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Working Paper
Social Capital and Mortgages
Using comprehensive mortgage-level data, we discover that the social capital of the community in which households live positively influences the likelihood of the approval of their mortgage applications, the terms of approved mortgages, and the subsequent performance of those mortgages. The results hold when conditioning on extensive household and community characteristics and a battery of fixed effects, including individual effects, data permitting, and when employing instrumental variables and propensity score matching to address identification and selection concerns. Concerning causal ...
Working Paper
Did bank borrowers benefit from the TARP program : the effects of TARP on loan contract terms
We study the effects of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on loan contract terms to businesses borrowing from recipient banks. Using a difference-in-difference analysis, we find that TARP led to more favorable terms to these borrowers in all five contract terms studied ? loan amounts, spreads, maturities, collateral, and covenants. This suggests recipient banks' borrowers benefited from TARP. These findings are statistically and economically significant, and are robust to dealing with potential endogeneity issues and other checks. {{p}} The contract term improvements are concentrated ...
Working Paper
Did saving Wall Street really save Main Street : the real effects of TARP on local economic conditions
We investigate whether saving Wall Street through the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) really saved Main Street during the recent financial crisis. Our difference-in-difference analysis suggests that TARP statistically and economically significantly increased net job creation and net hiring establishments and decreased business and personal bankruptcies. The results are robust, including accounting for endogeneity. The main mechanisms driving the results appear to be increases in commercial real estate lending and off-balance sheet real estate guarantees. These results suggest that ...
Working Paper
Bank Size and Household Financial Sentiment: Surprising Evidence from the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers
We analyze comparative advantages/disadvantages of small and large banks in improving household sentiment regarding financial conditions. We match sentiment data from the University Of Michigan Surveys Of Consumers with local banking market data from 2000 to 2014. Surprisingly, the evidence suggests that large rather than small banks have significant comparative advantages in boosting household sentiment. Findings are robust to instrumental variables and other econometric methods. Additional analyses are consistent with both scale economies and the superior safety of large banks as channels ...
Working Paper
Shareholder activism in banking
This paper conducts the first assessment of shareholder activism in banking and its effects on risk and performance. The focus is on the conflicts among bank shareholders, managers, and creditors (e.g., regulators, deposit insurer, taxpayers, depositors). This paper finds activism may generally be a destabilizing force, increasing bank risk-taking, but creating market value for shareholders, and leaving operating returns unchanged, consistent with the empirical dominance of the Shareholder-Creditor Conflict. However, during financial crises, the increase in risk disappears, suggesting ...
Working Paper
Lending by Servicing: Monetary Policy Transmission Through Shadow Banks
We propose a new conceptual framework for monetary policy transmission through shadow banks in the mortgage market that highlights the role of mortgage servicing in generating non-deposit funds for lending. We document that mortgage servicing acts as a natural hedge against interest rate shocks and dampens the effect of monetary policy on shadow bank mortgage lending. Higher interest rates reduce prepayment risk, increasing the collateral value of mortgage servicing assets and cashflow from servicing income. This enables shadow banks with greater exposure to mortgage servicing to obtain more ...
Working Paper
Is a Friend in Need a Friend Indeed? How Relationship Borrowers Fare during the COVID-19 Crisis
We analyze loan contract terms, investigating whether relationship borrowers fare better or worse than others in times of need, using the COVID-19 crisis as a quasi-natural experiment. COVID-19 is superior to prior crises for such analysis because its public health and government restrictions shocks directly harm borrowers, rather than banks. Our dataset includes Y-14Q, covering syndicated and non syndicated loans and small and large firms, unlike some other datasets. We find the dark side of relationships dominates across four relationship measures, 14 COVID-19 shocks, and PPP participation. ...
Working Paper
"Let Us Put Our Moneys Together": Minority-Owned Banks and Resilience to Crises
Minority-owned banks have a mission to promote economic well-being in their communities. In particular, specialization in lending based on a central mechanism of shared-minority identity can yield an advantage in serving community needs through times of financial and economic crises. To test this proposition, we analyze individual banks in their local market context from 2006 to 2020. Results suggest minority-owned banks improve economic resilience in their communities during the global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 crisis through increased small business and household lending, but ...
Working Paper
Banking on Deforestation: The Cost of Nonenforcement
Despite surging environmental laws, how their enforcement influences banks’ management of climate risks remains underexplored. Using the Brazilian Amazon as a laboratory, we examine the impact of a shock to environmental law enforcement capacity on bank management of risks arising from deforestation — a significant but understudied climate risk. After enforcement declined, Brazilian banks significantly altered their priorities to more short-term profitability over longer-term risk concerns. Banks greatly increased lending to agribusinesses engaged in deforestation and actively shifted ...
Journal Article
Enforcement Actions and Bank Loan Contracting
Raluca A. Roman finds that bank loans initiated after an enforcement action have lower interest rates than loans initiated before an enforcement action.