Search Results
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of relationship lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to less productive and more indebted firms. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Low-capitalized banks systematically distort firms’ risk assessments to window-dress their balance sheets. To avoid further reductions in their capital ratios, such banks extend relatively more credit to underreported borrowers. We incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening ...
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of relationship lending where lenders have an incentive to evergreen loans by offering better terms to less productive and more indebted firms. We detect such lending distortions using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Low-capitalized banks systematically distort their risk assessments of firms to window-dress their balance sheets and extend relatively more credit to underreported borrowers. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, these effects are driven by larger outstanding loans and low-productivity firms. We incorporate the theoretical ...
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of concentrated lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to firms that are close to default. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Banks that own a larger share of a firm’s debt provide distressed firms with relatively more credit at lower interest rates. Building on this empirical validation, we incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening affects aggregate outcomes, resulting in lower interest rates, higher ...
Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model with Occasional Financial Crises
Financial crises occur out of prolonged and credit-fueled boom periods and, at times, they are initiated by relatively small shocks that can have large effects. Consistent with these empirical observations, this paper extends a standard macroeconomic model to include financial intermediation, long-term loans, and occasional financial crises. Within this framework, intermediaries raise their lending and leverage in good times, thereby building up financial fragility. Crises typically occur at the end of a prolonged boom, initiated by a moderate adverse shock that triggers a liquidation of ...
Working Paper
Banks, Maturity Transformation, and Monetary Policy
Banks engage in maturity transformation and the term premium compensates them for bearing the associated duration risk. Consistent with this view, I show that banks’ net interest margins and term premia have comoved in the United States over the last decades. On monetary policy announcement days, banks’ stock prices fall in response to an increase in expected future short-term interest rates but rise if term premia increase. These effects are reflected in the response of banks’ net interest margins and amplified for institutions with a larger maturity mismatch. The results reveal that ...
Journal Article
Two Years into COVID, What’s the State of U.S. Businesses?
More than two years after the outbreak of COVID-19, concerns remain that U.S. businesses are substantially more vulnerable and less productive than in the past. Using extensive data on private and public firms allows for a detailed assessment of these concerns. According to a number of performance measures, businesses borrowing from large U.S. banks appear relatively healthy, increased leverage is concentrated among safer companies rather than riskier ones, and probabilities of default are close to pre-crisis levels.
Working Paper
The Transmission of Monetary Policy under the Microscope
We investigate the transmission of monetary policy to household consumption using detailed administrative data on the universe of households in Norway. Based on a novel series of identified monetary policy shocks, we estimate the dynamic responses of consumption, income, and saving along the liquid asset distribution of households. We find that low-liquidity but also high-liquidity households show strong responses, interest rate changes faced by borrowers and savers feed into consumption, and indirect effects of monetary policy outweigh direct effects, albeit with a delay. Overall, the ...
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of concentrated lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to firms that are close to default. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Banks that own a larger share of a firm’s debt provide distressed firms with relatively more credit at lower interest rates. Building on this empirical validation, we incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening affects aggregate outcomes, resulting in lower interest rates, higher ...
Journal Article
Monetary Policy Cycles and Financial Stability
Recent research suggests that sustained accommodative monetary policy has the potential to increase financial instability. However, under some circumstances tighter monetary policy may increase financial fragility through two channels. First, a surprise tightening tends to reduce the market value of banks? equity and raise their market leverage, exacerbating balance sheet fragility in the short run. Second, increases in the federal funds rate have historically been followed by an expansion of assets held by money market funds, which proved to be a source of instability in the 2007-09 ...
Journal Article
Are Banks Exposed to Interest Rate Risk?
While banks seem to face inherent risk from short-term interest rate changes, in practice they structure their balance sheets to avoid exposure to such risk. Nonetheless, recent research finds that banks cannot offload all of the interest rate risk they are naturally exposed to. Historically, banks’ profit margins reflect their compensation for taking on interest rate risk and their stock prices are highly sensitive to changes in interest rates. These findings can help practitioners assess banks’ risk exposures and may have implications for unconventional monetary policy.