner of last resort'' role for a central bank as opposed to a naive lender of last resort suggested by Bagehot’s dictum.

In the second chapter, I investigate a fundamental and yet less explored moment of asset returns which is the expected time it takes for a given asset's return to change state from high to low or vice versa. I introduce formally the concept of ``expected traveling time'' in the context of asset prices and returns and demonstrate a number of results. Mainly, I provide pricing equations for a class of fixed-income assets, which their payoff would default to zero when particular states are triggered (similar to a risky bond). Moreover, I show that barrier like option prices can reveal transition probabilities of the underlying asset's return. Finally, I discuss the estimation of the traveling times from historical data where I identify a considerable variation of traveling times across different assets.