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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 ...
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
Good news and bad news about share repurchases
We estimate the cross-sectional relationship between open market repurchases and accounting data for a large sample of dividend- paying and non-dividend paying firms over a twelve year period (1984-95). Consistent with the hypothesis that firms use open market repurchases to reduce the agency costs of free cash flow, we find that repurchases are positively related to proxies for free cash flow and negatively related to proxies for marginal financing costs. We also examine the extent to which management stock options influence the choice between open market repurchases and dividend payments. ...
Working Paper
The evolution of a financial crisis: panic in the asset-backed commercial paper market
The $350 billion contraction in the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in the last five months of 2007 played a central role in transforming concerns about the credit quality of mortgage-related assets into a global financial crisis. This paper attempts to better understand why the substantial contraction in ABCP occurred by measuring and analyzing runs on ABCP programs over the period from August 2007 through December 2007. While it has been suggested that commercial paper programs, like commercial banks, may be prone to runs, we are the first to conduct a comprehensive empirical ...
Report
Financial stability monitoring
We present a forward-looking monitoring program to identify and track the sources of systemic risk over time and to facilitate the development of pre-emptive policies to promote financial stability. We offer a framework that distinguishes between shocks, which are difficult to prevent, and vulnerabilities that amplify shocks. Building on substantial research, we focus on leverage, maturity transformation, interconnectedness, complexity, and the pricing of risk as the primary vulnerabilities in the financial system. The monitoring program tracks these vulnerabilities in four areas: the banking ...
Working Paper
How did the 2003 dividend tax cut affect stock prices and corporate payout policy?
We examine the effects of the 2003 dividend tax cut on U.S. stock prices and corporate payout policies. First, using an event-study methodology, we compare the performance of U.S. stocks to that of other securities that should not have benefited from the tax change. We find that U.S. large-cap and small-cap indexes do not outperform their European counterparts, nor REIT stocks, over the event windows, suggesting little if any aggregate stock market effect from the tax change. In cross-sectional analysis, high-dividend stocks outperformed low-dividend stocks by a few percentage points over the ...
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 ...
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
Financial Stability Committees and Basel III Macroprudential Capital Buffers
We evaluate how a country’s governance structure for macroprudential policy affects its implementation of Basel III macroprudential capital buffers. We find that the probabilities of using the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) are higher in countries that have financial stability committees (FSCs) with stronger governance mechanisms and fewer agencies, which reduces coordination problems. These higher probabilities are more sensitive to credit growth, consistent with the CCyB being used to mitigate systemic risk. A country’s probability of using the CCyB is even higher when the FSC ...