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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.
Journal Article
What is China's capital seeking in a global environment?
China is becoming increasingly active in international markets for mergers and acquisitions. Chinese acquirers are buying stakes in foreign companies to get access to resources, markets, and technology, among other reasons. With China's expanding wealth and vast foreign exchange resources, further growth in the volume and variety of foreign direct investment is likely.
Discussion Paper
Did Securitization Lead to Riskier Corporate Lending?
There?s ample evidence that securitization led mortgage lenders to take more risk, thereby contributing to a large increase in mortgage delinquencies during the financial crisis. In this post, I discuss evidence from a recent research study I undertook with Vitaly Bord suggesting that securitization also led to riskier corporate lending. We show that during the boom years of securitization, corporate loans that banks securitized at loan origination underperformed similar, unsecuritized loans originated by the same banks. Additionally, we report evidence suggesting that the performance gap ...
Conference Paper
Evidence of bank information monopolies across the business cycle
Discussion Paper
The Effects of Post-Crisis Banking Reforms
The financial crisis of 2007-08 exposed many limitations of the regulatory architecture of the U.S. financial system. In an attempt to mitigate these limitations, there has been a wave of regulatory reforms in the post-crisis period, especially in the banking sector. These include tighter bank capital and liquidity rules; new resolution procedures for failed banks; the creation of a stand-alone consumer protection agency; greater transparency in money market funds; and a move to central clearing of derivatives, among other measures. As these reforms have been finalized and implemented, a ...
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
Did the Dodd-Frank Act End ‘Too Big to Fail’?
One goal of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was to end ?too big to fail.? Toward that goal, the Act required systemically important financial institutions to submit detailed plans for an orderly resolution (?living wills?) and authorized the FDIC to create an alternative resolution procedure. In response, the FDIC has developed a ?single point of entry? (SPOE) strategy, under which healthy parent companies bear the losses of their failing subsidiaries. Since SPOE makes the parent company responsible for subsidiaries? losses, we would expect that parents have become riskier, relative to their ...
Discussion Paper
Why Do Central Banks Have Discount Windows?
Though not literally a window any longer, the “discount window” refers to the facilities that central banks, acting as lender of last resort, use to provide liquidity to commercial banks. While the need for a discount window and lender of last resort has been debated, the basic rationale for their existence is that circumstances can arise, such as bank runs and panics, when even fundamentally sound banks cannot raise liquidity on short notice. Massive discount window borrowing in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States clearly illustrates the ...
Report
Has the credit derivatives swap market lowered the cost of corporate debt?
There have been widespread claims that credit derivatives such as the credit default swap (CDS) have lowered the cost of firms' debt financing by creating for investors new hedging opportunities and information. However, these instruments also give banks an opaque means to sever links to their borrowers, thus reducing lender incentives to screen and monitor. In this paper, we evaluate the effect that the onset of CDS trading has on the spreads that underlying firms pay at issue when they seek funding in the corporate bond and syndicated loan markets. Employing matched-sample methods, we find ...