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Working Paper
Mortgage Choice in the Housing Boom: Impacts of House Price Appreciation and Borrower Type
The U.S. housing boom during the first part of the past decade was marked by rapid house price appreciation and greater access to mortgage credit for lower credit-rated borrowers. The subsequent collapse of the housing market and the high default rates on residential mortgages raise the issue of whether the pace of house price appreciation and the mix of borrowers may have affected the influence of fundamentals in housing and mortgage markets. This paper examines that issue in connection with one aspect of mortgage financing, the choice among fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages. This ...
Journal Article
Tax incentives for corporate leverage in the 1980s
Journal Article
Commodity prices and inflation
This study examines the empirical relationship between changes in commodity prices and inflation by looking at the performance of non-oil commodity prices as stand-alone indicators of inflation and in conjunction with other leading indicators of inflation. The results indicate that the empirical link between commodity prices and inflation has changed dramatically over time. Commodity prices were relatively strong and statistically robust leading indicators of overall inflation during the 1970s and early 1980s, but they have been poor stand-alone indicators of inflation since the early ...
Journal Article
Drivers of mortgage choices by risky borrowers
During the past decade?s housing boom, borrowers with lower credit ratings were more likely than higher-rated borrowers to choose adjustable-rate mortgages. This raises the question of whether, amid rapidly rising house prices, lower-rated borrowers paid less attention to loan pricing and interest-rate-related factors. However, even accounting for house price appreciation, research shows these borrowers were as, if not more, responsive as higher-rated borrowers to changes in interest-rate-related fundamentals. Their tendency to choose adjustable-rate mortgages is consistent with mortgage ...
Working Paper
Bank capital regulation: a reconciliation of two viewpoints
There are two seemingly inconsistent strands of the finance literature regarding the effects of bank capital regulation. On the one hand, the value maximization literature implies that more stringent capital regulation will reduce the probability of bank failure and the risk exposure of the deposit insurance fund. On the other hand, the utility-maximization literature, using the Markowitz two-parameter portfolio model, concludes that more stringent capital regulation will increase asset risk and can increase the probability of bank failure. ; In this paper, we show that this seeming ...
Journal Article
Bank capital regulation and asset risk
Journal Article
Financial modernization and regulation
Journal Article
Financial market signals and banking supervision: are current practices consistent with research findings?
The trend toward incorporating information derived from financial markets into the bank supervision process has gained momentum over the past several years. This in part reflects an evolution in the thinking about how private market information can contribute to the process. In light of the evolving view of the potential contributions of market information, this paper reviews the empirical evidence relevant to the usefulness of financial market information in the bank supervision process. This paper reviews the research on what information can be gleaned from the pricing of equity and debt ...
Journal Article
A deposit insurance puzzle
Journal Article
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and financial integration