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Working Paper
Do jumbo-CD holders care about anything?
Uninsured deposits represent a theoretically appealing but relatively untested alternative to subordinated debt for incorporating market discipline into banking supervision. To make the deposit market a useful supervisory tool, it is necessary to know what types of risk are priced by depositors and in what proportions. Using a clustering technique to select from among a large set of potential regressors, as well as a carefully chosen set of control variables, we attempt to determine the types of risk that cause uninsured depositors to react in both the price and quantity dimensions. As a ...
Working Paper
Should the FDIC worry about the FHLB? the impact of Federal Home Loan Bank advances on the Bank Insurance Fund
Does growing commercial-bank reliance on Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLBank) advances increase expected losses to the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF)? Our approach to this question begins by modeling the link between advances and expected losses. We then quantify the effect of advances on default probability with a CAMELS-downgrade model. Finally, we assess the impact on loss-given-default by estimating resolution costs in two scenarios: the liquidation of all banks with failure probabilities above two percent and the liquidation of all banks with advance-to-asset ratios above 15 percent. The evidence ...
Working Paper
Gains from financial integration in the European union: evidence for new and old members
We estimate potential welfare gains from financial integration and corresponding better insurance against country-specific shocks to output (risk sharing) for the twenty-five European Union countries. Using theoretical utility-based measures we express the gains from risk sharing as the utility equivalent of a permanent increase in consumption. We report positive potential welfare gains for all the EU countries if they move toward full risk sharing. Ten country-members who joined the Union in 2004 have more volatile or counter-cyclical consumption and output and would obtain much higher ...
Working Paper
Consumer-finance myths and other obstacles to financial literacy
The consumer-finance market for middle and upper-income households in the United States is characterized by a wide range of choices, both in terms of financial-services providers and the specific products and services available.1 Prices generally are determined in competitive markets. Consumer-protection regulation is extensive. Why then is there so much dissatisfaction with the U.S. consumer-finance market, even for prime-quality customers? ; This paper focuses not on inadequate choices, inadequate competition or regulation, but on the difficulty many middle and upper-income households ...
Working Paper
Executive compensation at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Corporate governance-and executive-compensation arrangements in particular-should be an important component of the agenda to reform the housing GSEs. The GSEs' safety-and-soundness regulator-who is essentially the debtholders' and taxpayers' representative-must be admitted to the GSEs' boardroom in a way that is atypical of an ordinary publicly held company. This intrusion into the board's oversight of executive-compensation plans is justified given the GSEs' public purposes and their large potential cost to taxpayers. Prudent public policy requires greater supervisory control over executive ...
Working Paper
What does the Federal Reserve’s economic value model tell us about interest rate risk at U.S. community banks?
The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s revealed the vulnerability of some depository institutions to changes in interest rates. Since that episode, U.S. bank supervisors have placed more emphasis on monitoring the interest rate risk of commercial banks. One outcome developed by economists at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was a duration-based Economic Value Model (EVM) designed to estimate the interest rate sensitivity of banks. ; We test whether measures derived from the Fed?s EVM are correlated with the interest rate sensitivity of U.S. community banks. The answer to this question ...
Working Paper
The British tripartite financial supervision system in the face of the Northern Rock run
The Northern Rock debacle - Britain's first bank run in 141 years - was the Tripartite regulatory system's first live ammunition test since its establishment in 1997. The aftermath of the crisis lists the destruction of Britain's fifth largest mortgage lender, the tarnishing of the Bank of England's well-established reputation, and the loss of confidence in the reformed regulatory system - a system that had been considered a paragon by policymakers and reformers around the world. As market observers, politicians, investors and bankers criticize not only the mortgage lender for its extreme ...
Working Paper
The demise of community banks? local economic shocks aren't to blame
A potentially troubling characteristic of the U.S. banking industry is the geographic concentration of many community banks* offices and operations. If geographic concentration of operations exposes banks to local market risk, we should observe a widespread decline in their financial performance following adverse local economic shocks. In addition, geographic diversification should help banks reduce risk significantly. By analyzing the performance of geographically concentrated U.S. community banks exposed to severe unemployment shocks in the 1990s, I find that banks are not systematically ...
Working Paper
Investigating output cycles under two alternative financial systems
Different financial systems vary in the way they contribute to the process of resource allocation in the economy and in the risk-sharing pattern that they bring about. It would therefore be plausible to expect different financial systems to differ in the way they affect real economic activity. I hereby provide a theoretic framework for the comparison and analysis of output cycles under two alternative financial systems: an equity-based financial system (EFS), in which a mutual fund functions as a financial intermediary, versus a debt-based financial system (DFS), in which a bank plays that ...
Working Paper
U.S. banking deregulation and self-employment: a differential impact on those in need
Starting in 1978, the U.S. banking sector was gradually deregulated in terms of restrictions on geographical expansion. This paper examines the impact of intrastate branching deregulation on (state-specific) self-employment income growth rate. If postreform changes in the banking structure led to improved lending to previously underserved (potential) businessmen, their self-employment income would accelerate, as banks are the prime source of finance for self-employment. Based on a simple model adopted from Evans and Jovanovic (1989), it is hypothesized that banking deregulation would ...