Search Results
Briefing
How Concentrated Is the Distribution of Banks' Reserve Balances?
Reserve balances play a critical role in the banking system. Prior to 2020, they satisfied reserve requirements, and they now also serve as the primary payment instrument for settling transactions and client orders via the Fedwire system. Maintaining adequate reserve balances allows banks to meet withdrawal demands and instills depositor confidence, reducing the risk of bank runs. Empirical studies have demonstrated that banks' holding of reserve balances affects the provision of bank credit to firms and households, although the relationship depends on types of credit and methods of reserves ...
Journal Article
Review of New York Fed studies on the effects of post-crisis banking reforms
In 2017, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York initiated a project to examine the effects of post-crisis reforms on bank performance and vulnerability. The project, which was completed in June 2018, consisted of twelve studies evaluating a wide set of regulatory changes. The primary focus was how these regulatory changes affected the risk taking, funding costs, and profitability of banks, as well as their impact on liquidity. In this article, the authors survey the twelve papers that make up the project and place the principal findings in the context of the current academic and policymaking ...
Briefing
How Risky Are Young Borrowers?
Young borrowers are conventionally considered the most prone to making financial mistakes. This has spurred efforts to limit their access to credit, particularly via credit cards. Recent research suggests, however, that young borrowers are actually among the least likely to experience a serious credit card default. One reason why people obtain credit cards early in life may be to build a strong credit history.
Briefing
Reforming Money Market Mutual Funds: A Difficult Assignment
The money market mutual fund (MMMF) industry was one of many segments of the financial sector that experienced significant volatility during the 2007?08 financial crisis. Reform efforts have been underway to make the industry more resilient to shocks, but proposals have been controversial. This Economic Brief explores some of the key issues and sheds light on why reforming this industry has been so challenging.
Working Paper
Supervisory Stress Testing For CCPs : A Macro-Prudential, Two-Tier Approach
Stress testing has become an increasingly important mechanism to support a variety of financial stability objectives. Stress tests can be used to test the individual resilience of a single entity or to assess the system-wide vulnerabilities of a network. This article examines the role of supervisory stress testing of central counterparties (CCPs), which has emerged in recent years. A key message is that crucial differences in CCPs? role, risk profile and financial structure, when compared to banks, are likely to require significant adaptation in the design of supervisory stress tests (SSTs). ...
Working Paper
Inventory, Market Making, and Liquidity in OTC Markets
We develop a search-theoretic model of a dealer-intermediated over-the-counter market. Our key departure from the literature is to assume that, when a customer meets a dealer, the dealer can sell only assets that it already owns. Hence, in equilibrium, dealers choose to hold inventory. We derive the equilibrium relationship between dealers’ costs of holding assets on their balance sheets, their optimal inventory holdings, and various measures of liquidity, including bid-ask spreads, trade size, volume, and turnover. Using transaction-level data from the corporate bond market, we calibrate ...
Working Paper
Post-crisis Signals in Securitization: Evidence from Auto ABS
We find significant evidence of asymmetric information and signaling in post-crisis offerings in the auto asset-backed securities (ABS) market. Using granular regulatory reporting data, we are able to directly measure private information and quantify its effect on signaling and pricing. We show that lenders "self-finance'' unobservably higher-quality loans by holding these loans for longer periods to signal private information. This signal is priced in initial offerings of auto ABS and accurately predicts ex-post loan performance. We also demonstrate that our results are robust to exogenous ...
Working Paper
Out of Sight No More? The Effect of Fee Disclosures on 401(k) Investment Allocations
We examine the effects of a 2012 regulatory reform that mandated fee and performance disclosures for the investment options in 401(k) plans. We show that participants became significantly more attentive to expense ratios and short-term performance after the reform. The disclosure effects are stronger among plans with large average contributions per participant and weaker for plans with many investment options. Additionally, these results are not driven by secular changes in investor behavior or sponsor-initiated changes to the investment menus. Our findings suggest that providing salient fee ...
Briefing
The Center for Advancing Women in Economics: A Conference Recap
Economists from the Richmond Fed, research universities and other institutions met in Richmond for the Center for Advancing Women in Economics (AWE) conference in November. Women researchers presented papers on a variety of topics, including unconventional monetary and fiscal policy, global inflation patterns, worker responses to labor shocks, capital flows and risk, changes in U.S. supply chains, and the dynamics of official lending.The conference concluded with a panel discussion on the challenges and opportunities for academic research to inform policy. AWE Director Marina Azzimonti served ...