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Discussion Paper
On the Benefits of Universal Banks: Concurrent Lending and Corporate Bond Underwriting
In this note, we explore whether "universal banks" provide value to firms through their ability to provide both lending and underwriting services.
Working Paper
The Marginal Effect of Government Mortgage Guarantees on Homeownership
The U.S. government guarantees a majority of residential mortgages, which is often justified as a means to promote homeownership. In this paper we use property-level data to estimate the effect of government mortgage guarantees on homeownership, by exploiting variation of the conforming loan limits (CLLs) along county borders. We find substantial effects on government guarantees, but find no robust effect on homeownership. This finding suggests that government guarantees could be considerably reduced with modest effects on homeownership, which is relevant for housing finance reform plans that ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Competitive Effects of Common Ownership
If managers maximize the payoffs of their shareholders rather than firm profits, then it may be anticompetitive for a shareholder to own competing firms. This is because a manager?s objective function may place weight on profits of competitors who are held by the same shareholder. Recent research found evidence that common ownership by diversified institutional investors is anticompetitive by showing that prices in the airline and banking industries are related to generalized versions of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) that account for common ownership. In this paper we propose an ...
Working Paper
Identification of First-Price Auctions With Biased Beliefs
This paper exploits variation in the number of bidders to separately identify the valuation distribution and the bidders' belief about the valuation distribution in first-price auctions with independent private values. Exploiting variation in auction volume the result is extended to environments with risk averse bidders. In an illustrative application we fail to reject the null hypothesis of correct beliefs.
Discussion Paper
The Branch Puzzle : Why Are there Still Bank Branches?
We provide evidence that the persistence of the large number of local bank branches across the country may be due to the fact that both depositors and small businesses continue to value local bank branches.
Discussion Paper
How do Rural and Urban Retail Banking Customers Differ?
This note documents differences and similarities between rural and urban retail banking clients using data from the Board's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Understanding geographic differences in local demand conditions for banking is important for designing effective public policy.
Working Paper
Identification and Estimation of Risk Aversion in First Price Auctions With Unobserved Auction Heterogeneity
We extent the point-identification result in Guerre, Perrigne, and Vuong (2009) to environments with one-dimensional unobserved auction heterogeneity. In addition, we also show a robustness result for the case where the exclusion restriction used for point identification is violated: We provide conditions to ensure that the primitives recovered under the violated exclusion restriction still bound the true primitives in this case. We propose a new Sieve Maximum Likelihood Estimator, show its consistency and illustrate its finite sample performance in a Monte Carlo experiment. We investigate ...
Working Paper
Robust Inference in First-Price Auctions : Experimental Findings as Identifying Restrictions
In laboratory experiments bidding in first-price auctions is more aggressive than predicted by the risk-neutral Bayesian Nash Equilibrium (RNBNE) - a finding known as the overbidding puzzle. Several models have been proposed to explain the overbidding puzzle, but no canonical alternative to RNBNE has emerged, and RNBNE remains the basis of the structural auction literature. Instead of estimating a particular model of overbidding, we use the overbidding restriction itself for identification, which allows us to bound the valuation distribution, the seller's payoff function, and the optimal ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Common Ownership on Profits : Evidence From the U.S. Banking Industry
Theory predicts that "common ownership" (ownership of rivals by a common shareholder) can be anticompetitive because it reduces the weight firms place on their own profits and shifts weight toward rival firms held by common shareholders. In this paper we use accounting data from the banking industry to examine empirically whether shifts in the profit weights are associated with shifts in profits. We present the distribution of a wide range of estimates that vary the specification, sample restrictions, and assumptions used to calculate the profit weights. The distribution of estimates is ...
Working Paper
Consumer Mistakes and Advertising : The Case of Mortgage Refinancing
Does advertising help consumers to find the products they need or push them to buy products they don't need? In this paper, we study the effects of advertising on consumer mistakes and quantify the resulting effect on consumer welfare in the market for mortgage refinancing. Mortgage borrowers frequently make costly refinancing mistakes by either refinancing when they should wait, or by waiting when they should refinance. We assemble a novel data set that combines a borrower's exposure to direct mail refinance advertising and their subsequent refinancing decisions. Even though on average ...