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Working Paper
The Impact of Regulatory Stress Tests on Bank Lending and Its Macroeconomic Consequences
We use an expansive regulatory loan-level data set to analyze how the portfolios of the largest US banks have changed in response to the Dodd-Frank Act Stress Test (DFAST) requirements. We find that the portfolios of the largest banks, which are subject to stress-testing, have become more similar to each other since DFAST was implemented in 2011. We also find that banks with poor stress-test results tend to adjust their portfolios in a way that makes them more similar to the portfolios of banks that performed well in the stress-testing. In general, stress-testing has resulted in more ...
Working Paper
The Transmission Mechanisms of International Business Cycles: Output Spillovers through Trade and Financial Linkages
We study the transmission channels through which shocks affect the global economy and the cross-country comovement of real economic activity. For this purpose, we collect detailed data on international trade and financial linkages as well as domestic macro and financial variables for a large set of countries. We document significant international output comovement following U.S. monetary shocks, and find that openness to international trade matters more than financial openness in explaining cross-country spillovers. In particular, output in countries with a high share of exports and imports ...
Working Paper
Bargaining Power and Outside Options in the Interbank Lending Market
We study the role of bargaining power and outside options with respect to the pricing of over-the-counter interbank loans using a bilateral Nash bargaining model, and we test the model predictions with detailed transaction-level data from the euro-area interbank market. We find that lender banks with greater bargaining power over their borrowers charge higher interest rates, while the lack of alternative investment opportunities for lenders lowers bilateral interest rates. Moreover, we find that when lenders that are not eligible to earn interest on excess reserves (IOER) lend funds to ...
Working Paper
Output Spillovers from U.S. Monetary Policy: The Role of International Trade and Financial Linkages
We estimate that U.S. monetary policy has sizable spillover effects on global economic activity. In response to a surprise increase in the federal funds rate of 25 basis points, real output in our sample of 44 countries declines on average by 0.9% after three years. We find that international trade is a more important factor than international finance in explaining these spillovers. In particular, countries with a high share of exports and imports in output have 79% larger responses than countries with a low share, whereas we do not find significant heterogeneity depending on a country’s ...
Working Paper
The dynamic factor network model with an application to global credit risk
We introduce a dynamic network model with probabilistic link functions that depend on stochastically time-varying parameters. We adopt the widely used blockmodel framework and allow the high-dimensional vector of link probabilities to be a function of a low-dimensional set of dynamic factors. The resulting dynamic factor network model is straightforward and transparent by nature. However, parameter estimation, signal extraction of the dynamic factors, and the econometric analysis generally are intricate tasks for which simulation-based methods are needed. We provide feasible and practical ...
Report
Interest Expenses, Coverage Ratio, and Firm Distress
Historically, the pass-through of federal funds rate increases into firms’ interest expenses has been incomplete and delayed, with the peak responses occurring about one year after a policy rate increase. These findings indicate that current corporate interest rate expenses will continue to increase, even absent any additional rate hikes going forward. Higher interest expenses can lead to firm distress and defaults, which have adverse effects on employment and investment. These effects can be amplified through the financial accelerator channel.
Report
Evidence That Relaxing Dealers’ Risk Constraints Can Make the Treasury Market More Liquid
This brief studies how regulation involving bank capital requirements affects the behavior of bank-affiliated primary dealers in the Treasury market. Specifically, it looks at the potential effects of changes to the supplementary leverage ratio (SLR) requirement, which determines how much capital a bank must hold in relation to its overall exposure, including exposure in its trading assets such as Treasuries. The SLR is a measure of a bank’s ability to absorb losses during periods of financial stress; the Federal Reserve sets a minimum requirement for the SLR to help protect the stability ...
Working Paper
Corporate Finance and the Transmission of Shocks to the Real Economy
Credit availability from different sources varies greatly across firms and has firm-level effects on investment decisions and aggregate effects on output. We develop a theoretical framework in which firms decide endogenously at the extensive and intensive margins of different funding sources to study the role of firm choices on the transmission of credit supply shocks to the real economy. As in the data, firms can borrow from different banks, issue bonds, or raise equity through retained earnings to fund productive investment. Our model is calibrated to detailed firm- and loan-level data and ...
Working Paper
Did High Leverage Render Small Businesses Vulnerable to the COVID-19 Shock?
Using supervisory data on small and mid-sized nonfinancial enterprises (SMEs), we find that those SMEs with higher leverage faced tighter constraints in accessing bank credit after the COVID-19 outbreak in spring 2020. Specifically, SMEs with higher pre-COVID leverage obtained a smaller volume of new loans and had to pay a higher spread on them during the pandemic period. Consistent with an inward shift in loan supply, these effects were concentrated in loans originated by banks with below-median capital buffers. Highly levered SMEs that relied on low-capital large banks for funding before ...