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Working Paper
Monetary policy and the housing bubble
We examine the role of monetary policy in the housing bubble. Our review examines the setting of monetary policy in the middle of this decade, the impetus from monetary policy to the housing market, and other factors that may have contributed to the run-up, and subsequent collapse, in house prices.
Report
BASEL III: long-term impact on economic performance and fluctuations
We assess the long-term economic impact of the new regulatory standards (the Basel III reform), answering the following questions: 1) What is the impact of the reform on long-term economic performance? 2) What is the impact of the reform on economic fluctuations? 3) What is the impact of the adoption of countercyclical capital buffers on economic fluctuations? The main results are the following: 1) Each percentage point increase in the capital ratio causes a median 0.09 percent decline in the level of steady-state output, relative to the baseline. The impact of the new liquidity regulation is ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy and Bank Equity Values in a Time of Low and Negative Interest Rates
Does banks' exposure to interest rate risk change when interest rates are very low or even negative? Using a high-frequency event study methodology and intraday data, we find that the effect of surprise interest rate cuts announced by the ECB on European bank equity values ? an effect that is normally positive ? has become negative since interest rates in the euro area reached zero and below. Since then, a further unexpected cut of 25 basis points in the short-term policy rate lowered banks' stock prices by about 2% on average, compared to a 1% increase in normal times. In the cross section, ...
Working Paper
From Wall Street to main street: the impact of the financial crisis on consumer credit supply
This paper studies how the collapse of the asset backed securities (ABS) market during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 affected the supply of credit to the broader economy using a new dataset that describes unique interbank relationships within the credit union industry. This industry is important for consumer finance, and we find that ABS related losses at correspondent credit unions are associated with a large contraction in the supply of consumer credit and a hoarding of cash among downstream credit unions. We also find that this contraction in credit supply was concentrated among ...
Journal Article
Does bank capital matter for monetary transmission?
Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary Transmission
Working Paper
Interest rate risk and bank equity valuations
Because they engage in maturity transformation, a steepening of the yield curve should, all else equal, boost bank profitability. We re-examine this conventional wisdom by estimating the reaction of bank intraday stock returns to exogenous fluctuations in interest rates induced by monetary policy announcements. We construct a new measure of the mismatch between the repricing time or maturity of bank assets and liabilities and analyze how the reaction of stock returns varies with the size of this mismatch and other bank characteristics, including the usage of interest rate derivatives. Our ...
Working Paper
Temporal risk aversion and asset prices
Agents with standard, time-separable preferences do not care about the temporal distribution of risk. This is a strong assumption. For example, it seems plausible that a consumer may find persistent shocks to consumption less desirable than uncorrelated fluctuations. Such a consumer is said to exhibit temporal risk aversion. This paper examines the implications of temporal risk aversion for asset prices. The innovation is to work with expected utility preferences that (i) are not time-separable, (ii) exhibit temporal risk aversion, (iii) separate risk aversion from the intertemporal ...