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Report
Barriers to household risk management: evidence from India
Cole, Shawn; Gine, Xavier; Tobacman, Jeremy; Vickery, James; Townsend, Robert M.; Topalova, Petia (2009-05-01)
Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce the consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this potential remains unfulfilled. This paper studies the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in the event of insufficient rainfall during the primary monsoon season. We first document relatively low adoption of this new risk management product: Only 5-10 percent of households purchase the insurance, even though they overwhelmingly cite rainfall variability as their most ...
Staff Reports , Paper 373

Journal Article
Do big banks have lower operating costs?
Zhou, Lily; Kovner, Anna; Vickery, James (2014-12)
This study examines the relationship between bank holding company (BHC) size and components of noninterest expense (NIE) in order to shed light on the sources of scale economies in banking. Drawing on detailed expense information provided by U.S. banking firms in the memoranda of their regulatory filings, the authors find a robust negative relationship between size and normalized measures of NIE. The relationship is strongest for employee compensation expenses and components of ?other? noninterest expense such as information technology and corporate overhead expenses. In addition, the authors ...
Economic Policy Review , Issue Dec , Pages 1-27

Discussion Paper
Do Big Banks Have Lower Operating Costs?
Zhou, Lily; Kovner, Anna; Vickery, James (2014-03-25)
Despite recent financial reforms, there is still widespread concern that large banking firms remain “too big to fail.” As a solution, some reformers advocate capping the size of the largest banking firms. One consideration, however, is that while early literature found limited evidence for economies of scale, recent academic research has found evidence of scale economies in banking, even for the largest banking firms, implying that such caps could impose real costs on the economy. In our contribution to the volume on large and complex banks, we extend this line of research by studying the ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 201404325a

Conference Paper
Interest rates and consumer choice in the residential mortgage market: a summary
Vickery, James (2007)
Proceedings , Paper 1041

Report
Identifying term interbank loans from Fedwire payments data
Kuo, Dennis; Skeie, David R.; Vickery, James; Youle, Thomas (2013)
Interbank markets for term maturities experienced great stress during the 2007-09 financial crisis, as illustrated by the behavior of the one- and three-month Libor. Despite widespread interest in these markets, little data is available on dollar interbank lending for maturities beyond overnight. We develop a methodology to infer information about individual term dollar interbank loans settled through the Fedwire Funds Service, the large-value bank payment system operated by the Federal Reserve Banks. We find a sharp increase in the dispersion of inferred term interbank interest rates, a ...
Staff Reports , Paper 603

Report
MBS ratings and the mortgage credit boom
Ashcraft, Adam B.; Vickery, James; Goldsmith-Pinkham, Paul (2010)
We study credit ratings on subprime and Alt-A mortgage-backed-securities (MBS) deals issued between 2001 and 2007, the period leading up to the subprime crisis. The fraction of highly rated securities in each deal is decreasing in mortgage credit risk (measured either ex ante or ex post), suggesting that ratings contain useful information for investors. However, we also find evidence of significant time variation in risk-adjusted credit ratings, including a progressive decline in standards around the MBS market peak between the start of 2005 and mid-2007. Conditional on initial ratings, we ...
Staff Reports , Paper 449

Report
The rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Tracy, Joseph; Frame, W. Scott; Vickery, James; Fuster, Andreas (2015-03-01)
We describe and evaluate the measures taken by the U.S. government to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. We begin by outlining the business model of these two firms and their role in the U.S. housing finance system. Our focus then turns to the sources of financial distress that the firms experienced and the events that ultimately led the government to take action in an effort to stabilize housing and financial markets. We describe the various resolution options available to policymakers at the time and evaluate the success of the choice of conservatorship, and other actions ...
Staff Reports , Paper 719

Report
Intermediation Frictions in Debt Relief: Evidence from CARES Act Forbearance
Kim, You Suk; Lee, Donghoon; Scharlemann, Tess C.; Vickery, James (2022-10-01)
We study how intermediaries—mortgage servicers—shaped the implementation of mortgage forbearance during the COVID-19 pandemic and use servicer-level variation to trace out the causal effect of forbearance on borrowers. Forbearance provision varied widely across servicers. Small servicers and nonbanks, especially nonbanks with small liquidity buffers, facilitated fewer forbearances and saw a higher incidence of forbearance-related complaints. Easier access to forbearance substantially increased mortgage nonpayment but also reduced delinquencies outside of forbearance. Part of the liquidity ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1035

Report
The role of technology in mortgage lending
Schnabl, Philipp; Vickery, James; Fuster, Andreas; Plosser, Matthew (2018-02-01)
Technology-based (?FinTech?) lenders increased their market share of U.S. mortgage lending from 2 percent to 8 percent from 2010 to 2016. Using market-wide, loan-level data on U.S. mortgage applications and originations, we show that FinTech lenders process mortgage applications about 20 percent faster than other lenders, even when controlling for detailed loan, borrower, and geographic observables. Faster processing does not come at the cost of higher defaults. FinTech lenders adjust supply more elastically than other lenders in response to exogenous mortgage demand shocks, thereby ...
Staff Reports , Paper 836

Report
How does risk management influence production decisions? evidence from a field experiment
Cole, Shawn; Vickery, James; Gine, Xavier (2014-09-01)
Weather is a key source of income risk, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial involving a sample of Indian farmers to study how an innovative rainfall insurance product affects production decisions. We find that insurance provision induces farmers?particularly educated farmers?to shift production toward higher-return but higher-risk cash crops. Our results support the view that financial innovation can mitigate the real effects of uninsured production risk. Addressing the puzzle of low adoption, we show that payouts improve trust in the ...
Staff Reports , Paper 692

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