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Journal Article
Are Banks Exposed to Interest Rate Risk?
While banks seem to face inherent risk from short-term interest rate changes, in practice they structure their balance sheets to avoid exposure to such risk. Nonetheless, recent research finds that banks cannot offload all of the interest rate risk they are naturally exposed to. Historically, banks’ profit margins reflect their compensation for taking on interest rate risk and their stock prices are highly sensitive to changes in interest rates. These findings can help practitioners assess banks’ risk exposures and may have implications for unconventional monetary policy.
Journal Article
Do Banks Lend to Distressed Firms?
Concerns emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic over banks continuing to lend to unproductive businesses that were close to default. Recent research shows that lenders have incentives to offer relatively better terms to less-productive and more-indebted firms to recover their prior investments. U.S. loan-level data confirm the empirical relevance of such lending behavior. A rich model of firms and banks further emphasizes that this type of lending can also depress overall productivity by sustaining firms that should otherwise exit the economy.
Journal Article
When the Fed Raises Rates, Are Banks Less Profitable?
Banks limit their interest rate risk exposure by issuing adjustable-rate loans and protect their funding costs by slowly adjusting deposit rates. These actions allow banks to maintain largely stable profit margins even if monetary policy tightens unexpectedly. Evidence from the pre-pandemic tightening cycle suggests that bank profit margins could increase rather than decline over the coming months. However, the slow adjustment of rates that banks pay on deposits may result in people moving their savings, leading to a reallocation of assets away from the regulated banking system.
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of relationship lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to less productive and more indebted firms. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Low-capitalized banks systematically distort firms’ risk assessments to window-dress their balance sheets. To avoid further reductions in their capital ratios, such banks extend relatively more credit to underreported borrowers. We incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening ...
Journal Article
Modeling Financial Crises
Research has revealed several facts about financial crises based on historical data. Crises are rare events that are associated with severe recessions that are typically deeper than normal recessions. They are usually preceded by a buildup of system imbalances, particularly a rapid increase of credit. Financial crises tend to occur after prolonged booms but do not necessarily result from large shocks. Recent work shows a novel way to replicate these facts in a standard macroeconomic model, which policymakers could use to gain insights to prevent future crises.
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of relationship lending where lenders have an incentive to evergreen loans by offering better terms to less productive and more indebted firms. We detect such lending distortions using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Low-capitalized banks systematically distort their risk assessments of firms to window-dress their balance sheets and extend relatively more credit to underreported borrowers. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, these effects are driven by larger outstanding loans and low-productivity firms. We incorporate the theoretical ...
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of concentrated lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to firms that are close to default. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Banks that own a larger share of a firm’s debt provide distressed firms with relatively more credit at lower interest rates. Building on this empirical validation, we incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening affects aggregate outcomes, resulting in lower interest rates, higher ...
Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model with Occasional Financial Crises
Financial crises occur out of prolonged and credit-fueled boom periods and, at times, they are initiated by relatively small shocks that can have large effects. Consistent with these empirical observations, this paper extends a standard macroeconomic model to include financial intermediation, long-term loans, and occasional financial crises. Within this framework, intermediaries raise their lending and leverage in good times, thereby building up financial fragility. Crises typically occur at the end of a prolonged boom, initiated by a moderate adverse shock that triggers a liquidation of ...
Working Paper
Banks, Maturity Transformation, and Monetary Policy
Banks engage in maturity transformation and the term premium compensates them for bearing the associated duration risk. Consistent with this view, I show that banks’ net interest margins and term premia have comoved in the United States over the last decades. On monetary policy announcement days, banks’ stock prices fall in response to an increase in expected future short-term interest rates but rise if term premia increase. These effects are reflected in the response of banks’ net interest margins and amplified for institutions with a larger maturity mismatch. The results reveal that ...
Journal Article
Two Years into COVID, What’s the State of U.S. Businesses?
More than two years after the outbreak of COVID-19, concerns remain that U.S. businesses are substantially more vulnerable and less productive than in the past. Using extensive data on private and public firms allows for a detailed assessment of these concerns. According to a number of performance measures, businesses borrowing from large U.S. banks appear relatively healthy, increased leverage is concentrated among safer companies rather than riskier ones, and probabilities of default are close to pre-crisis levels.