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Journal Article
Financial instruments for mitigating credit risk
Discussion Paper
Alternative measures of the Federal Reserve banks' cost of equity capital
The Monetary Control Act of 1980 requires the Federal Reserve System to provide payment services to depository institutions through the twelve Federal Reserve Banks at prices that fully reflect the costs a private-sector provider would incur, including a cost of equity capital (COE). Although Fama and French (1997) conclude that COE estimates are ?woefully? and ?unavoidably? imprecise, the Reserve Banks require such an estimate every year. We examine several COE estimates based on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and compare them using econometric and materiality criteria. Our results ...
Conference Paper
Forecasting supervisory ratings using securities market information
Journal Article
Measuring Connectedness between the Largest Banks
The financial crisis provided a stark example of how interconnected the financial system is. Since then, researchers have developed several ways to monitor patterns of connectedness within the banking system. A key challenge is removing the impact of conditions that affect all banks in order to highlight evidence of direct connectedness. A new measure filters these common factors from bank stock market data. Estimates using this method show how different assumptions can affect conclusions about the connections among banks.
Journal Article
What Would It Cost to Issue 50-year Treasury Bonds?
The longest-term U.S. Treasury bonds that investors can buy mature in 30 years. Some other countries offer up to 50-year government bonds. Examining these foreign bond markets and extrapolating U.S. Treasury yields to evaluate such longer-term options suggests that the extra costs of introducing 50-year bonds relative to conventional 30-year bonds are likely to be small on average. Because the U.S. fiscal deficit remains substantial, such longer-term debt instruments could provide an attractive opportunity to finance the growing debt in a sustainable way.
Conference Paper
Inflation expectations and risk premiums in an arbitrage-free model of nominal and real bond yields
Differences between yields on comparable-maturity U.S. Treasury nominal and real debt, the so-called breakeven inflation (BEI) rates, are widely used indicators of inflation expectations. However, better measures of inflation expectations could be obtained by subtracting inflation risk premiums from the BEI rates. We provide such decompositions using an estimated affine arbitrage-free model of the term structure that captures the pricing of both nominal and real Treasury securities. Our empirical results suggest that long-term inflation expectations have been well anchored over the past few ...
Working Paper
Empirical analysis of corporate credit lines
Since bank credit lines are a major source of corporate funding and liquidity, we examine the determinants of credit line usage with a database of Spanish corporate credit lines. A line's default status is the primary factor driving its usage, which increases as a firm approaches default. Several lender characteristics suggest an important role for bank monitoring in firms' usage decisions. Credit line usage is found to be inversely related to macroeconomic conditions. Overall, while several factors influence corporate credit line usage, our analysis suggests that default and supply-side ...
Journal Article
Disclosure as a supervisory tool: Pillar 3 of Basel II
Journal Article
U.S. supervisory standards for operational risk management
The U.S. bank supervisory agencies recently issued for public comment revised guidance regarding the implementation of the proposed Basel II-related, risk-based capital requirements. Among the revisions is an important update to guidance regarding operational risk management. Operational risk generally refers to the risk of monetary losses resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people, and systems, or from external events, such as natural disasters. ; For other dimensions of risk, such as credit and market risk, the Basel II framework includes considerable detail on using ...
Journal Article
Formulating the imputed cost of equity capital for priced services at Federal Reserve banks
This paper was presented at the conference "Economic Statistics: New Needs for the Twenty-First Century," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, and the National Association for Business Economics, July 11, 2002. According to the 1980 Monetary Control Act, the Federal Reserve Banks must establish fees for their priced services to recover all operating costs as well as the imputed costs of capital and taxes that would be incurred by a profit-making firm. Since 2002, the Federal Reserve has made fundamental changes to the ...