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Working Paper
Federal Home Loan Bank advances and commercial bank portfolio composition
This paper considers the role of Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) advances in stabilizing their commercial bank members' residential mortgage lending activities. Our theoretical model shows that using mortgage-related membership criteria or requiring mortgage-related collateral does not ensure that FHLB advances will be put to use for stabilizing members' financing of housing. Using panel vector autoregression (VAR) techniques, we estimate recent dynamic responses of U.S. bank portfolios to FHLB advance shocks, bank lending shocks, and macroeconomic shocks. Our empirical findings suggest that ...
Working Paper
Are Basel's Capital Surcharges for Global Systemically Important Banks Too Small?
The Basel Committee promulgates bank regulatory standards that many major economies enact to a significant extent. One element of the Basel III capital standards is a system of capital surcharges for global systemically important banks (G-SIBs). If the purpose of the surcharges is to ensure the survival of G-SIBs through serious crises (like the 2007-09 financial crisis) without extraordinary public assistance, our analysis suggests that current surcharges are too low because of three shortcomings: (1) the Basel system underestimates the probability that a G-SIB can fail, (2) the Basel system ...
Conference Paper
Basel II competitive implications
Working Paper
Financing Affordable and Sustainable Homeownership with Fixed-COFI Mortgages
The 30-year fixed-rate fully amortizing mortgage (or ?traditional fixed-rate mortgage?) was a substantial innovation when first developed during the Great Depression. However, it has three major flaws. First, because homeowner equity accumulates slowly during the first decade, homeowners are essentially renting their homes from lenders. With this sluggish equity accumulation, many lenders require large down payments. Second, in each monthly mortgage payment, homeowners substantially compensate capital markets investors for the ability to prepay. The homeowners might have better uses for this ...
Working Paper
Is mortgage lending by savings associations special?
In this paper, we investigate whether elimination of the savings association charter might reduce lending to nontraditional mortgage borrowers. We present a theoretical model of lender portfolio choice, in which nontraditional lenders have some market power and traditional lenders are price-takers in the mortgage market. The comparative statics indicate differences between nontraditional and traditional lenders in terms of their asset allocation responses to changes in borrower income and house prices. Empirical tests indicate the absence of such differences between savings associations and ...
Discussion Paper
Government-Backed Mortgage Insurance Promoted a Speedier Recovery from the Great Recession
The United Sates government has a long history of involvement in mortgage finance. During the 1930s, the government created the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). In this note, we estimate how the intensity of GSE, FHA, PLS, and portfolio exposures influence the state of the real economy across counties.