Search Results
Working Paper
Employment Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policy : Evidence from QE
This paper investigates the effect of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy on employment via a bank lending channel. We find that banks with higher mortgage-backed securities holdings issued relatively more loans after the first and third rounds of quantitative easing (QE1 and QE3). While additional volume is concentrated in refinanced mortgages after QE1, increases are driven by newly originated home purchase mortgages and additional commercial and industrial lending after QE3. Using spatial variation, we show that regions with a high share of affected banks experienced ...
Working Paper
Claim Dilution in the Municipal Debt Market
Using loan-level municipal bank lending data, we examine the debt structure of municipalities and its response to exogenous income shocks. We show that small, more indebted, low-income, and medium credit quality counties are particularly reliant on private bank financing. Low income counties are more likely to increase bank debt share after an adverse permanent income shock while high income counties do not shift their debt structure in response. In contrast, only high income counties draw on their credit lines after adverse transitory income shocks. Overall, our paper raises concerns about ...
Working Paper
Did QE Lead Banks to Relax Their Lending Standards? Evidence from the Federal Reserve's LSAPs
Using confidential loan officer survey data on lending standards and internal risk ratings on loans, we document an effect of large-scale asset purchase programs (LSAPs) on lending standards and risk-taking. We exploit cross-sectional variation in banks? holdings of mortgage-backed securities to show that the first and third round of quantitative easing (QE1 and QE3) significantly lowered lending standards and increased loan risk characteristics. The magnitude of the effects is about the same in QE1 and QE3, and is comparable to the effect of a one percentage point decrease in the Fed funds ...
Working Paper
Bottom-up Leading Macroeconomic Indicators: An Application to Non-Financial Corporate Defaults using Machine Learning
This paper constructs a leading macroeconomic indicator from microeconomic data using recent machine learning techniques. Using tree-based methods, we estimate probabilities of default for publicly traded non-financial firms in the United States. We then use the cross-section of out-of-sample predicted default probabilities to construct a leading indicator of non-financial corporate health. The index predicts real economic outcomes such as GDP growth and employment up to eight quarters ahead. Impulse responses validate the interpretation of the index as a measure of financial stress.
Working Paper
Publication Bias and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns
We develop an estimator for publication bias and apply it to 156 hedge portfolios based on published cross-sectional return predictors. Publication bias adjusted returns are only 12% smaller than in-sample returns. The small bias comes from the dispersion of returns across predictors, which is too large to be accounted for by data-mined noise. Among predictors that can survive journal review, a low t-stat hurdle of 1.8 controls for multiple testing using statistics recommended by Harvey, Liu, and Zhu (2015). The estimated bias is too small to account for the deterioration in returns after ...
Working Paper
Open Source Cross-Sectional Asset Pricing
We provide data and code that successfully reproduces nearly all crosssectional stock return predictors. Our 319 characteristics draw from previous meta-studies, but we differ by comparing our t-stats to the original papers' results. For the 161 characteristics that were clearly significant in the original papers, 98% of our long-short portfolios find t-stats above 1.96. For the 44 characteristics that had mixed evidence, our reproductions find t-stats of 2 on average. A regression of reproduced t-stats on original longshort t-stats finds a slope of 0.90 and an R2 of 83%. Mean returns ...
Newsletter
Exposure to Cyber Risk and Inadequate Cybersecurity Regulations: Evidence from Municipalities
In this article, which is based on a related working paper, we document the adverse effects of cyberattacks on municipalities and the ineffectiveness of current state regulation to stave off future cyberattacks. In the process of providing services to their citizens, state and local governments collect and store a wide range of sensitive personal information (data). Access to personal information, sometimes combined with a lack of adequate cybersecurity (FitchRatings, 2022), makes governments attractive targets for cyberattacks, in particular data breaches. Indeed, in our sample external data ...
Working Paper
The “Privatization” of Municipal Debt
We study the determinants of local governments’ reliance on bank loans using granular data from the Federal Reserve. Governments that are larger, rely on stable revenue sources, or have higher spending relative to revenues are more likely to borrow from banks. About a third of governments in the top revenue quintile have obtained bank loans since 2011, typically accounting for a fifth of their total debt. Declines in revenues, reductions in bond market access, agency rating downgrades, and relationships with financial advisers and underwriters all strongly predict higher bank loan reliance. ...
Discussion Paper
Ten years later – Did QE work?
By November 2008, the Global Financial Crisis, which originated in the residential housing market and the shadow banking system, had begun to turn into a major recession, spurring the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to initiate what we now refer to as quantitative easing (QE). In this blog post, we draw upon the empirical findings of post-crisis academic research's including our own work's to shed light on the question: Did QE work?
Discussion Paper
Inflating Away the Debt: The Debt-Inflation Channel of German Hyperinflation
The recent rise in price pressures around the world has reignited interest in understanding how inflation transmits to the real economy. Economists have long recognized that unexpected surges of inflation can redistribute wealth from creditors to debtors when debt contracts are written in nominal terms (see, for example, Fisher 1933). If debtors are financially constrained, this redistribution can affect real economic activity by relaxing financing constraints. This mechanism, which we call the debt-inflation channel, is well understood theoretically (for example, Gomes, Jermann, and Schmid ...