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Discussion Paper
How Do Liquidity Conditions Affect U.S. Bank Lending?
The recent financial crisis underscored the importance of understanding how liquidity conditions for banks (or other financial institutions) influence the banks' lending to domestic and foreign customers.
Working Paper
Do Small Businesses Still Prefer Community Banks?
We formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank type ? small versus large, single-market versus multimarket, and local versus nonlocal banks ? in banking relationships. The conventional paradigm suggests that "community banks" ? small, single market, local institutions ? are better able to form strong relationships with informationally opaque small businesses, while "megabanks" ? large, multimarket, nonlocal institutions ? tend to serve more transparent firms. Using the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finance (SSBF), we conduct two sets of tests. First, we test for the type of bank ...
Journal Article
Estimating the volume of payments-driven revenues
This paper estimates the volume of payments-driven revenues at the top 40 domestic BHCs and builds on the statistical summaries that Radecki (1999) compiles from the top 25 BHCs in 1996. We replicate Radecki's 1996 results, but find that they overstate payments-driven revenues by including entire revenue sources that are not entirely payments-driven. We offer a modified definition of payments-driven revenue and re-estimate BHC payments-driven revenue for the top 40 BHCs. Our modified estimation method suggests that on average 16 percent of the operating revenue of the top 40 BHCs is derived ...
Working Paper
Does credit supply affect small-firm finance?
States were granted authority to limit interstate branching following passage of Federal legislation in 1994, relaxing restrictions on geographical expansion by banks. We show that differences in state?s branching restrictions affect credit supply. In states more open to branching, small firms borrow at interest rates 25 to 45 basis points lower than firms operating in less open states. Firms in open states also are more likely to borrow from banks. Despite this evidence that interstate branch openness expands credit supply, we find no effect of variation in state restrictions on branching on ...
Working Paper
Bank imputed interest rates: unbiased estimates of offered rates?
We examine whether 'imputed' interest rates obtained from bank financial statements are unbiased estimates of 'offered' interest rates that the same banks report in surveys. We find evidence of a statistically significant amount of bias. However, the statistical bias that we document does not appear to be economically significant. When used as dependent variables in regression analysis, imputed rates and offered rates lead to the same policy conclusions. Our work has important methodological implications for empirical research that examines the product market competition among depository ...
Working Paper
Measuring the Implementation of the FSB Key Attributes of Effective Resolution Regimes for Financial Institutions in the European Union
There are lingering concerns about the health of European banks and extensive market commentary about whether post-crisis regulatory reforms in Europe have adequately addressed these concerns. In June 2012, European policymakers released the broad outlines of a proposal for a "European banking union" to strengthen the banking sector and help assuage concerns of investors and depositors, however, uncertainty remains regarding how the new EU bank resolution regime, the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD), will work in practice. This paper addresses whether the BRRD has fulfilled the ...
Working Paper
When good investments go bad: the contraction in community bank lending after the 2008 GSE takeover
In September 2008, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed into conservatorship and dividend payments on common and preferred shares were suspended. As a result, share prices fell to nearly zero and many banks across the country lost the value of their investments in the preferred shares. We estimate more than 600 depository institutions in the United States were exposed to at least $8 billion in investment losses from these securities. In addition, fifteen failures and two distressed mergers either directly or indirectly resulted from the takeover. ...
Working Paper
Assessing a decade of interstate bank branching
U.S. banking regulation has historically prohibited the ability of a bank to open or own a branch located outside of its home state, commonly referred to as interstate branching. Only since the passage of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) in 1994 have banks have been able to engage in interstate branching, though subject to state restrictions. Despite IBBEA?s removal of branching barriers, it still allowed the states to impose restrictions on the entry of out-of-state branch offices. This article describes the changes in Federal and state interstate ...
Journal Article
How do banks make money? a variety of business strategies
In the second of two articles, the authors show that the business strategy chosen by a commercial banking company can have a substantial impact on its risk-return profile. Their analysis suggests that a wide variety of business strategies are likely to be financially viable in the future but, echoing concerns of others, they conclude that very small banking companies will face financial challenges regardless of the business strategy they select