Search Results
Discussion Paper
Flood Risk and Firm Location Decisions in the Fed’s Second District
The intensity, duration, and frequency of flooding have increased over the past few decades. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 99 percent of U.S. counties have been impacted by a flooding event since 1999. As the frequency of flood events continues to increase, the number of people, buildings, and agriculture exposed to flood risk is only likely to grow. As a previous post points out, measuring the geographical accuracy of such risk is important and may impact bank lending. In this post, we focus on the distribution of flood risk within the Federal Reserve’s ...
Working Paper
Banks in Space
We study the spatial expansion of banks in response to the banking deregulation of the 1980s and 90s in order to develop a spatial theory of banking. During this period, large banks expanded rapidly, mostly by adding new branches in new locations, while many small banks exited. We document that large banks sorted into the densest markets, but that sorting weakened over time as large banks expanded to more marginal markets in search of locations with a relative abundance of retail deposits. This allowed large banks to reduce their dependence on expensive wholesale funding and grow further. To ...
Newsletter
Interest-only mortgages and speculation in hot housing markets
Even as housing markets have temporarily shut down across the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic, housing remains a key sector that contributes disproportionately to fluctuations in overall economic activity and that will likely play an important role as the economy reopens. Interest in this market among research economists and policymakers intensified after the exceptional boom and bust in housing between 2003 and 2008. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we describe research in Barlevy and Fisher (2020)1 that examined patterns in the kinds of mortgages homebuyers took out in different cities during ...