Search Results
Journal Article
Corporate Leverage and Investment
In this article, we examine the relationship between high corporate leverage and future firm investment spending on structures, machinery, and equipment. In other words, we examine how debt influences the growth of a firm’s capital stock or fixed assets. We find that, on average, more leveraged firms across industries tend to have lower levels of investment activity in the future. Specifically, we find that the negative relationship between debt and investment is strongest for the most highly indebted firms and is evident in both economic downturns and expansions.
Journal Article
Why Are Multifamily Property Prices Falling?
Multifamily property prices climbed to record levels in recent years amid low interest rates and surging housing demand. More recently, prices have retreated in the face of higher interest rates, slower rent growth, elevated operating expenses, and increased delivery of new units available for rent. However, the deterioration in these fundamentals does not fully explain recent property price declines, suggesting investors’ near-term outlooks have been pessimistic.
Journal Article
What's Driving Leveraged Loan Spreads?
Syndicated loan spreads have declined since the financial crisis, reducing the cost of credit for corporate borrowers. However, the combination of aggressive loan pricing and weaker credit protections has concerned market observers. We find that syndicated loan spreads have declined across loan and borrower types since the crisis. We also find the decline has been more pronounced for highly leveraged borrowers and has accelerated since 2016, especially for term loans.
Journal Article
How Have Banks Responded to Declining Reserve Balances?
Reserve balances have declined by more than $1 trillion since 2014, leading banks to increase their holdings of other high-quality assets to meet liquidity requirements. However, the composition of these assets varies substantially across banks, suggesting the drivers of demand for reserves are not uniform.
Journal Article
The Implications of Unrealized Losses for Banks
nterest rates have risen across the yield curve since the Federal Open Market Committee began tightening monetary policy in March 2022. After amassing securities during the pandemic, commercial banks saw rising interest rates erode the value of their securities portfolios by nearly $600 billion, or about 30 percent of their capital holdings. In some cases, declines in valuation of securities holdings in response to interest rate changes—known as “unrealized losses”—can mechanically reduce key regulatory capital and liquidity ratios. Should banks need to sell the securities to generate ...
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 ...
Journal Article
Is Bank Capital Regulation Driving Continued Use of the Overnight Reverse Repurchase (ON RRP) Facility?
Use of the Federal Reserve’s overnight reverse repurchase (ON RRP) facility rose in 2022, coinciding with deposit outflows and declining reserves at commercial banks. A popular narrative suggests that regulatory capital requirements discouraged bank deposit-taking, driving up ON RRP use. However, this story neglects important contributors to the ON RRP’s surge. We find that limited money market investment opportunities, policy uncertainty, and administrative changes likely explain increased ON RRP activity.
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.
Working Paper
Supervisory Stringency, Payout Restrictions, and Bank Equity Prices
I study investor responses to the 2020 bank stress tests that included restrictions on shareholder payouts. I find that banks subject to the stress tests and payout restrictions experienced both immediate and persistently lower excess stock price returns. In the cross-section, I find that excess stock returns declined with bank size but cannot otherwise be explained by pre-pandemic bank or payout characteristics, suggesting that investors penalized banks likely to experience greater regulatory scrutiny. However, the excess stock return penalties are smaller than those previously estimated in ...
Journal Article
Understanding the Recent Rise in Municipal Bond Yields
In late March, investors sold off municipal bonds at a rapid pace, depressing municipal bond prices and driving up their yields relative to U.S. Treasuries. We find that this initial investor run on the municipal bond market was likely due to increased liquidity demand rather than credit concerns, making the Federal Reserve’s early actions to relieve liquidity stress effective. Going forward, however, municipal bond prices will likely reflect increased credit concerns.