Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 16.
(refine search)
Report
A Dynamic Theory of Collateral Quality and Long-Term Interventions
We study a dynamic model of collateralized lending under adverse selection in which the quality of collateral assets is endogenously determined by hidden effort. Complementarities in incentives lead to non-ergodic dynamics: Asset quality and output grow when asset quality is high, but stagnate or deteriorate otherwise. Inefficiencies remain, even in the most efficient competitive equilibrium?investment and output are vulnerable to spells of lending market illiquidity, and these spells may persist because of suboptimal effort. Nevertheless, benevolent regulators without commitment can destroy ...
Report
The use of collateral in bilateral repurchase and securities lending agreements
We use unique data from U.S. bank holding company-affiliated securities dealers to study the use of collateral in bilateral repurchase and securities lending agreements. Market participants? use of collateral differs substantially across asset classes: for U.S. Treasury securities transactions, we find that haircuts are large enough to provide full protection from default, whereas the same is not usually true for equities transactions. Further, although most of the equities in our sample are each associated with a unique haircut, most of the U.S. Treasury securities are each associated with ...
Working Paper
Market-making with Search and Information Frictions
We develop a dynamic model of trading through market-makers that incorporates two canonical sources of illiquidity: trading (or search) frictions, which imply that market-makers have some amount of market power; and information frictions, which imply that market-makers face some degree of adverse selection. We use this model to study the effects of various technological innovations and regulatory initiatives that have reduced trading frictions in over-the-counter markets. Our main result is that reducing trading frictions can lead to less liquidity, as measured by bid-ask spreads. The key ...
Working Paper
Extended Loan Terms and Auto Loan Default Risk
A salient feature of the $1.2 trillion auto-loan market is the extension of loan maturity terms in recentyears. Using a large, national sample of auto loans from the entire auto market, we find that the default rates on six- and seven-year loans are multiple times that of shorter five-year term loans. Most of the default risk difference is due to borrower risks associated with longer-term loans, as those longer-term auto borrowers are more credit and liquidity constrained. We also find borrowers’ loan-term choice to be endogenous and that the endogeneity bias is substantial in conventional ...
Working Paper
Screening and Adverse Selection in Frictional Markets
We incorporate a search-theoretic model of imperfect competition into a standard model of asymmetric information with unrestricted contracts. We characterize the unique equilibrium, and use our characterization to explore the interaction between adverse selection, screening, and imperfect competition. We show that the relationship between an agent?s type, the quantity he trades, and the price he pays is jointly determined by the severity of adverse selection and the concentration of market power. Therefore, quantifying the effects of adverse selection requires controlling for market ...
Working Paper
Securitization and mortgage default
We find that private-securitized loans perform worse than observably similar, nonsecuritized loans, which provides evidence for adverse selection. The effect of securitization is strongest for prime mortgages, which have not been studied widely in the previous literature and particular prime adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs): These become delinquent at a 30 percent higher rate when privately securitized. By contrast, our baseline estimates for subprime mortgages show that private-securitized loans default at lower rates. We show, however, that ?early defaulting loans? account for this: those ...
Working Paper
Adverse Selection, Risk Sharing and Business Cycles
I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about an idiosyncratic shock to their value of leisure. I consider the mechanism design problem for this economy and describe a computational method to solve it. This is an important contribution of the paper since the method could be used to solve a wide class of models with heterogeneous agents and aggregate uncertainty. Calibrating the model to U.S. data I find a striking result: That the information frictions that plague the economy have no effects on business cycle fluctuations.
Working Paper
Securities Financing and Asset Markets: New Evidence
This paper presents new evidence on bilateral securities financing based on the Federal Reserve's Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey, which was launched in the wake of the financial crisis to provide a window into this otherwise opaque market. The survey asks large broker-dealers about terms at which they fund client positions, and the demand for such funding, across several different collateral types. Within asset classes, reported changes in spreads, haircuts, and other financing terms move closely together, and we show that they also covary with the state of the underlying cash ...
Working Paper
Finance and Inequality : The Distributional Impacts of Bank Credit Rationing
We analyze reductions in bank credit using a natural experiment where unprecedented flooding differentially affected banks that were more exposed to flooded regions in Pakistan. Using a unique dataset that covers the universe of consumer loans in Pakistan and this exogenous shock to bank funding, we find two key results. First, banks disproportionately reduce credit to new and less-educated borrowers, following an increase in their funding costs. Second, the credit reduction is not compensated by relatively more lending by less-affected banks. The empirical evidence suggests that adverse ...
Working Paper
Corporate Governance and Risk Management at Unprotected Banks: National Banks in the 1890s
Managers' incentives may conflict with those of shareholders or creditors, particularly at leveraged, opaque banks. Bankers may abuse their control rights to give themselves excessive salaries, favored access to credit, or to take excessive risks that benefit themselves at the expense of depositors. Banks must design contracting and governance structures that sufficiently resolve agency problems so that they can attract funding from outside shareholders and depositors. We examine banks from the 1890s, a period when there were no distortions from deposit insurance or government interventions ...