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Working Paper
“Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone”—The Community Reinvestment Act in a Changing Financial Landscape
This study provides new evidence on the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) on mortgage lending by taking advantage of an exogenous policy shock in 2014, which caused significant changes in neighborhoods’ CRA eligibility in the Philadelphia market. The loss of CRA coverage leads to an over 10 percent decrease in purchase originations by CRA-regulated lenders. While nondepository institutions replace approximately half, but not all, of the decreased lending, their increased market share was accompanied by a greater involvement in riskier and more costly FHA lending. This study ...
Working Paper
“Don't Know What You Got Till It’s Gone” — The Effects of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) on Mortgage Lending in the Philadelphia Market
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977, has served as an important tool to foster access to financial services for lower-income communities across the country. This study provides new evidence on the effectiveness of CRA on mortgage lending by focusing on a large number of neighborhoods that became eligible and ineligible for CRA credit in the Philadelphia market because of an exogenous policy shock in 2014. The CRA effects are more evident when a lower-income neighborhood loses its CRA coverage, which leads to a 10 percent or more decrease in purchase originations by ...
Working Paper
How Climate Change Shapes Bank Lending: Evidence from Portfolio Reallocation
I document how bank lending has changed in response to climate change by analyzing changes in bank loan portfolios since 2012. Using supervisory data providing loan-level portfolios of the largest U.S. banks, I find that banks significantly reduced lending to areas more impacted by climate change starting around 2015. Using flood risk and wildfire risk as proxies for climate risk, I estimate a one standard deviation increase in climate risk reduces county-level balances in banks’ portfolios by up to 4.7 percent between 2014 and 2020 in counties with large loan balances. The aggregate trend ...
Working Paper
Employment Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policy : Evidence from QE
This paper investigates the effect of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy on employment via a bank lending channel. We find that banks with higher mortgage-backed securities holdings issued relatively more loans after the first and third rounds of quantitative easing (QE1 and QE3). While additional volume is concentrated in refinanced mortgages after QE1, increases are driven by newly originated home purchase mortgages and additional commercial and industrial lending after QE3. Using spatial variation, we show that regions with a high share of affected banks experienced ...
Working Paper
The costs and benefits of liquidity regulations: Lessons from an idle monetary policy tool
We investigate how liquidity regulations affect banks by examining a dormant monetary policy tool that functions as a liquidity regulation. Our identification strategy uses a regression kink design that relies on the variation in a marginal high-quality liquid asset (HQLA) requirement around an exogenous threshold. We show that mandated increases in HQLA cause banks to reduce credit supply. Liquidity requirements also depress banks' profitability, though some of the regulatory costs are passed on to liability holders. We document a prudential benefit of liquidity requirements by showing that ...