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Working Paper
Estimating the Tax and Credit-Event Risk Components of Credit Spreads
This paper argues that tax liabilities explain a large fraction of observed short-maturity investment-grade (IG) spreads, but credit-event premia do not. First, we extend Duffie and Lando (2001) by permitting management to issue both debt and equity. Rather than defaulting, managers of IG firms who receive bad private signals conceal this information and service existing debt via new debt issuance. Consistent with empirical observation, this strategy implies that IG firms have virtually zero credit-event risk (at least until they become ?fallen angels"). Second, we provide empirical evidence ...
Working Paper
Forecasting credit card portfolio losses in the Great Recession: a study in model risk
Credit card portfolios represent a significant component of the balance sheets of the largest US banks. The charge?off rate in this asset class increased drastically during the Great Recession. The recent economic downturn offers a unique opportunity to analyze the performance of credit risk models applied to credit card portfolios under conditions of economic stress. Specifically, we evaluate three potential sources of model risk: model specification, sample selection, and stress scenario selection. Our analysis indicates that model specifications that incorporate interactions between policy ...
Working Paper
Credit Risk, Liquidity and Lies
We reexamine the relative effects of credit risk and liquidity in the interbank market using bank-level panel data on Libor submissions and CDS spreads. Our model synthesizes previous work by combining the fundamental determinants of interbank spreads with the effects of strategic misreporting by Libor-submitting firms. We find that interbank spreads were very sensitive to credit risk at the peak of the crisis. However, liquidity premia constitute the bulk of those spreads on average, and Federal Reserve interventions coincide with improvements in liquidity at short maturities. Accounting for ...
Working Paper
The Bank as Grim Reaper : Debt Composition and Bankruptcy Thresholds
We offer a model and evidence that private debtholders play a key role in setting the endogenous asset value threshold below which corporations declare bankruptcy. The model, in the spirit of Black and Cox (1976), implies that the recovery rate at emergence from bankruptcy on all of the firm's debt taken together is increasing in the pre-bankruptcy share of private debt in all debt. Empirical evidence supports this and other implications of the model. Indeed, debt composition has a more economically material empirical influence on recovery than all other variables we try taken together.
Working Paper
What Drives the Cross-Section of Credit Spreads?: A Variance Decomposition Approach
I decompose the cross-sectional variation of the credit spreads for corporate bonds into changing expected returns and changing expectation of credit losses with a model-free method. Using a log-linearized pricing identity and a vector autoregression applied to micro-level data from 1973 to 2011, I find that the expected credit loss component and the excess return component each explains about half of the variance of the credit spreads. Unlike the market-level findings in Gilchrist and Zakrajsek (2012), at the firm level, the expected credit loss is volatile and affects the firms' investment ...
Working Paper
Debt Maturity and Commitment on Firm Policies
If firms can issue debt only at discrete dates, debt maturity is an effective device against the commitment problem on debt and investment policies. With shorter maturities, debt dynamics are less persistent and more valuable because upward leverage adjustments are faster and long-run leverage lower. Debt maturities that are relatively shorter than asset maturities increase marginal q, and reduce underinvestment. A decomposition of the credit spread consistent with equilibrium shows that the component due to the commitment problem on future debt issuances is sizeable when leverage and default ...
Working Paper
Bank Failures, Capital Buffers, and Exposure to the Housing Market Bubble
We empirically document that banks with greater exposure to high home price-to-income ratio regions in 2005 and 2006 have higher mortgage delinquency and charge-off rates and significantly higher probabilities of failure during the last financial crisis even after controlling for capital, liquidity, and other standard bank performance measures. While high price-to-income ratios present a greater likelihood of house price correction, we find no evidence that banks managed this risk by building stronger capital buffers. Our results suggest that there is scope for improved measures of mortgage ...
Working Paper
Flight to Liquidity or Safety? Recent Evidence from the Municipal Bond Market
We examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent monetary and fiscal policy actions on municipal bond market pricing. Using high-frequency trading data, we estimate key policy events at the peak of the crisis by focusing on a sample of bonds within a narrow window before and after each policy event. We find that policy interventions, in particular those with explicit credit backstops, were effective in alleviating municipal bond market stress. Next, we exploit daily variation in traded municipal bonds and virus exposure across U.S. counties. We find a shift in how bond investors ...
Working Paper
Optimal Bank Regulation in the Presence of Credit and Run Risk
We modify the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model of banking to jointly study various regulations in the presence of credit and run risk. Banks choose between liquid and illiquid assets on the asset side, and between deposits and equity on the liability side. The endogenously determined asset portfolio and capital structure interact to support credit extension, as well as to provide liquidity and risk-sharing services to the real economy. Our modifications create wedges in the asset and liability mix between the private equilibrium and a social planner's equilibrium. Correcting these distortions ...
Working Paper
On the Economics of Discrimination in Credit Markets
This paper develops a general equilibrium model of both taste-based and statistical discrimination in credit markets. We find that both types of discrimination have similar predictions for intergroup differences in loan terms. The commonly held view has been that if there exists taste-based discrimination, loans approved to minority borrowers would have higher expected profitability than to majorities with comparable credit background. We show that the validity of this profitability view depends crucially on how expected loan profitability is measured. We also show that there must exist ...