Search Results
Working Paper
Market-based regulation and the informational content of prices
Various laws and policy proposals call for regulators to make use of the information reflected in market prices. We focus on a leading example of such a proposal, namely that bank supervision should make use of the market prices of traded bank securities. We study the theoretical underpinnings of this proposal in light of a key problem: if the regulator uses market prices, prices adjust to reflect this use and potentially become less revealing. We show that the feasibility of this proposal depends critically on the information gap between the market and the regulator. Thus, there is a strong ...
Working Paper
Federal Reserve Structure, Economic Ideas, and Monetary and Financial Policy
The decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System is evaluated as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary and financial policy. The role of the Reserve Banks starting in the 1960s is emphasized. The introduction of monetarism in the 1960s, rational expectations in the 1970s, credibility in the 1980s, transparency, and other monetary policy ideas by Reserve Banks into the Federal Reserve System is documented. Contributions by Reserve Banks to policy on bank structure, bank regulation, and lender of last resort are also discussed. We argue that the Reserve Banks ...
Working Paper
Did the Financial Reforms of the Early 1990s Fail? A Comparison of Bank Failures and FDIC Losses in the 1986-92 and 2007-13 Periods
Two of the most significant banking reforms to come out of the banking problems in the late 1980s and early 1990s were the increase in capital requirements from Basel 1 and the prompt corrective action (PCA) provisions of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA). The PCA provisions require regulators to shut down banks before book capital becomes negative. We compare failures and FDIC losses on commercial banks in the pre-FDICIA commercial bank crisis of the mid-1980s to early 1990s with that in the recent financial crisis. Using a sample of community and ...
Working Paper
An experimental analysis of contingent capital triggering mechanisms
This paper reports an experiment that evaluates three regimes for triggering the conversion of contingent capital bonds into equity: (a) a ?regulator? regime, where socially motivated regulators make conversion decisions based on observed prices, (b) a ?fixed trigger? regime where a price threshold triggers a mandatory conversion, and (c) a ?prediction market? regime where we supplement the regulator?s information set with the results of a prediction market that elicits traders? perceived likelihood of a conversion. Consistent with theory, we observe informational and allocative ...
Working Paper
Theory of the firm: applied mechanism design
This paper studies the question: Why are there Firms? Motivated by observations of a variety of economies, several distinct concepts of what it means to be a firm are identified and then analyzed with mechanism design models. In the first class of models, a group of individuals is a firm if they collude and share information. This model is analyzed and compared with the non-firm alternative. Conditions are provided in which firms are preferred to no firms and vice versa. Next, we show how an economy with multiple distinct groups of colluding individuals can be decentralized. ; In the next ...
Briefing
The costs and benefits of bank supervisory disclosure
Bank examinations, like the recent "stress test," yield information of interest to the market. Releasing those results may increase transparency. For routine annual bank exams, however, doing so could impede a supervisor's ability to collect information.
Journal Article
Technological design and moral hazard
Working Paper
Macroprudential Policy: Results from a Tabletop Exercise
This paper presents a tabletop exercise designed to analyze macroprudential policy. Several senior Federal Reserve officials were presented with a hypothetical economy as of 2020:Q2 in which commercial real estate and nonfinancial debt valuations were very high. After analyzing the economy and discussing the use of monetary and macroprudential policy tools, participants were then presented with a hypothetical negative shock to commercial real estate valuations that occurred in the second half of 2020. Participants then discussed the use of the tools during an incipient downturn. Some of the ...
Journal Article
A regional look at the role of house prices and labor market conditions in mortgage default
A linear fixed effects statistical model is used to study variations in foreclosure rates across metropolitan statistical areas in the Fifth Federal Reserve District. We find that variations in local labor market conditions and house prices do a remarkable job of capturing variation in foreclosure rates. We study the regional variation in foreclosure rates in more detail by examining two localities in our district: Prince William County, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Finally, the model is used to provide forecasts of foreclosure rates conditioned on possible paths of labor market ...
Working Paper
State-contingent bank regulation with unobserved actions and unobserved characteristics
This paper studies bank regulation in the presence of deposit insurance, where banks have private information on their own ability and their investment strategy. Banks choose the mean and variance of their portfolio return. Regulators wish to control banks' risk choice, even though all agents are risk neutral and there are no deadweight costs of bank failure, because high risk adversely affects banks' ex ante incentives along other dimensions. Regulatory tools studied are capital requirements and return-contingent fines. Regulators can seek to separate bank types by offering a menu of ...