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Working Paper
Demonstration effects in preventive care
Using a unique dataset composed of female employees at a large medical organization, this paper explores the role of social interactions among female co-workers and neighbors in the decision to obtain breast cancer screening exams. In our theoretical framework, the experience of other women is salient because it alters the tolerance for ambiguity about their own vulnerability, via a comparative ignorance effect. We find that the social multiplier ranges from 2 to 3: the equilibrium effect of an exogenous shock that impacts the probability of performing a mammogram is two to three times the ...
Working Paper
Household debt repayment behaviour: what role do institutions play?
Household debt repayment behavior has been understudied, especially empirically, despite the heightened debate on rising household debt, personal bankruptcy filings, and arrears. In this paper, we use data from the European Community Household Panel to analyze the determinants of household debt arrears. The paper's primary aim is to understand the role of institutions in household arrears by exploiting cross-country differences and the panel nature of the data set. We start our analysis by showing that falling into arrears has important long-term consequences for employment, self-employment, ...
Working Paper
Your house or your credit card, which would you choose?: personal delinquency tradeoffs and precautionary liquidity motives
This paper finds strong evidence that many individuals choose to pay credit card bills even at the cost of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures. While the popular press and some recent literature have suggested that this choice may emerge from steep declines in housing prices, we find evidence that individual-level liquidity concerns are at least as important in the decision. That is, choosing credit cards over housing suggests a precautionary liquidity preference. ; By linking the mortgage delinquency decisions to individual-level credit conditions, we are able to assess the compound ...
Working Paper
Optimal Delegation Under Unknown Bias: The Role of Concavity
A principal is uncertain of an agent's preferences and cannot provide monetary transfers. The principal, however, does control the discretion granted to the agent. In this paper, we provide a simple characterization of when it is optimal for the principal to screen by offering different terms of discretion to the agent. When the principal's utility is sufficiently concave, it is optimal for the principal to pool and to offer all agents the same discretion. Thus, for any number of agents and any distribution over agent preferences, the optimal contract is simple: the principal sets a cap and ...
Working Paper
Offshore Production and Business Cycle Dynamics with Heterogeneous Firms
To examine the effect of offshoring through vertical FDI on the international transmission of business cycles, I propose a two-country model in which firms endogenously choose the location of their production plants over the business cycle. Firms face a sunk cost to enter the domestic market and an additional fixed cost to produce offshore. As such, the offshoring decision depends on the firm-specific productivity and on fluctuations in the relative cost of effective labor. The model generates a procyclical pattern of offshoring and dynamics along its extensive margin that are consistent with ...
Working Paper
Managing Risk in Cards Portfolios: Risk Appetite and Limits
We describe an important risk management tool at financial institutions, risk appetite frameworks. We observe those frameworks for credit cards portfolios at four large banks and analyze when and why banks adjust them. The risk appetite frameworks for these banks monitor 40 to 150 metrics. We focus on metrics related to outstanding balances of which we identified 79. Overall, we find that these frameworks are sticky. Most adjustments occur during scheduled annual reviews and are relatively limited. Limit breaches are rare. Thresholds are often changed the month after a breach or after the ...
Working Paper
Information diffusion based explanations of asset pricing anomalies
In this paper we develop information based factors which outperform other popular factors used in the multifactor pricing literature such as the Fama and French size and book-to-market factors. The first factor is based on the age of an asset, measured by the number of months since the asset?s IPO, while the second factor is based on the percentage of trading days an asset does not trade in a given year. Both factors attempt to capture the quality and speed of information diffusion on the market. Our information factors perform particularly well on momentum portfolios, which, Hong et al ...
Working Paper
Addressing the pro-cyclicality of capital requirements with a dynamic loan loss provision system
The pro-cyclical effect of bank capital requirements has attracted much attention in the post-crisis discussion of how to make the financial system more stable. This paper investigates and calibrates a dynamic provision as an instrument for addressing pro-cyclicality. The model for the dynamic provision is adopted from the Spanish banking regulatory system. We argue that, had U.S. banks set aside general provisions in positive states of the economy, they would have been in a better position to absorb their portfolios? loan losses during the recent financial turmoil. The allowances accumulated ...
Working Paper
Looking behind the aggregates: a reply to “Facts and Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008”
As Chari et al (2008) point out in a recent paper, aggregate trends are very hard to interpret. They examine four common claims about the impact of financial sector phenomena on the economy and conclude that all four claims are myths. We argue that to evaluate these popular claims, one needs to look at the underlying composition of financial aggregates. Our findings show that most of the commonly argued facts are indeed supported by disaggregated data.
Working Paper
Asset liquidity, debt valuation and credit risk
This paper presents a structural debt valuation model that links default probabilities and recovery rates of corporate securities to asset market liquidity. This linking is advantageous for risk management and regulation of financial institutions in that it provides a method of calibrating the relationship between probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD). Two innovations in the paper are the placing of the default point in a model of debt valuation into general equilibrium and conditioning this point on market factors such as asset liquidity. These allow one to derive ...