Search Results
Working Paper
Assessing Targeted Macroprudential Financial Regulation: The Case of the 2006 Commercial Real Estate Guidance for Banks
In January 2006, federal regulators issued guidance requiring banks with specific high concentrations of commercial real estate (CRE) loans to tighten managerial controls. This paper shows that banks with concentrations in excess of the thresholds set in the guidance subsequently experienced slower growth in their CRE portfolios than can be explained by changes in bank or economic conditions. Moreover, banks above the CRE thresholds tended to have slower commercial and industrial loan growth but faster household loan growth following issuance of the guidance. The results highlight the ...
Skimming U.S. Housing Froth a Delicate, Daunting Task
The possibility of a sharp price correction leading to an economic contraction—were one to materialize—would further complicate Federal Reserve inflation-fighting efforts.
Rent inflation remains on track to slow over the coming year
Measures of market rents—the rental rate for new leases—increased about 15 percent in 2021. The surge occurred despite a modest increase of less than 4 percent in the rent and owners’ equivalent rent (OER) components of the most commonly watched U.S. inflation gauges, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures (PCE). A forecast of rent inflation using the Single Family Rent Index from CoreLogic, a financial analytics firm, would have accurately predicted this path a year in advance and currently anticipates rent inflation slowing to below 6 percent by the end ...
Journal Article
Banking Trends: Estimating Today's Commercial Real Estate Risk
To survive a decline in commercial real estate prices such as occurred during the financial crisis, how much more capital do banks today need?
Location, location, location: Mortgage rate impact varies by metro
The role of individual housing markets and their sensitivity to mortgage rate changes play an important part in understanding the impact of higher rates.
Working Paper
Impacts of Monetary Stimulus on Credit Allocation and Macroeconomy: Evidence from China
We develop a new empirical framework to identify and estimate the effects of monetary stimulus on the real economy. The framework is applied to the Chinese economy when monetary policy in normal times was switched to an extraordinarily expansionary regime to combat the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. We show that this unprecedented monetary stimulus accounted for as high as a 4 percent increase of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate by the end of 2009. Monetary transmission to the real economy was through bank credit allocated disproportionately to financing investment in real ...
Lower interest rates don’t necessarily improve housing affordability
The direct impact of higher mortgage rates on housing affordability has received much attention. We emphasize that housing affordability not only depends on mortgage rates but also on house prices, which have competing effects.
Working Paper
The Good, the Bad, and the Ordinary: Estimating Agent Value-Added Using Real Estate Transactions
Despite the prevalence and high cost of real estate agents, there is limited empirical evidence as to the nature or efficacy of their services. In this paper we estimate real estate agents’ value-added when either selling or buying homes using data from three large multiple listing services (MLS). We find that homeowners who forgo a conventional real estate agent, but who list their homes on the MLS via a flat fee broker, sell for between 1 and 4 percent more before commission but take longer to sell and are less likely to complete a sale. However, these average effects mask a significant ...
Working Paper
Bank Competition and Strategic Adaptation to Climate Change
How does competition affect banks' adaptation to emergent risks for which there is limited supervisory oversight? The analysis matches detailed supervisory data on home equity lines of credit with high resolution flood projections to identify climate risks. Following Hurricane Harvey, banks updated their internal risk models to better reflect flood risk projections, even in areas unaffected by the disaster. These updates are only detected in banks with exposures to the disaster, indicating heterogeneous bank learning. We use this heterogeneity to identify how bank adaptation is affected by ...
Working Paper
Institutional Investors, Rents, and Neighborhood Change in the Single Family Residential Market
Institutional investors that buy and rent out single family homes have continued to increase their presence after the Great Recession. We examine their neighborhood entry choices and rent charging behavior by leveraging tax and deed transfer records and Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data for 2010-2021. We find that investor share is higher in markets with lower housing values and higher shares of Black and noncollege residents, but higher median income. We also find that investors raise rents at 60% higher rates than the average increase when first acquiring the property, and higher investor ...