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Discussion Paper
Interest on Reserves and Arbitrage in Post-Crisis Money Markets
In this note, we use confidential, daily data on wholesale unsecured borrowing and reserve balances to empirically document several salient features of IOR arbitrage trades.
Newsletter
Exposure to Cyber Risk and Inadequate Cybersecurity Regulations: Evidence from Municipalities
In this article, which is based on a related working paper, we document the adverse effects of cyberattacks on municipalities and the ineffectiveness of current state regulation to stave off future cyberattacks. In the process of providing services to their citizens, state and local governments collect and store a wide range of sensitive personal information (data). Access to personal information, sometimes combined with a lack of adequate cybersecurity (FitchRatings, 2022), makes governments attractive targets for cyberattacks, in particular data breaches. Indeed, in our sample external data ...
Working Paper
Emergency Collateral Upgrades
During the 2008-09 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve established two emergency facilities for broker-dealers. One provided collateralized loans. The other lent securities against a pledge of other securities, effectively providing collateral upgrades, an operation similar to activities traditionally undertaken by broker-dealers. We find that these facilities alleviated dealers' funding pressures when access to repos backed by illiquid collateral deteriorated. We also find that dealers used the facilities, especially the ability to upgrade collateral, to continue funding their own illiquid ...
Discussion Paper
Cyberattacks and Supply Chain Disruptions
Cybercrime is one of the most pressing concerns for firms. Hackers perpetrate frequent but isolated ransomware attacks mostly for financial gains, while state-actors use more sophisticated techniques to obtain strategic information such as intellectual property and, in more extreme cases, to disrupt the operations of critical organizations. Thus, they can damage firms’ productive capacity, thereby potentially affecting their customers and suppliers. In this post, which is based on a related Staff Report, we study a particularly severe cyberattack that inadvertently spread beyond its ...
Working Paper
Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?
Stablecoins and money market funds both seek to provide investors with safe, money-like assets but are vulnerable to runs in times of stress. In this paper, we investigate similarities and differences between the two, comparing investor behavior during the stablecoin runs of 2022 and 2023 to investor behavior during the money market fund runs of 2008 and 2020. We document that, similar to money market fund investors, stablecoin investors engage in flight-to-safety, with net flows from riskier to safer stablecoins during run periods. However, whereas in money market funds run risk has ...
Discussion Paper
Shining a Light on the Shadows: Dealer Funding and Internalization
In this note, we use new confidential supervisory data to take a first look at the practice of internalization and examine some of its implications.
Working Paper
Liquidity Regulation and Financial Intermediaries
We document several effects of the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) rule on dealers' financing and intermediation of securities. For identification, we exploit the fact that the US implementation is more stringent than that in foreign jurisdictions. In line with LCR incentives, US dealers reduce their reliance on repos as a way to finance inventories of high-quality assets and increase the maturity of lower-quality repos relative to foreign dealers; additionally, US dealers cut back on trades that downgrade their own collateral. Dealers are nevertheless still providing significant maturity ...
Working Paper
Endogenous Debt Maturity and Rollover Risk
We challenge the common view that short-term debt, by having to be rolled over continuously, is a risk factor that exposes banks to higher default risk. First, we show that the average effect of expiring obligations on default risk is insignificant; it is only when a bank has limited access to new funds that maturing debt has a detrimental impact on default risk. Next, we show that both limited access to new funds and shorter maturities are causally determined by deteriorating market expectations about the bank's future profitability. In other words, short-term debt is not a cause of ...
Discussion Paper
The Impact of Natural Disasters on the Corporate Loan Market
Natural disasters are usually associated with an increase in the demand for credit by both households and companies in the affected regions. However, if capacity constraints preclude banks from meeting the local increase in demand, the banks may reduce lending elsewhere, thus propagating the shock to unaffected areas. In this post, we analyze the corporate loan market and find that banks, particularly those with lower capital, reduce credit provisioning to distant regions unaffected by natural disasters. We also find that shadow banks only partially offset the reduction in bank credit, so ...
Working Paper
The Political Origin of Home Bias: The Case of Europe
We show that politics is at the root of the banks-sovereign nexus that exacerbated the Eurozone crisis. First, government-owned banks or banks with politicians in the board of directors display higher home bias in sovereign debt compared to privately-owned banks throughout the 2010-2013 period. Second, only government-owned banks increased the home bias during the sovereign crisis (moral suasion). We exploit the fact that equity injections (bail-outs) by domestic governments were not directly targeted to politically connected banks to show that, upon receiving such assistance, only ...