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Report
How Did the MSLP Borrowers Fare Before and During COVID-19?
This policy brief uses Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data to assess whether the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) borrowers were in worse financial health than their peers before COVID-19 hit the economy hard in March 2020 or suffered worse deterioration afterward. The findings can help us better understand why these firms sought to obtain MSLP loans. We find that MSLP borrowers tend to be larger than their peer firms (that is, firms in the same industry and state). Within the same size group, MSLP borrowers are on average younger than their peers. Borrowers tended to have a slightly higher ...
Working Paper
Banks' search for yield in the low interest rate environment: a tale of regulatory adaptation
This paper examines whether the low interest rate environment that has prevailed since the Great Recession has compelled banks to reach for yield. It is important to recognize that banks can take on a variety of risks that offer higher yields today but incur different forms of future losses. Some losses, such as mark-to-market losses due to yield increases, can be avoided with accounting treatments whereas others, chiefly credit losses, cannot. A simple model shows that a bank?s incentive to take on risks for which potential future losses can be managed, such as interest rate risk, is ...
Report
Corporate Debt Maturity and Monetary Policy
Do firms lengthen the maturity of their borrowing following a flattening of the Treasury yield curve that results from monetary policy operations? We explore this question separately for the years before and during the zero lower bound (ZLB) period, recognizing that the same change in the yield curve slope signifies different states of the economy and monetary policy over the two regimes. We find that the answer is robustly yes for the pre-ZLB period: Firms extended the maturity of their bond issuance by nearly three years in response to a policy-induced reduction of 1 percentage point in the ...
Working Paper
A general-equilibrium asset-pricing approach to the measurement of nominal and real bank output
This paper addresses the proper measurement of financial service output that is not priced explicitly. It shows how to impute nominal service output from financial intermediaries? interest income and how to construct price indices for those financial services. We present an optimizing model with financial intermediaries that provide financial services to resolve asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders. We embed these intermediaries in a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium model where assets are priced competitively according to their systematic risk, as in the standard ...
Working Paper
The Main Street Lending Program: Who Borrowed and How Have They Benefited?
The Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) was established by the Federal Reserve to supply credit to small and, especially, midsize businesses so they could weather COVID-19–induced disruptions. This study uses Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data on the financial condition and overall viability of firms to examine the characteristics of MSLP borrowers and their performance after receiving a loan relative to the performance of their peers. Estimates show that, even when differences in firms' industries and geographic regions are taken into account, a firm was more likely to borrow from the MSLP if it ...
Report
Productivity in the slow lane?: the role of information and communications technology
As the current recovery matures in the United States, evidence is mounting that total factor productivity (TFP), the typical measure of technological change, has moved back into the slow lane. This study uses industry data to explore the extent to which the acceleration in TFP in the late 1990s and early 2000s and the subsequent deceleration are attributable to unmeasured investment by firms to take full advantage of the new capabilities made possible by information and communications technology (ICT).
Journal Article
What is the value of bank output?
Financial institutions often do not charge explicit fees for the services they provide, but are instead compensated by the spread between interest rates on loans and deposits. The lack of explicit fees in lending makes it difficult to measure the output of banks and other financial institutions. Effective measurement should distinguish between income derived from lending services and income derived from portfolio decisions about risk and duration, and should be consistent among bank and nonbank financial institutions.
Working Paper
The value of risk: measuring the service output of U. S. commercial banks
Rather than charging direct fees, banks often charge implicitly for their services via interest spreads. As a result, much of bank output has to be estimated indirectly. In contrast to current statistical practice, dynamic optimizing models of banks argue that compensation for bearing systematic risk is not part of bank output. We apply these models and find that between 1997 and 2007, in the U.S. National Accounts, on average, bank output is overestimated by 21 percent and GDP is overestimated by 0.3 percent. Moreover, compared with current methods, our new estimates imply more plausible ...
Working Paper
Service output of bank holding companies in the 1990s and the role of risk
This paper constructs a new measure of output for Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1986 to 1999. This flow measure of bank value added follows from a unified model of bank operation that integrates theories of production, financial intermediation, and asset pricing. The primary contribution of the model is to demonstrate how one should account for risk when measuring the value added of bank services. One key implication is that the risk-related return on the funds banks borrow and lend should be excluded from the nominal value of the services banks produce, since the model ...
Working Paper
Merger-related cost savings in the production of bank services
This paper utilizes a new flow measure of the true output of bank services to analyze the impact of mergers on the cost and productivity of Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1987-1999. It shows that there are conceptual problems in the output measures used in previous studies, which may be the reason for their paradoxical findings: Bank mergers are estimated to lead to significant increases in profit, without cost savings or increases in market power. This paper also points out the problematic understanding of diversification in previous studies. To remedy these problems, this ...