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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 34.
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Working Paper
Commercial banks in the securities business: a review
An analysis of the potential effects of commercial banks' expansion into the securities business, focusing on gains, such as information advantages and economies of scope, as well as on potential costs, including conflicts of interest and risk considerations.
Discussion Paper
Moving Out of a Flood Zone? That May Be Risky!
An often-overlooked aspect of flood-plain mapping is the fact that these maps designate stark boundaries, with households falling either inside or outside of areas designated as “flood zones.” Households inside flood zones must insure themselves against the possibility of disasters. However, costly insurance may have pushed lower-income households out of areas officially designated a flood risk and into physically adjacent areas. While not designated an official flood risk, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and disaster data shows that these areas are still at considerable risk ...
Discussion Paper
The Impact of Natural Disasters on the Corporate Loan Market
Natural disasters are usually associated with an increase in the demand for credit by both households and companies in the affected regions. However, if capacity constraints preclude banks from meeting the local increase in demand, the banks may reduce lending elsewhere, thus propagating the shock to unaffected areas. In this post, we analyze the corporate loan market and find that banks, particularly those with lower capital, reduce credit provisioning to distant regions unaffected by natural disasters. We also find that shadow banks only partially offset the reduction in bank credit, so ...
Discussion Paper
The Adverse Effect of “Mandatory” Flood Insurance on Access to Credit
The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was designed to reduce household and lender flood-risk exposure and encourage lending. In this post, which is based on our related study, we show that in certain situations the program actually limits access to credit, particularly for low-income borrowers—an unintended consequence of this well-intentioned program.
Working Paper
Banking and commerce: a liquidity approach
This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of mixing banking and commerce, using the "liquidity" approach to financial intermediation. Adding a commercial firm makes it easier for a bank to dispose of assets seized in a loan default. This "internal market" increases the liquidity of such assets and improves the bank's ability to perform financial intermediation. More generally, owning a commercial firm may act either as a substitute or a complement to commercial lending. In some cases, a bank will voluntarily refrain from making loans, choosing to become a nonbank bank in an ...
Working Paper
Do banks propagate debt market shocks?
Over the years, U.S. banks have increasingly relied on the bond market to finance their business. This created the potential for a link between the bond market and the corporate sector whereby borrowers, including those that do not rely on bond funding, became exposed to the conditions in the bond market. We investigate the importance of this link. Our results show that when the cost to access the bond market goes up, banks that rely on bond financing charge higher interest rates on their loans. Banks that rely exclusively on deposit funding follow bond financing banks and increase the ...
Report
Macroprudential policy and the revolving door of risk: lessons from leveraged lending guidance
We investigate the U.S. experience with macroprudential policies by studying the interagency guidance on leveraged lending. We find that the guidance primarily impacted large, closely supervised banks, but only after supervisors issued important clarifications. It also triggered a migration of leveraged lending to nonbanks. While we do not find that nonbanks had more lax lending policies than banks, we unveil important evidence that nonbanks increased bank borrowing following the issuance of guidance, possibly to finance their growing leveraged lending. The guidance was effective at reducing ...
Report
Unintended Consequences of "Mandatory" Flood Insurance
We document that the quasi-mandatory U.S. flood insurance program reduces mortgage lending along both the extensive and intensive margins. We measure flood insurance mandates using FEMA flood maps, focusing on the discreet updates to these maps that can be made exogenous to true underlying flood risk. Reductions in lending are most pronounced for low-income and low-FICO borrowers, implying that the effects are at least partially driven by the added financial burden of insurance. Our results are also stronger among non-local or more-distant banks, who have a diminished ability to monitor local ...
Working Paper
Securities activities in banking conglomerates: should their location be regulated?
A review of the arguments as to whether the location of the securities unit in a banking conglomerate should be subject to regulation. The author contends that correcting the safety nets distortions and allowing banks to choose where to locate their securities units is better than retaining such distortions and relying on corporate separateness to limit the problems they may create.
Discussion Paper
How Liquidity Standards Can Improve Lending of Last Resort Policies
Prior to the Great Recession, the focus of bank regulation was on bank capital with little consensus about the need for liquidity regulation. This view was in contrast with an existing body of academic research that pointed to inefficiencies in environments with strictly private provision of liquidity, via either interbank markets or credit line agreements. In spite of theoretical results pointing to the possible benefits of liquidity regulation for reducing fire sales in crises or the risk of panics due to coordination failures, a common view was that its costs might exceed its benefits, ...