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Conference Paper
Housing price changes
Conference Paper
The originate-to-distribute model and refi waves
Newsletter
Rules and Discretion in Life Insurance Regulation
In this Chicago Fed Letter, we illustrate how regulators have used rule-based and principle-based approaches to set the minimum level of reserves and capital for insurers. We use examples to show the trend toward more principle-based regulation.
Conference Paper
The size of the banking industry and managerial entrenchment
Working Paper
The effect of market size structure on competition: the case of small business lending
Banking industry consolidation has raised concern about the supply of small business credit since large banks generally invest lower proportions of their assets in small business loans. However, we find that the likelihood that a small business borrows from a bank of a given size is roughly proportional to the local market presence of banks of that size, although there are exceptions. Moreover, small business loan interest rates depend more on the size structure of the market than on the size of the bank providing the credit, with markets dominated by large banks generally charging lower ...
Conference Paper
Overcapacity and exit from banking
Working Paper
The impact of the originate-to-distribute model on banks before and during the financial crisis
The growth of securitization made it easier for banks to sell home mortgage loans that they originated. I explore how mortgage sales affected banks in the years leading up to the financial crisis that began in 2007 and how their pre-crisis mortgage sales affected banks during the crisis. Loan sales are important because most banks sell mortgages as part of the securitization process, but few actually do the securitization. I find that stock returns increase when banks increase sales of mortgages used for refinancing rather than home purchase, suggesting that some banks scale up lending during ...
Working Paper
Macroprudential Policy: Results from a Tabletop Exercise
This paper presents a tabletop exercise designed to analyze macroprudential policy. Several senior Federal Reserve officials were presented with a hypothetical economy as of 2020:Q2 in which commercial real estate and nonfinancial debt valuations were very high. After analyzing the economy and discussing the use of monetary and macroprudential policy tools, participants were then presented with a hypothetical negative shock to commercial real estate valuations that occurred in the second half of 2020. Participants then discussed the use of the tools during an incipient downturn. Some of the ...
Working Paper
Mergers and risk
This paper examines the impact of mergers on default risk, finding that, on average, a merger increases the default risk of the acquiring firm. This is surprising for two reasons: risk reduction is among the reasons commonly cited for mergers, and asset diversification should reduce default risk unless the newly-merged firm takes some action to increase risk. We associate the risk increase with mergers satisfying one of a trifecta of conditions related to agency problems: mergers financed with stock, acquirers with a high market- to-book ratio, and acquirers with poor stock price performance ...
Working Paper
Do regulators search for the quiet life? the relationship between regulators and the regulated in banking
In some industries, firms are able to choose who regulates them. There is a long debate over whether regulatory competition is beneficial or whether it leads to a race for the bottom. We introduce another possible issue with regulation. Regulators may take actions intended to minimize the effort they spend on work. Using banking as an example, we test this quiet life hypothesis against other explanations of regulatory behavior. Banks are able to switch among three options for a primary federal regulator: the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC. We examine why they switch and what the ...