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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.
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
Assessing the Common Ownership Hypothesis in the US Banking Industry
The common ownership hypothesis (COH) states that firms with common shareholders, primarily large asset managers, compete less aggressively with each other. The U.S. banking industry is well suited to assess the common ownership hypothesis, because thousands of private banks without common ownership (CO) compete with hundreds of public banks with high and increasing levels of CO. This paper assesses the COH in the banking industry using more comprehensive ownership data than previous studies. In simple comparisons of raw deposit rate averages we document that the deposit rates of public banks ...
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
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 ...
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.