Search Results
Discussion Paper
Bank Lending Conditions during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a large shock to economies and financial systems around the world. In the beginning, as governments introduced unprecedented measures to contain the quickly spreading virus and households hunkered down to socially distance from one another, output plummeted, unemployment skyrocketed, and significant financial stress materialized.
Working Paper
The Anatomy of Financial Vulnerabilities and Crises
We extend the framework used in Aikman, Kiley, Lee, Palumbo, and Warusawitharana (2015) that maps vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system to a broader set of advanced and emerging economies. Our extension tracks a broader set of vulnerabilities and, therefore, captures signs of different types of crises. The typical anatomy of the evolution of vulnerabilities before and after a financial crisis is as follows. Pressures in asset valuations materialize, and a build-up of imbalances in the external, financial, and nonfinancial sectors follows. A financial crisis is typically followed by a ...
Working Paper
Risk-Taking Spillovers of U.S. Monetary Policy in the Global Market for U.S. Dollar Corporate Loans
We study the effects of U.S. interest rates and other factors on risk-taking in the global market for U.S. dollar syndicated term loans. We find that, before the Global Financial Crisis, both U.S. and non-U.S. lenders originated ex ante riskier loans to non-U.S. borrowers in response to a decline in short-term U.S. interest rates and, after the crisis, in response to a decline in longer-term U.S. interest rates. After the crisis, this behavior was more prominent for shadow banks and less prominent for banks with relatively low capital. Separately, before the crisis, lenders originated less ...
Working Paper
Modeling Your Stress Away
We investigate systematic changes in banks' projected credit losses between the 2014 and 2016 EBA stress tests, employing methodology from Philippon et al. (2017). We find that projected credit losses were smoothed across the tests through systematic model adjustments. Those banks whose losses would have increased the most from 2014 to 2016 due to changes in the supervisory scenarios-keeping the models constant and controlling for changes in the riskiness of underlying portfolios-saw the largest decrease in losses due to model changes. Model changes were more pronounced for banks that rely ...
Working Paper
Bank Capital Pressures, Loan Substitutability, and Nonfinancial Employment
We exploit the cross-state, cross-time variation in bank tangible capital ratios-brought about by bank branch deregulation on a state-by-state basis-to identify the effects of bank capital pressures on employment and firm dynamics during two waves of changes in bank capital regulation. We show that stronger capital pressures temporarily slowed down growth in employment in industries that depend on external finance, retarding growth in the average size of firms rather than in the number of firms. Such effects were particularly strong for smaller firms that may not have had access to national ...
Working Paper
The Domestic and International Effects of Interstate U.S. Banking
This paper studies the domestic and international effects of national bank market integration in a two-country, dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model with endogenous producer entry. Integration of banking across localities reduces the degree of local monopoly power of financial intermediaries. The economy that implements this form of deregulation experiences increased producer entry, real exchange rate appreciation, and a current account deficit. The foreign economy experiences a long-run increase in GDP and consumption. Less monopoly power in financial intermediation results in less ...
Working Paper
Financial Institutions’ Business Models and the Global Transmission of Monetary Policy
Global financial institutions play an important role in channeling funds across countries and, therefore, transmitting monetary policy from one country to another. In this paper, we study whether such international transmission depends on financial institutions' business models. In particular, we use Dutch, Spanish, and U.S. confidential supervisory data to test whether the transmission operates differently through banks, insurance companies, and pension funds. We find marked heterogeneity in the transmission of monetary policy across the three types of institutions, across the three banking ...