Search Results
Working Paper
Regulatory incentives and consolidation: the case of commercial bank mergers and the Community Reinvestment Act
Bank regulators are required to consider a bank?s record of providing credit to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and individuals in approving bank applications for mergers and acquisitions. We test the hypothesis that banks strategically prepare for the regulatory and public scrutiny associated with a merger or acquisition by increasing their lending to low-and moderate-income individuals in anticipation of acquiring another institution. We find evidence in favor of this hypothesis. In particular, we show that the higher the percentage of the institution?s mortgage originations in a ...
Newsletter
What do U.S. life insurers invest in?
Researchers at the Chicago Fed Insurance Initiative are analyzing the role that the insurance industry plays in financial markets and the economy as a whole. This article presents an overview of life insurers? financial asset holdings, the industries they invest in, and how the value of their investments would change if there was a large negative shock to asset values.
Working Paper
Risk taking and the quality of informal insurance: gambling and remittances in Thailand
More than 35% of Thai households either give or receive remittances, and remittances account for about one-third of the income of the receiving households. Remittance relationships may be an important source of protection against adverse events for the individuals involved. This paper provides evidence that remittances behave in a way that is consistent with insurance: they are sensitive to shocks to regional rainfall and they respond to household level events. The paper goes on to consider how the quality of insurance that is offered through remittances affects household risk taking ...
Working Paper
Prospects for immigrant-native wealth assimilation: evidence from financial market participation
Because financial transactions are important for wealth accumulation, and rely on trust and confidence in institutions, the financial market behavior of immigrants can provide important insights into the assimilation process. Compared to the native-born, immigrants are less likely to own savings and checking accounts and these differences tend to persist over time. Our results suggest that a large share of the immigrant-native gap in financial market participation is driven by group differences in education, income, and geographic location. For a given immigrant, the likelihood of financial ...
Newsletter
How liquid are U.S. life insurance liabilities?
This article describes the liquidity of various life insurance products and provides a measure that can be used to characterize the liquidity of the liabilities of the industry as a whole or of a particular firm.
Searching for “Inflation Canaries” in Household Surveys
Current surveys of household inflation expectations make it challenging to identify “inflation canaries”—individuals who consistently send out early and accurate warning signals for inflation. We propose some simple changes in survey design (longer, staggered survey panels) and emphasis (focusing on changes in expectations rather than levels and highlighting particularly accurate subpopulations) that have the potential to alleviate these concerns. To demonstrate, we provide several examples using the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations.
Journal Article
Default rates on prime and subprime mortgages: differences & similarities
For the past several years, the news media have carried countless stories about soaring defaults among subprime mortgage borrowers. Although concern over this segment of the mortgage market is certainly justified, subprime mortgages only account for about onequarter of the total outstanding mortgages in the United States. The remaining 75 percent are prime loans that are made to borrowers with good credit, who fully document their income and make traditional down payments. While default rates on prime loans are significantly lower than those on subprime loans, they are also increasing ...
Newsletter
The Structure of Federal Reserve Liabilities
Throughout the financial crisis and its aftermath from late 2008 through October 2014, the Federal Reserve used asset purchases as a potent tool of monetary policy?buying longer-term Treasury and mortgage-backed securities to provide economic stimulus beyond what traditional policy approaches could produce. Consequently, the size and composition of the Fed?s balance sheet changed significantly over this period.