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Journal Article
Community Bank Funding Is Getting Costlier and Riskier
Banks’ core funding has been under pressure since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began raising rates in early 2022. As depositors shift funds out of low-yielding savings and noninterest-bearing deposit accounts and into more lucrative alternative investments, community banks have increasingly turned to longer-maturity deposits and borrowings to finance their balance sheets. Although these funding sources allow banks to retain their asset size, they are both more expensive and potentially less stable.
Journal Article
Pushing the Limit: Last-Minute Debt Limit Resolutions Have Increased Market Volatility and Uncertainty
Since reaching the debt limit in January 2023, the U.S. Treasury has used extraordinary measures to fund the government. However, the Treasury estimates those measures will be exhausted later this year. To gauge possible effects, we review economic and financial market outcomes during previous debt limit episodes. In each case, these episodes led to increased borrowing costs, financial market volatility, and uncertainty, particularly when the resolutions were prolonged.
Journal Article
Banking on Distributed Ledger Technology: Can It Help Banks Address Financial Inclusion?
Despite its promise, distributed ledger technology is unlikely to draw unbanked consumers into the financial mainstream
Working Paper
Assessing Targeted Macroprudential Financial Regulation: The Case of the 2006 Commercial Real Estate Guidance for Banks
In January 2006, federal regulators issued guidance requiring banks with specific high concentrations of commercial real estate (CRE) loans to tighten managerial controls. This paper shows that banks with concentrations in excess of the thresholds set in the guidance subsequently experienced slower growth in their CRE portfolios than can be explained by changes in bank or economic conditions. Moreover, banks above the CRE thresholds tended to have slower commercial and industrial loan growth but faster household loan growth following issuance of the guidance. The results highlight the ...
Journal Article
Trends in the Labor Share Post-2000
The labor share of income declined sharply in the United States from 2000 to 2010 but seems to have stabilized since 2010. We examine aggregate trends in the labor share and show that the 2000?10 decline was driven by declines in the fraction of income paid to workers in all industries. The stabilization in the labor share after 2010 mostly reflects an increased share of services industries income paid to workers.
Working Paper
The U.S. Syndicated Loan Market : Matching Data
We introduce a new software package for determining linkages between datasets without common identifiers. We apply these methods to three datasets commonly used in academic research on syndicated lending: Refinitiv LPC DealScan, the Shared National Credit Database, and S&P Global Market Intelligence Compustat. We benchmark the results of our match using results from the literature and previously matched files that are publicly available. We find that the company level matching is enhanced by careful cleaning of the data and considering hierarchical relationships. For loan level matching, a ...
Journal Article
Bank Financial Restatements and Market Discipline
Banks may reissue financial statements for several reasons, ranging from simple accounting or clerical errors to fraud. Regardless of the reason, financial restatements send negative signals to the public, potentially driving stakeholders to undertake actions that are costly to the restating bank. These actions constitute ?market discipline? and may incentivize banks to report financial information accurately. But whether financial restatements lead to market discipline is an empirical question. For example, strict bank regulation might blunt disciplinary effects if stakeholders believe ...
Working Paper
Flight to Liquidity or Safety? Recent Evidence from the Municipal Bond Market
We examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent monetary and fiscal policy actions on municipal bond market pricing. Using high-frequency trading data, we estimate key policy events at the peak of the crisis by focusing on a sample of bonds within a narrow window before and after each policy event. We find that policy interventions, in particular those with explicit credit backstops, were effective in alleviating municipal bond market stress. Next, we exploit daily variation in traded municipal bonds and virus exposure across U.S. counties. We find a shift in how bond investors ...
Journal Article
Bank Deposit Rates Haven't Kept Pace with Yields on Other Investments, but Depositors Are Staying Anyway
Bank deposit outflows continued during 2023 despite rising deposit rates. One possible explanation is that deposit rate increases have not kept pace with rising yields on other investments. For example, spreads between bank deposit rates and yields on deposit substitutes such as money market funds have reached historically high levels. Although the outlook for deposit rates depends on the policy rate path, deposit levels are likely to remain stable under alternative policy scenarios.
Journal Article
Do Adverse Oil Price Shocks Change Loan Contract Terms for Energy Firms?
This article examined whether the relationship between creditworthiness and loan spreads for energy firms in the syndicated loan market changed after the 2014 oil-price shock. {{p}} The authors use syndicated loans, which are jointly funded by several financial institutions, because the syndicated loan market is a major source of debt financing for oil firms. Credit conditions tightened following the oil-price shock in mid-2014.