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Keywords:Banks 

Newsletter
Interest-only mortgages and speculation in hot housing markets

Even as housing markets have temporarily shut down across the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic, housing remains a key sector that contributes disproportionately to fluctuations in overall economic activity and that will likely play an important role as the economy reopens. Interest in this market among research economists and policymakers intensified after the exceptional boom and bust in housing between 2003 and 2008. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we describe research in Barlevy and Fisher (2020)1 that examined patterns in the kinds of mortgages homebuyers took out in different cities during ...
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 439 , Pages 6

Working Paper
Credit Ratings, Private Information, and Bank Monitoring Ability

In this paper, we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' internal credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. Banks' private information increases with the size of loans.
Working Papers , Paper 16-14

Working Paper
Banks as Patient Fixed Income Investors

We examine the business model of traditional commercial banks in the context of their co-existence with shadow banks. While both types of intermediaries create safe "money-like" claims, they go about this in very different ways. Traditional banks create safe claims with a combination of costly equity capital and fixed income assets that allows their depositors to remain "sleepy": they do not have to pay attention to transient fluctuations in the mark-to-market value of bank assets. In contrast, shadow banks create safe claims by giving their investors an early exit option that allows them ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2014-15

Working Paper
Bank Profitability and Debit Card Interchange Regulation: Bank Responses to the Durbin Amendment

The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 alters the competitive structure of the debit card payment processing industry and caps debit card interchange fees for banks with over $10 billion in assets. Market participants predicted that debit card issuers would offset the reduction in debit interchange revenue by increases in customer account fees. Some participants also predicted that banks would cut costs in response to the law by reducing staff and shutting down branches. Using a difference-in-differences testing strategy, we show that ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2014-77

Working Paper
Gates, Fees, and Preemptive Runs

We build a model of a financial intermediary, in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983), and show that allowing the intermediary to impose redemption fees or gates in a crisis--a form of suspension of convertibility--can lead to preemptive runs. In our model, a fraction of investors (depositors) can become informed about a shock to the return of the intermediary's assets. Later, the informed investors learn the realization of the shock and can choose their redemption behavior based on this information. We prove two results: First, there are situations in which informed investors would ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2014-30

Working Paper
Financial Business Cycles

Using Bayesian methods, I estimate a DSGE model where a recession is initiated by losses suffered by banks and exacerbated by their inability to extend credit to the real sector. The event triggering the recession has the workings of a redistribution shock: a small sector of the economy -- borrowers who use their home as collateral -- defaults on their loans. When banks hold little equity in excess of regulatory requirements, the losses require them to react immediately, either by recapitalizing or by deleveraging. By deleveraging, banks transform the initial shock into a credit crunch, and, ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1116

Discussion Paper
How Were the Basel 3 Minimum Capital Requirements Calibrated?

One way to reduce the likelihood of bank failures is to require banks to hold more and better capital. But how much capital is enough? An international committee of regulators recently reached a new agreement (called Basel 3) to impose new, higher standards for capital on globally active banks. The Basel 3 common equity minimum capital requirement will be 4.5 percent plus an additional buffer of at least 2.5 percent of risk-weighted assets (RWA). Are these numbers big or small?and where did they come from? In this post, I describe how the new Basel capital standards were calibrated.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20110328

Journal Article
Bank Financial Restatements and Market Discipline

Banks may reissue financial statements for several reasons, ranging from simple accounting or clerical errors to fraud. Regardless of the reason, financial restatements send negative signals to the public, potentially driving stakeholders to undertake actions that are costly to the restating bank. These actions constitute ?market discipline? and may incentivize banks to report financial information accurately. But whether financial restatements lead to market discipline is an empirical question. For example, strict bank regulation might blunt disciplinary effects if stakeholders believe ...
Economic Review , Issue Q II , Pages 25-53

Working Paper
Money, Banking and Financial Markets

The fact that money, banking, and financial markets interact in important ways seems self-evident. The theoretical nature of this interaction, however, has not been fully explored. To this end, we integrate the Diamond (1997) model of banking and financial markets with the Lagos and Wright (2005) dynamic model of monetary exchange?a union that bears a framework in which fractional reserve banks emerge in equilibrium, where bank assets are funded with liabilities made demandable in government money, where the terms of bank deposit contracts are affected by the liquidity insurance available in ...
Working Papers , Paper 2017-23

Discussion Paper
Were Banks Ever 'Boring'?

In a previous post, I documented that much of the expansion into nontraditional activities by U.S. banks began well before the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, the legislation that repealed much of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The historical record actually contains many prior instances of the Glass-Steagall restrictions being circumvented, with nonbank firms allowed to operate as financial conglomerates and engage in activities that go beyond traditional banking. These broad industry dynamics might indicate that the business of banking tends to expand firm boundaries beyond ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20170802

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