Search Results
Working Paper
Mortgage Design, Repayment Schedules, and Household Borrowing
How does the design of debt repayment schedules affect household borrowing? To answer this question, we exploit a Swedish policy reform that eliminated interest-only mortgages for loan-to-value ratios above 50%. We document substantial bunching at the threshold, leading to 5% less borrowing. Wealthy borrowers drive the results, challenging credit constraints as the primary explanation. We develop a model to evaluate the mechanisms driving household behavior and find that much of the effect comes from households experiencing ongoing flow disutility to amortization payments. Our results ...
Working Paper
Prudential Policies and Their Impact on Credit in the United States
We analyze how two types of recently used prudential policies affected the supply of credit in the United States. First, we test whether the U.S. bank stress tests had any impact on the supply of mortgage credit. We find that the first Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) stress test in 2011 had a negative effect on the share of jumbo mortgage originations and approval rates at stress-tested banks?banks with worse capital positions were impacted more negatively. Second, we analyze the impact of the 2013 Supervisory Guidance on Leveraged Lending and subsequent 2014 FAQ notice, ...
Working Paper
Efficient Bailouts?
We develop a quantitative equilibrium model of financial crises to assess the interaction between ex-post interventions in credit markets and the buildup of risk ex ante. During a systemic crisis, bailouts relax balance sheet constraints and mitigate the severity of the recession. Ex ante, the anticipation of such bailouts leads to an increase in risk-taking, making the economy more vulnerable to a financial crisis. We find that moral hazard effects are limited if bailouts are systemic and broad-based. If bailouts are idiosyncratic and targeted, however, this makes the economy significantly ...
Working Paper
Overborrowing, Underborrowing, and Macroprudential Policy
In this paper, we revisit the scope for macroprudential policy in production economies with pecuniary externalities and collateral constraints. We study competitive equilibria and constrained-efficient equilibria and examine the extent to which the gap between the two depends on the production structure and the policy instruments available to the planner. We argue that macroprudential policy is desirable regardless of whether the competitive equilibrium features more or less borrowing than the constrained-efficient equilibrium. In our quantitative analysis, macroprudential taxes on borrowing ...
Working Paper
Capital Buffers in a Quantitative Model of Banking Industry Dynamics
We develop a model of banking industry dynamics to study the quantitative impact of regulatory policies on bank risk taking and market structure. Since our model is matched to U.S. data, we propose a market structure where big banks with market power interact with small, competitive fringe banks as well as non-bank lenders. Banks face idiosyncratic funding shocks in addition to aggregate shocks which affect the fraction of performing loans in their portfolio. A nontrivial bank size distribution arises out of endogenous entry and exit, as well as banks' buffer stock of capital. We show the ...
Working Paper
Enhancing Stress Tests by Adding Macroprudential Elements
The use of stress testing for macroprudential objectives is advanced by modeling spillovers within the financial sector or between the real and financial sectors. In this chapter, we discuss several macroprudential elements that capture these spillovers and how they might be added to stress test frameworks. We show how funding spillovers can be modeled as an add-on, using a reduced-form relation between banks' funding cost, bank capital and economic activity. Using a calibration to US data, we project very modest funding spillovers conditional on the DFAST 2018 severely adverse scenario. ...
Working Paper
Bank Runs, Fragility, and Regulation
We examine banking regulation in a macroeconomic model of bank runs. We construct a general equilibrium model where banks may default because of fundamental or self-fulfilling runs. With only fundamental defaults, we show that the competitive equilibrium is constrained efficient. However, when banks are vulnerable to runs, banks’ leverage decisions are not ex-ante optimal: individual banks do not internalize that higher leverage makes other banks more vulnerable. The theory calls for introducing minimum capital requirements, even in the absence of bailouts.
Working Paper
Evaluating the Information Value for Measures of Systemic Conditions
Timely identification of coincident systemic conditions and forward-looking capacity to anticipate adverse developments are critical for macroprudential policy. Despite clear recognition of these factors in literature, an evaluation methodology and empirical tests for the information value of coincident measures are lacking. This paper provides a twofold contribution to the literature: (i) a general-purpose evaluation framework for assessing information value for measures of systemic conditions, and (ii) an empirical assessment of the information value for several alternative measures of US ...
Discussion Paper
Credit Supply and the Housing Boom
There is no consensus among economists as to what drove the rise of U.S. house prices and household debt in the period leading up to the recent financial crisis. In this post, we argue that the fundamental factor behind that boom was an increase in the supply of mortgage credit, which was brought about by securitization and shadow banking, along with a surge in capital inflows from abroad. This argument is based on the interpretation of four macroeconomic developments between 2000 and 2006 provided by a general equilibrium model of housing and credit.
Working Paper
The Anatomy of Financial Vulnerabilities and Crises
We extend the framework used in Aikman, Kiley, Lee, Palumbo, and Warusawitharana (2015) that maps vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system to a broader set of advanced and emerging economies. Our extension tracks a broader set of vulnerabilities and, therefore, captures signs of different types of crises. The typical anatomy of the evolution of vulnerabilities before and after a financial crisis is as follows. Pressures in asset valuations materialize, and a build-up of imbalances in the external, financial, and nonfinancial sectors follows. A financial crisis is typically followed by a ...