Search Results
Journal Article
Out of the Office, Into a Financial Crisis?
For decades, the office has offered an alternative to the manual labor that defined work for most of human history. But it came with its own set of headaches for workers.Those headaches have provided fuel for movies like Office Space and The Devil Wears Prada and TV shows like Severance and The Office. The COVID-19 pandemic gave many Americans the chance to live out their dreams of escaping their commutes and the annoyances of the modern workplace. In the initial months of the pandemic in 2020, most offices shut down. More than 60 percent of all paid full days were worked from home.
Working Paper
Factors Affecting Regional Bank Health and Supervisory Rating: An Exploration
Local commercial real estate conditions are positively correlated with the health of regional banks (assets between $10 billion and $100 billion), as measured by the composite confidential supervisory rating. Among other variables, return on assets is positively correlated with our proxy of bank health, but size and capital ratio are negatively correlated. Among the different components of the rating, the management rating has the most influence on the composite rating.
Working Paper
On Commercial Construction Activity's Long and Variable Lags
We use microdata on the phases of commercial construction projects to document three facts regarding time-to-plan lags: (1) plan times are long—about 1.5 years—and highly variable, (2) roughly 40 percent of projects are abandoned in planning, and (3) property price appreciation reduces the likelihood of abandonment. We construct a model with endogenous planning starts and abandonment that matches these facts. The model has the testable implication that supply is more elastic when there are more "shovel ready" projects available to advance to construction. We use local projections to ...
Working Paper
Does Skin in the Game Align Incentives? The Case of CRE CLOs
This paper examines whether high levels of risk retention effectively align incentives in securitizations, using evidence from the $100 billion-plus commercial real estate collateralized loan obligation (CRE CLO) market. CRE CLO sponsors retain all equity and non–investment-grade tranches, far exceeding Dodd–Frank Act minimums. Despite this substantial retention, we find that security returns are driven in part by resolving distressed loans through par-value buyouts back to sponsor balance sheets, shifting losses outside the trust. Moreover, sponsors vertically integrated across servicing ...
Working Paper
CRE Redevelopment Options and the Use of Mortgage Financing
A significant share of commercial real estate (CRE) investment properties—about half by our estimates—are purchased without a mortgage. Using comprehensive microdata on transactions in the US CRE market, we analyze which types of properties are purchased without a mortgage, highlighting the important role of renovation or redevelopment options. We show that mortgage-financed properties are less likely to be subsequently redeveloped, and that owners anticipate these redevelopment frictions and avoid mortgage financing for properties with greater redevelopment options. These effects were ...
Journal Article
Why Do Net Interest Margins Behave Differently across Banks as Interest Rates Rise?
Rising interest rates can influence bank profitability positively (by increasing payments from those with floating-rate debt) or negatively (by forcing banks to offer higher returns to their depositors). Although most banks became more profitable as the Federal Reserve raised rates in 2022–23, a smaller group of banks saw consistent decreases in their net interest margins (NIMs). Understanding why these banks’ NIMs declined may provide useful insight to policymakers concerned with vulnerabilities in the banking system.Brendan Laliberte and Rajdeep Sengupta explore the differences in bank ...
Speech
Economic Fragility: Implications for Recovery from the Pandemic
President Rosengren’s comments were delivered as part of the Annual Regional and Community Bankers Conference, and were based on a speech he delivered on October 8, 2020 for the Marburg Memorial Lecture, Marquette University Economics Department.
Briefing
Understanding the Surge in Commercial Real Estate Lending
U.S. banks have increased their commercial real estate (CRE) lending significantly in the past five years. Economists and regulators note that some positive factors are driving this trend, but they also see potential risks. Analysts at the Richmond Fed have found that some banks could be especially vulnerable if economic conditions deteriorate. These include institutions that are in certain major urban areas and have high concentrations of CRE loans, rapid CRE loan growth, and heavy reliance on "noncore" (or illiquid) funding. But the analysts also conclude that, overall, banks' CRE exposures ...
Working Paper
Lease Expirations and CRE Property Performance
This study analyzes how lease expirations affect the performance of commercial real estate (CRE) properties and how these patterns changed during the COVID-19 crisis. Even before the pandemic, lease expirations were associated with a notable increase in the downside risk to a property’s occupancy or income, particularly in weaker property markets. These risks became more pronounced during the pandemic, driven mostly by office properties. During the pandemic, the adverse effect of lease expirations on office occupancy increased more than 50 percent overall, and it doubled for offices in ...
Banking Analytics: Commercial Real Estate Loan Growth Slows to 11-Year Low
An analysis of call report data shows that quarterly growth in commercial real estate loan volumes at U.S. banks slowed throughout 2024.