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Working Paper
Mixed Signals: Investment Distortions with Adverse Selection
We study how adverse selection distorts equilibrium investment allocations in a Walrasian credit market with two-sided heterogeneity. Representative investor and partial equilibrium economies are special cases where investment allocations are distorted above perfect information allocations. By contrast, the general setting features a pecuniary externality that leads to trade and investment allocations below perfect information levels. The degree of heterogeneity between informed agents' type governs the direction of the distortion. Moreover, contracts that complete markets dampen the impact ...
Discussion Paper
Credit Market Arbitrage and Regulatory Leverage
In a companion post, we examined the recent trends in arbitraged-based measures of liquidity in the cash bond and credit default swap (CDS) markets. In this post, we turn to the mechanics of the CDS-bond arbitrage trade and explore how the costs and profitability of such trades might be affected by the finalization of the supplementary leverage ratio (SLR) rule in September 2014.
Report
Resolving “Too Big to Fail”
Using a synthetic control research design, we find that ?living will? regulation increases a bank?s annual cost of capital by 22 basis points, or 10 percent of total funding costs. This effect is stronger in banks that were measured as systemically important before the regulation?s announcement. We interpret our findings as a reduction in ?too big to fail? subsidies. The size of this effect is large: a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies a subsidy reduction of $42 billion annually. The impact on equity costs drives the main effect. The impact on deposit costs is statistically ...
Working Paper
The Costs of (sub)Sovereign Default Risk: Evidence from Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico's unique characteristics as a U.S. territory allow us to examine the channels through which (sub)sovereign default risk can have real effects on the macroeconomy. Post-2012, during the period of increased default probabilities, the cointegrating relationship between real activity in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland breaks down and Puerto Rico spirals into a significant decline. We exploit the cross-industry variation in default risk exposure to identify the impact of changes in default risk on employment. The evidence suggests that there are significantly higher employment growth ...
Report
Evaluating regulatory reform: banks’ cost of capital and lending
We examine the effects of regulatory changes on banks’ cost of capital and lending. Since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, the value-weighted CAPM cost of capital for banks has averaged 10.5 percent and declined by more than 4 percent on a within-firm basis relative to financial crisis highs. This decrease was much greater for the largest banks subject to new regulation than for other banks and firms. Over a longer twenty-year horizon, we find that changes in the systematic risk of bank equity have real economic consequences: increases in banks’ cost of capital are associated with ...
Working Paper
A Simple Measure of the Intensity of Capital Controls
We propose a monthly measure of the intensity of capital controls across 29 emerging markets. Our measure, which is based on restrictions on foreign ownership of equities, provides information on the extent and evolution of financial liberalization. Using the measure, we show that a complete liberalization results in a much sharper decrease in the cost of capital than previously reported, but following a partial liberalization the cost of capital increases. Moreover, the more complete the liberalization is, the greater are the subsequent exchange rate appreciation and capital inflows.
Discussion Paper
Regulatory Changes and the Cost of Capital for Banks
In response to the financial crisis nearly a decade ago, a number of regulations were passed to improve the safety and soundness of the financial system. In this post and our related staff report, we provide a new perspective on the effect of these regulations by estimating the cost of capital for banks over the past two decades. We find that, while banks? cost of capital soared during the financial crisis, after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA), banks experienced a greater decrease in their cost of capital than nonbanks and nonbank financial intermediaries (NBFI).
Report
The cost of bank regulatory capital
The Basel I Accord introduced a discontinuity in required capital for undrawn credit commitments. While banks had to set aside capital when they extended commitments with maturities in excess of one year, short-term commitments were not subject to a capital requirement. The Basel II Accord sought to reduce this discontinuity by extending capital standards to most short-term commitments. We use these differences in capital standards around the one-year maturity to infer the cost of bank regulatory capital. Our results show that following Basel I, undrawn fees and all-in-drawn credit spreads on ...
Working Paper
The Global Rise of Corporate Saving
The sectoral composition of global saving changed dramatically during the last three decades. Whereas in the early 1980s most of global investment was funded by household saving, nowadays nearly two-thirds of global investment is funded by corporate saving. This shift in the sectoral composition of saving was not accompanied by changes in the sectoral composition of investment, implying an improvement in the corporate net lending position. We characterize the behavior of corporate saving using both national income accounts and firm-level data and clarify its relationship with the global ...
Report
Bank-intermediated arbitrage
We argue that post-crisis banking regulations pass through from regulated institutions to unregulated arbitrageurs. We document that, once post-crisis regulations bind post 2014, hedge funds use a larger number of prime brokers and diversify away from GSIB-affiliated prime brokers, and that the match to such prime brokers is more fragile. Tighter regulatory constraints disincentivize regulated institutions not only to engage in arbitrage activity themselves but also to provide leverage to other arbitrageurs. Indeed, we show that the maximum leverage allowed and the implied return on basis ...