Search Results
Working Paper
The Impact of Regulatory Stress Tests on Bank Lending and Its Macroeconomic Consequences
We use an expansive regulatory loan-level data set to analyze how the portfolios of the largest US banks have changed in response to the Dodd-Frank Act Stress Test (DFAST) requirements. We find that the portfolios of the largest banks, which are subject to stress-testing, have become more similar to each other since DFAST was implemented in 2011. We also find that banks with poor stress-test results tend to adjust their portfolios in a way that makes them more similar to the portfolios of banks that performed well in the stress-testing. In general, stress-testing has resulted in more ...
Working Paper
Stress Testing Household Debt
We estimate a county-level model of household delinquency and use it to conduct "stress tests" of household debt. Applying house price and unemployment rate shocks from Comprehensive Capital Analysis Review (CCAR) stress tests, we find that forecasted delinquency rates for the recent stock of debt are moderately lower than for the stock of debt before the 2007-09 financial crisis, given the same set of shocks. This decline in expected delinquency rates under stress reflects an improvement in debt-to-income ratios and an increase in the share of debt held by borrowers with relatively high ...
Working Paper
Primer on the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) Model: A Top-Down Stress Test Model
This technical note describes the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) model, which is a top-down model that helps assess how well the banking system is positioned to weather exogenous macroeconomic shocks. FLARE estimates banking system capital under varying macroeconomic scenarios, time horizons, and other systemic shocks.
Discussion Paper
CRISK: Measuring the Climate Risk Exposure of the Financial System
A growing number of climate-related policies have been adopted globally in the past thirty years (see chart below). The risk to economic activity from changes in policies in response to climate risks, such as carbon taxes and green subsidies, is often referred to as transition risk. Transition risk can adversely affect the real economy through the banking sector. For example, a shock to borrowers’ transition risk can impair their ability to repay, which can then lead to an amplified effect on banks’ current and expected future profits, resulting in a systemic undercapitalization of banks. ...
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. ...
Report
Tracking and stress-testing U.S. household leverage
Borrowers? housing equity is an important component of their wealth and a critical determinant of their vulnerability to shocks. In this paper, we create a unique data set that enables us to provide a comprehensive look at the ratio of housing debt to housing values?what we refer to as household leverage?at the micro level. An advantage of our data is that we are able to study the evolution of household leverage over time and locations in the United States. We find that leverage was at a very low point just prior to the large declines in house prices that began in 2006, and rose very quickly ...
Working Paper
Supervisory Stringency, Payout Restrictions, and Bank Equity Prices
I study investor responses to the 2020 bank stress tests that included restrictions on shareholder payouts. I find that banks subject to the stress tests and payout restrictions experienced both immediate and persistently lower excess stock price returns. In the cross-section, I find that excess stock returns declined with bank size but cannot otherwise be explained by pre-pandemic bank or payout characteristics, suggesting that investors penalized banks likely to experience greater regulatory scrutiny. However, the excess stock return penalties are smaller than those previously estimated in ...
Discussion Paper
How Resilient Is the U.S. Housing Market Now?
Housing is by far the most important asset for most households, and, not coincidentally, housing debt dwarfs other household liabilities. The relationship between housing debt and housing values figures significantly in financial and macroeconomic stability, as events during the housing bust of 2006-12 clearly demonstrated. This week, Liberty Street Economics presents five posts touching on various aspects of housing, from the changing relationship between mortgage debt and housing equity to the future of homeownership. In today’s post, we provide estimates of housing equity and explore how ...
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
Choosing Stress Scenarios for Systemic Risk Through Dimension Reduction
Regulatory stress-testing is an important tool for ensuring banking system health in many countries around the world. Current methodologies ensure banks are well capitalized against the scenarios in the test, but it is unclear how resilient banks will be to other plausible scenarios. This paper proposes a new methodology for choosing scenarios that uses a measure of systemic risk with Correlation Pursuit variable selection, and Sliced Inverse Regression factor analysis, to select variables and create factors based on their ability to explain variation in the systemic risk measure. The main ...