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Working Paper
The Effects of Audit Partners on Financial Reporting: Evidence from U.S. Bank Holding Companies
This paper uses confidential data on audit engagement partner names from regulatory filings of bank holding companies (BHC) to investigate whether partners display individual style that affects the financial reporting of the BHCs. We focus on loan loss provisioning. We construct an audit partner-BHC matched panel data set that enables us to track different partners across different BHCs over time. We employ two empirical approaches to investigate partner style. The first approach tests whether partner fixed effects are statistically significant in loan loss provisioning models. The second ...
Working Paper
Mobility and Engagement Following the SARS-Cov-2 Outbreak
We develop a Mobility and Engagement Index (MEI) based on a range of mobility metrics from Safegraph geolocation data, and validate the index with mobility data from Google and Unacast. We construct MEIs at the county, MSA, state and nationwide level, and link these measures to indicators of economic activity. According to our measures, the bulk of sheltering-in-place and social disengagement occurred during the week of March 15 and simultaneously across the U.S. At the national peak of the decline in mobility in early April, localities that engaged in a 10% larger decrease in mobility than ...
Journal Article
Blockchain Technology Disrupting Traditional Records Systems
Working Paper
Audit Partners and Loan Loss Provisioning: Evidence from U.S. Bank Holding Companies
This paper uses confidential data on audit engagement partner names from regulatory filings of bank holding companies (BHC) to investigate whether partners display individual style that affects the financial reporting of the BHCs. We focus on loan loss provisioning. We construct an audit partner-BHC matched panel data set that enables us to track different partners across different BHCs over time. We employ two empirical approaches to investigate partner style. The first approach tests whether partner fixed effects are statistically significant in loan loss provisioning models. The second ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic news and asset prices before and after the zero lower bound
With short-term policy interest rates constrained by their effective zero lower bound (ZLB), monetary policy relied on communicating the future path of policy conditional on incoming macroeconomic data. Motivated by this, we exploit intra-day prices to investigate how updates on the state of the U.S. economy affect interest rates and exchange rates before and after the ZLB. We find that releases reflecting the dual mandate of the Fed rose in importance and ? as an ex-post acknowledgement of the sources of the Great Recession ? additional housing market indicators and GDP revisions, that ...
Journal Article
Bank Asset Concentration Not Necessarily Cause for Worry
U.S. banking assets have become substantially more concentrated within a few large institutions. However, decreasing relative rates of big-bank growth and of idiosyncratic volatility?an indicator of individual bank susceptibility to shocks and a resulting redistribution of assets?suggest a reduction in systemic financial system risk through contagion.
Journal Article
Weakly capitalized banks slowed lending recovery after recession
The reluctance to lend played out particularly among a subset of banks?often larger institutions with very low ratios of capital to assets.
Working Paper
Deposit interest rate ceilings as credit supply shifters: bank level evidence on the effects of Regulation Q
Shocks emanating from and propagating through the banking system have recently gained interest in the macroeconomics literature, yet they are not a feature unique to the 2008/09 financial crisis. Banking disintermediation shocks occured frequently during the Great Inflation era due to fixed deposit rate ceilings. I estimate the effect of deposit rate ceilings inscribed in Regulation Q on the transmission of federal funds rate changes to bank level credit growth using a historic bank level data set spanning half a century from 1959 to 2013 with about two million observations. Measures of the ...
Working Paper
Economic policy uncertainty and the credit channel: aggregate and bank level U.S. evidence over several decades
Economic policy uncertainty aspects decisions of households, businesses, policy makers and financial intermediaries. We first examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty on aggregate bank credit growth. Then we analyze commercial bank entity level data to gauge the effects of policy uncertainty on financial intermediaries' lending. We exploit the cross-sectional heterogeneity to back out indirect evidence of its effects on businesses and households. We ask (i) whether, conditional on standard macroeconomic controls, economic policy uncertainty affected bank level credit growth, and (ii) ...