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Working Paper
Can the Federal Reserve Effectively Target Main Street? Evidence from the 1970s Recession
Modern central bankers confront a challenge of providing economic stimulus even when the policy rate is constrained by a lower bound. This challenge has led to substantial innovation by policymakers and a proliferation of new policy tools. In this paper, I offer evidence on the efficacy of a new tool known as funding for lending, which provides banks with subsidized funding to make additional loans. I focus on a historical episode from the United States in which the Federal Reserve provided banks with steeply subsidized loans to promote the expansion of credit within their local communities. ...
Working Paper
Domestic Lending and the Pandemic: How Does Banks' Exposure to Covid-19 Abroad Affect Their Lending in the United States?
We study how U.S. banks' exposure to the economic fallout due to governments' response to Covid-19 in foreign countries has affected their credit provision to borrowers in the United States. We combine a rarely accessed dataset on U.S. banks' cross-border exposure to borrowers in foreign countries with the most detailed regulatory ("credit registry") data that is available on their U.S.-based lending. We compare the change in the U.S. lending of banks that are more vs. less exposed to the pandemic abroad, during and after the onset of Covid-19 in 2020. We document strong spillover effects: ...
Working Paper
Owe a Bank Millions, the Bank Has a Problem: Credit Concentration in Bad Times
How does a bank react when a substantial share of its borrowers suffer a large negative shock? To answer this question we exploit the 2014 collapse of energy prices using the universe of Mexican commercial bank loans. We show that, after the drop in energy prices, banks exposed to the energy sector increased their exposure to these borrowers even more, relaxing credit margins to their larger debtors in the sector. An increase of one standard deviation in a bank's ex-ante exposure to the energy sector increased the loan volume to borrowers in the sector by 18 percent and reduced interest rates ...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Shock and Consumer Credit: Evidence from Credit Card Data
We use credit card data from the Federal Reserve Board's FR Y-14M reports to study the impact of the COVID-19 shock on the use and availability of consumer credit across borrower types from March through August 2020. We document an initial sharp decrease in credit card transactions and outstanding balances in March and April. While spending starts to recover by May, especially for risky borrowers, balances remain depressed overall. We find a strong negative impact of local pandemic severity on credit use, which becomes smaller over time, consistent with pandemic fatigue. Restrictive public ...
Working Paper
Domestic Lending and the Pandemic: How Does Banks' Exposure to Covid-19 Abroad Affect Their Lending in the United States?
Shortly after the onset of the pandemic, U.S. banks cut their term lending to businesses–but little is known about how much, and why, banks' choice to ration credit contributed to this contraction. Afforded by a unique combination of several highly granular bank regulatory datasets, we identify the role of banks' exposure to Covid-related restrictions abroad – a balance sheet "shock" that affects only banks' credit supply, but not their US borrowers' demand for loans. We find that US banks with higher foreign Covid exposure cut their lending to US firms, and tightened terms on such loans, ...
Working Paper
Motivating Banks to Lend? Credit Spillover Effects of the Main Street Lending Program
We study the effects of the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP)—an emergency lending program aimed at supporting the flow of credit to small and mid-sized firms during the COVID-19 crisis on bank lending to businesses. Using instrumental variables for identification and multiple loan-level and survey data sources, we document that the MSLP increased banks' willingness to lend more generally outside the program to both large and small firms. Following the introduction of the program, participating banks were more likely to renew maturing loans and to originate new loans, as well as less ...
Working Paper
"Revitalize or Stabilize": Does Community Development Financing Work?
Banks in the United States originate $100 billion in community development loans every year and hold a similar amount of community development investments on their balance sheets. A number of federal place-based policies encourage the provision of these loans and investments to promote growth, employment and the availability of affordable housing to disadvantaged communities. Research into the effectiveness of privately supplied community development financing has been hampered, however, by the lack of comprehensive data on banks' community development activities at a local level. Hand ...
Working Paper
Unintended Consequences of Unemployment Insurance Benefits: The Role of Banks
We use disaggregated U.S. data and a border discontinuity design to show that more generous unemployment insurance (UI) policies lower bank deposits. We test several channels that could explain this decline and find evidence consistent with households lowering their precautionary savings. Since deposits are the largest and most stable source of funding for banks, the decrease in deposits affects bank lending. Banks that raise deposits in states with generous UI policies squeeze their small business lending. Furthermore, counties that are served by these banks experience a higher unemployment ...
Working Paper
Half-full or Half-empty? Financial Institutions, CDS Use, and Corporate Credit Risk
We construct a novel U.S. data set that matches bank holding company credit default swap (CDS) positions to detailed U.S. credit registry data containing both loan and corporate bond holdings to study the effects of banks' CDS use on corporate credit quality. Banks may use CDS to mitigate agency frictions and not renegotiate loans with solvent but illiquid borrowers resulting in poorer measures of credit risk. Alternatively, banks may lay off the credit risk of high quality borrowers through the CDS market to comply with risk-based capital requirements, which does not impact corporate credit ...
Working Paper
Claim Dilution in the Municipal Debt Market
Using loan-level municipal bank lending data, we examine the debt structure of municipalities and its response to exogenous income shocks. We show that small, more indebted, low-income, and medium credit quality counties are particularly reliant on private bank financing. Low income counties are more likely to increase bank debt share after an adverse permanent income shock while high income counties do not shift their debt structure in response. In contrast, only high income counties draw on their credit lines after adverse transitory income shocks. Overall, our paper raises concerns about ...