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Working Paper
Nonbank Lenders as Global Shock Absorbers: Evidence from US Monetary Policy Spillovers
We show that nonbank lenders act as global shock absorbers from US monetary policy spillovers. We exploit loan-level data from the global syndicated lending market and US monetary policy surprises. When US policy tightens, nonbanks increase dollar credit supply to non-US firms (relative to banks), mitigating the dollar credit reduction. This increase is stronger for riskier firms, proxied by emerging market firms, high-yield firms, or firms in countries with stronger capital inflow restrictions. However, firm-lender matching, zombie lending, fragile-nonbank lending, or periods of low vs ...
Working Paper
Pipeline Risk in Leveraged Loan Syndication
Leveraged term loans are typically arranged by banks but distributed to institutional investors. Using novel data, we find that to elicit investors' willingness to pay, arrangers expose themselves to pipeline risk: They have to retain larger shares when investors are willing to pay less than expected. We argue that the retention of such problematic loans creates a debt overhang problem. Consistent with this, we find that the materialization of pipeline risk for an arranger reduces its subsequent arranging and lending activity. Aggregate time series exhibit a similar pattern, which suggests ...
Working Paper
The Rise of Shadow Banking : Evidence from Capital Regulation
We investigate the connections between bank capital regulation and the prevalence of lightly regulated nonbanks (shadow banks) in the U.S. corporate loan market. For identification, we exploit a supervisory credit register of syndicated loans, loan-time fixed-effects, and shocks to capital requirements arising from surprise features of the U.S. implementation of Basel III. We find that less-capitalized banks reduce loan retention and nonbanks step in, particularly among loans with higher capital requirements and at times when capital is scarce. This reallocation has important spillovers: ...
Working Paper
Credit line use and availability in the financial crisis: the importance of hedging
What determined the corporate use of credit lines in the recent financial crisis? To address this question we hand-collect data on credit lines and interest rate hedging for a random sample of 600 COMPUSTAT firms. We document that drawdowns of credit lines had already increased in 2007, earlier than what previous work has found. The surge in drawdowns occurred precisely when disruptions in bank funding markets began. In addition, we distinguish unused and available portions of credit lines, which we then use to disentangle credit supply and credit demand effects. On the supply side, we find ...
Working Paper
Ownership Concentration and Performance of Deteriorating Syndicated Loans
Regulation and capital constraints may force banks and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) to sell deteriorating loans, potentially hampering renegotiation and amplifying the initial negative shock to the borrower. We show that banks and CLOs sell downgraded loans to mutual funds and hedge funds. The reallocation of loan shares favors the syndicate's concentration, increasing lenders' incentives to renegotiate. However, syndicates remain less concentrated when potential buyers experience financial constraints and subsequently loans are less likely to be amended and more likely to be ...
Newsletter
How central bank swap lines affect the leveraged loan market
The cost of borrowing U.S. dollars through foreign exchange (FX) swap markets increased significantly at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020, indicated by larger deviations from covered interest rate parity (CIP). CIP deviations narrowed again when the Federal Reserve expanded its swap lines to support U.S. dollar liquidity globally—by enhancing and extending its swap facility with foreign central banks and introducing the new temporary Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) repurchase agreement facility for foreign and international monetary authorities. ...
Working Paper
The unreliability of credit-to-GDP ratio gaps in real-time: Implications for countercyclical capital buffers
Macroeconomists have long recognized that activity-gap measures are unreliable in real time and that this can present serious difficulties for stabilization policy. This paper investigates whether the credit-to-GDP ratio gap, which has been proposed as a reference point for accumulating countercyclical capital buffers, is subject to similar problems. We find that ex-post revisions to the U.S. credit-to-GDP ratio gap are sizable and as large as the gap itself, and that the main source of these revisions stems from the unreliability of end-of-sample estimates of the series' trend rather than ...
Working Paper
Verifying the state of financing constraints: evidence from U.S. business credit contracts
Which of the strategies for financing constraints in economic models is the most empirically plausible? This paper tests two commonly used models of financing constraints, costly state verification (Townsend, 1979) and moral hazard (Holmstrom and Tirole, 1997), using a comprehensive data set of US small business credit contracts. The data include detailed information about the business, its owner, bank balance sheet information, and the terms of credit. In line with the predictions of models of financing constraints, I find that an additional dollar of net worth accounts for about 30 cents of ...
Newsletter
Privately Placed Debt on Life Insurers’ Balance Sheets: Part 2—Increasing Complexity
In this second part of our Chicago Fed Letter series on life insurers’ investments in private placements, we use novel data to assess the growing complexity and liquidity of these investments.1 We start by documenting that these investments have shifted toward issuers in financial and real estate sectors. We then show that this shift reflects more lending to asset managers, including private direct lending funds. One reason for this shift to financial issuers is that these private placements tend to be more complex and less liquid, resulting in higher yields. Lastly, we show that, while ...
Working Paper
Crisis Liquidity Facilities with Nonbank Counterparties: Lessons from the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
In response to immense strains in the asset-backed securities market in 2008 and 2020, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury twice launched the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF). TALF was an unusual crisis facility because it provided loans to a wide range of nonbank financial institutions. Using detailed loan-level data unexplored by previous researchers, we study the behavior of nonbank borrowers in TALF. We find the extent to which the actions of these borrowers supported key program goals--stabilizing markets quickly, winding down the program when it was no longer ...