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Conference Paper
Credit card securitization, recourse, and regulatory arbitrage
Journal Article
Deposit insurance: lessons from the record
Working Paper
Restoring confidence in troubled financial institutions after a financial crisis
After an unprecedented number of banks suspended operations in the during Panic of 1893, the head regulator of banks chartered by the United States government allowed about 100 banks to reopen after certifying their solvency. We evaluate whether actions by bank owners to change management, contract with depositors to extend liability maturity structure, write off bad assets, and/or inject capital affected bank survival and deposit retention. This historical episode is particularly informative because there was no expectation of government intervention. We find that contracting with depositors ...
Conference Paper
Remarks on inside information in banking
Working Paper
Mining for Oil Forecasts
In this paper, we study the usefulness of a large number of traditional determinants and novel text-based variables for in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting of oil spot and futures returns, energy company stock returns, oil price volatility, oil production, and oil inventories. After carefully controlling for small-sample biases, we find compelling evidence of in-sample predictability. Our text measures hold their own against traditional variables for oil forecasting. However, none of this translates to out-of-sample predictability until we data mine our set of predictive variables. Our ...
Working Paper
Liquidity Risk, Bank Networks, and the Value of Joining the Federal Reserve System
Reducing systemic liquidity risk related to seasonal swings in loan demand was one reason for the founding of the Federal Reserve System. Existing evidence on the post-Federal Reserve increase in the seasonal volatility of aggregate lending and the decrease in seasonal interest rate swings suggests that it succeeded in that mission. Nevertheless, less than 8 percent of state-chartered banks joined the Federal Reserve in its first decade. Some have speculated that nonmembers could avoid higher costs of the Federal Reserve?s reserve requirements while still obtaining access indirectly to the ...
Conference Paper
Causes of U.S. bank distress during the depression
Working Paper
Did Doubling Reserve Requirements Cause the 1937-38 Recession? New Evidence on the Impact of Reserve Requirements on Bank Reserve Demand and Lending
In 1936-37, the Federal Reserve doubled member banks' reserve requirements. Friedman and Schwartz (1963) famously argued that the doubling increased reserve demand and forced the money supply to contract, which they argued caused the recession of 1937-38. Using a new database on individual banks, we show that higher reserve requirements did not generally increase banks' reserve demand or contract lending because reserve requirements were not binding for most banks. Aggregate effects on credit supply from reserve requirement increases were therefore economically small and statistically zero.