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Working Paper
Financial Vulnerabilities, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and Monetary Policy
We define a measure to be a financial vulnerability if, in a VAR framework that allows for nonlinearities, an impulse to the measure leads to an economic contraction. We evaluate alternative macrofinancial imbalances as vulnerabilities: nonfinancial sector credit, risk appetite of financial market participants, and the leverage and short-term funding of financial firms. We find that nonfinancial credit is a vulnerability: impulses to the credit-to-GDP gap when it is high leads to a recession. Risk appetite leads to an economic expansion in the near-term, but also higher credit and a recession ...
Working Paper
Initial public offerings in hot and cold markets
Asymmetric information models characterize hot IPO markets as periods when better quality firms have an incentive to issue equity, and cold markets when the lemons premium associated with equity is too high to draw in many issuers. Recent empirical evidence, however, suggests that firms that issue in hot markets are a major source of stock price underperformance of equity issuers. We investigate these opposing views with data on IPO firms that issued in 1983, a hot market, and 1988, a cold market. We find that the two sets of firms have similar operating performance, but stock returns are ...
Working Paper
Designing loan modifications to address the mortgage crisis and the making home affordable program
Delinquencies on residential mortgages and home foreclosures have risen dramatically in the past couple of years. The mortgage losses triggered a broad-based financial crisis and severe recession, which, in turn, exacerbated the initial financial distress faced by homeowners. Although servicers increased their loss mitigation efforts as defaults began to mount, foreclosures continued to occur in cases where both the borrower and investor would be better off if such an outcome were avoided. The U.S. government has engaged in a number of initiatives to reduce such foreclosures. This paper ...
Discussion Paper
Financial Stability Monitoring
In a recently released New York Fed staff report, we present a forward-looking monitoring program to identify and track time-varying sources of systemic risk.
Working Paper
Share repurchases and employee stock options and their implications for S&P 500 share retirements and expected returns
We estimate the effects of share repurchases and employee stock option exercises on net share retirements for large S&P 500 companies. We find that, over the past five years, gross repurchases have reduced shares outstanding 2 percent annually; but, owing to the exercise of employee stock options, only about half of those shares were actually retired. Given the recent pace of employee stock option grants, and assuming that equities continue to be priced at about 30 times earnings, our analysis suggests that the pace of net share retirements will fall well below the pace of the last few years, ...
Working Paper
Executive financial incentives and payout policy: firm responses to the 2003 dividend tax cut
Using the 2003 reduction in dividend tax rates to identify an exogenous change in the after-tax value of dividends to shareholders, we test whether stock holdings among company executives is an important determinant of payout policy. We have three primary findings. First, we find that when top executives have greater stock ownership, and thus an incentive to increase dividends for personal liquidity reasons, there is a significantly greater likelihood of a dividend increase following the 2003 dividend tax cut, whereas no such relation existed in the prior decade when the dividend tax rate was ...
Report
Monetary policy, financial conditions, and financial stability
We review a growing literature that incorporates endogenous risk premiums and risk taking in the conduct of monetary policy. Accommodative policy can create an intertemporal trade-off between improving current financial conditions and increasing future financial vulnerabilities. In the United States, structural and cyclical macroprudential tools to reduce vulnerabilities at banks are being implemented, but they may not be sufficient because activities can migrate and there are limited tools for nonbank intermediaries and for borrowers. While monetary policy itself can influence ...
Working Paper
Do Creditor Rights Increase Employment Risk? Evidence from Loan Covenants
Using a regression discontinuity design, we provide evidence that incentive conflicts between firms and their creditors have a large impact on employees. There are sharp and substantial employment cuts following loan covenant violations, when creditors exercise their ex post control rights. The negative impact of violations on employment is stronger for firms that face more severe agency and financing frictions and those whose employees have weaker bargaining power. Employment cuts following violations are much larger during industry and macroeconomic downturns, when employees have fewer ...