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Author:Kovner, Anna 

Discussion Paper
The Impact of the Corporate Credit Facilities

American companies have raised almost $1 trillion in the U.S. corporate bond market since March. If companies had been unable to refinance those bonds, their inability to repay may have led to an immediate default on all of their obligations, creating a cascade of defaults and layoffs. Based on Compustat data, an inability to access public bond markets could have affected companies employing more than 16 million people. In this post, we document the impact of the Primary Market and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF) on bond market functioning, summarizing a ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20201001

Report
Stressed, not frozen: the Federal Funds market in the financial crisis

We examine the importance of liquidity hoarding and counterparty risk in the U.S. overnight interbank market during the financial crisis of 2008. Our findings suggest that counterparty risk plays a larger role than does liquidity hoarding: the day after Lehman Brothers? bankruptcy, loan terms become more sensitive to borrower characteristics. In particular, poorly performing large banks see an increase in spreads of 25 basis points, but are borrowing 1 percent less, on average. Worse performing banks do not hoard liquidity. While the interbank market does not freeze entirely, it does not seem ...
Staff Reports , Paper 437

Discussion Paper
Tax Reform's Impact on Bank and Corporate Cyclicality

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is expected to increase after-tax profits for most companies, primarily by lowering the top corporate statutory tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. At the same time, the TCJA provides less favorable treatment of net operating losses and limits the deductibility of net interest expense. We explain how the latter set of changes may heighten bank and corporate borrower cyclicality by making bank capital and default risk for highly levered corporations more sensitive to economic downturns.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20180716

Working Paper
Why Do Firms Pay Different Interest Rates on Their Bank Loans?

We document significant variation in interest rates among similar commercial and industrial loans using confidential supervisory data on the largest US banks. This dispersion does not appear to be due to risk. We rationalize the data using a search cost model and find that search costs are highest for smaller and riskier borrowers and lower for public firms, consistent with predictable differences in the costs of screening and monitoring. We find that search costs are substantial. Over a third of firms behave as if they do not comparison shop; half of all firms appear to only obtain two ...
Working Paper , Paper 26-03

Report
Evaluating the quality of fed funds lending estimates produced from Fedwire payments data

A number of empirical analyses of interbank lending rely on indirect inferences from individual interbank transactions extracted from payments data using algorithms. In this paper, we conduct an evaluation to assess the ability of identifying overnight U.S. fed funds activity from Fedwire payments data. We find evidence that the estimates extracted from the data are statistically significantly correlated with banks' fed funds borrowing as reported on the FRY-9C. We find similar associations for fed funds lending, although the correlations are lower. To be conservative, we believe that the ...
Staff Reports , Paper 629

Discussion Paper
What Is Corporate Bond Market Distress?

Corporate bonds are a key source of funding for U.S. non-financial corporations and a key investment security for insurance companies, pension funds, and mutual funds. Distress in the corporate bond market can thus both impair access to credit for corporate borrowers and reduce investment opportunities for key financial sub-sectors. In a February 2021 Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced a unified measure of corporate bond market distress, the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), then followed up in early June 2022 with a look at how corporate bond market functioning evolved ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220629

Discussion Paper
The Private Premium in Public Bonds?

In a 2012 New York Fed study, Chenyang Wei and I find that interest rate spreads on publicly traded bonds issued by companies with privately traded equity are about 31 basis points higher on average than spreads on bonds issued by companies with publicly traded equity, even after controlling for risk and other factors. These differences are economically and statistically significant and they persist in the secondary market. We control for many factors associated with bond pricing, including risk, liquidity, and covenants. Although these controls account for some of the absolute pricing ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20120516

Report
Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation for Economics Ph.D. Students

We analyze letters of recommendation for more than 2,200 economics and finance Ph.D. graduates and document that letters for female and Black or Hispanic job candidates are weaker in some dimensions, while letters for Asian candidates are notably less positive overall. Female and Asian candidates are less likely to be recommended to top academic departments. Letter characteristics, especially a top recommendation, have meaningful effects on initial job placements and journal publications. The effect appears to be causal—we instrument for better letters and still estimate a meaningful impact ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1129

Report
Evaluating the information in the Federal Reserve stress tests

We present evidence that the Federal Reserve stress tests produce information about both the stress-tested bank holding companies and the overall state of the banking industry. Our evidence goes beyond a standard event study, which cannot differentiate between small abnormal returns and large, but opposite?signed, abnormal stock returns. We find that stress test disclosures are associated with significantly higher absolute abnormal returns, as well as higher abnormal trading volume. More levered and riskier holding companies seem to be more affected by the stress test information. We find no ...
Staff Reports , Paper 744

Discussion Paper
Becoming More Alike? Comparing Bank and Federal Reserve Stress Test Results

Stress tests have become an important method of assessing whether financial institutions have enough capital to operate in bad economic conditions. Under the provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, both the Federal Reserve and large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) are required to do annual stress tests and to disclose these results to the public. While the BHCs’ and the Federal Reserve’s projections are made under the same macroeconomic scenario, the results differ, primarily because of differences in the models used to make the projections. In this post, we look at the 2014 stress test ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20140721

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