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Working Paper
Less Bank Regulation, More Non-Bank Lending
Bank deregulation in the form of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act facilitated the entry of non-bank lenders into the market for syndicated loans during the pre-2008 credit boom. Institutional investors disproportionately purchase tranches of loans originated by universal banks able to cross-sell loans and underwriting services to firms (as permitted by the repeal). A shock to cross-selling intensity increases loan liquidity at origination and over time. The mechanism is that non-loan exposures ensure monitoring even when banks retain small loan shares. Our findings complement the ...
Working Paper
Mortgage Borrowing and the Boom-Bust Cycle in Consumption and Residential Investment
This paper studies the transmission of the major shocks in the U.S. housing market in the 2000s to consumption and residential investment. Using geographically disaggregated data, I show that residential investment is more responsive to these shocks than consumption, as measured by elasticities and the implied contributions to GDP growth. I develop a structural life-cycle model featuring multiple types of housing investment to understand the large responses of residential investment. Consistent with the microdata, the model generates lumpy debt accumulation, lumpy housing investment and a ...
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
Bank Market Power and the Risk Channel of Monetary Policy
This paper investigates the risk channel of monetary policy through banks' lending standards. We modify the classic costly state verification (CSV) problem by introducing a risk-neutral monopolistic bank, which maximizes profits subject to borrower participation. While the bank can diversify idiosyncratic default risk, it bears the aggregate risk. We show that, in partial equilibrium, the bank prefers a higher leverage ratio of borrowers, when the profitability of lending increases, e.g. after a monetary expansion. This risk channel persists when we embed our contract in a standard New ...
Working Paper
Minimum Wages and Consumer Credit : Impacts on Access to Credit and Traditional and High-Cost Borrowing
Proponents of minimum wage legislation point to its potential to raise earnings and reduce poverty, while opponents argue that disemployment effects lead to net welfare losses. But these arguments typically ignore the possibility of spillover effects on other aspects of households' financial circumstances. This paper examines how state-level minimum wages affect the decisions of lenders and low-income borrowers. Using data derived from direct mailings of credit offers, survey-reported usage of high-cost alternative credit products, and debt recorded in credit reports, we find that higher ...
Working Paper
Employment in the Great Recession : How Important Were Household Credit Supply Shocks?
I pool data from all large multimarket lenders in the U.S. to estimate how many of the over seven million jobs lost in the Great Recession can be explained by reductions in the supply of mortgage credit. I construct a mortgage credit supply instrument at the county level, the weighted average (by prerecession mortgage market shares) of liquidity-driven lender shocks during the recession. The reduction in mortgage supply explains about 15 percent of the employment decline. The job losses are concentrated in construction and finance.
Working Paper
The Effects of Mortgage Credit Availability : Evidence from Minimum Credit Score Lending Rules
Since the housing bust and financial crisis, mortgage lenders have introduced progressively higher minimum thresholds for acceptable credit scores. Using loan-level data, we document the introduction of these thresholds, as well as their effects on the distribution of newly originated mortgages. We then use the timing and nonlinearity of these supply-side changes to credibly identify their short- and medium-run effects on various individual outcomes. Using a large panel of consumer credit data, we show that the credit score thresholds have very large negative effects on borrowing in the short ...