Secured facility
The Mortgage Interest Deduction and Its Impact on Homeownership decisions
Christian Hilber & Tracy Turner
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of the combined U.S. state and federal mortgage interest deduction (MID) on homeownership attainment, using data from 1984 to 2007 and exploiting variation in the subsidy arising from changes in the MID within and across states over time. We test whether capitalization of the MID into house prices offsets the positive effect on homeownership. We find that the MID boosts homeownership attainment only of higher income households in less tightly regulated housing markets. In more restrictive places an adverse effect exists. The MID is an ineffective policy to promote homeownership and improve social welfare.
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Did Affordable Housing Mandates Cause the Subprime Mortgage Crisis?
Shawn Moulton
Journal of Housing Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The 1992 Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act (GSE Act) mandated that a specified percentage of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchases come from underserved populations. A number of prominent observers have pointed to the GSE Act as a root cause of the recent housing crisis. This paper evaluates the link between the GSE Act and relaxed mortgage market standards. Using loan application-level data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, I analyze whether the GSE Act's single-family affordable housing goals altered mortgage lending or purchasing decisions. To identify this effect, I use a regression discontinuity design that exploits arbitrary cutoffs used to determine whether a loan satisfies the GSE Act goals. I find that the GSE Act's single-family affordable housing goals increased GSE purchases from very low-income borrowers by 4.4 percent but had no effect on mortgage lending. These results stand up to a number of specification and robustness checks.
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The Chrysler Effect: The Impact of Government Intervention on Borrowing Costs
Deniz Anginer & Joseph Warburton
Journal of Banking & Finance, March 2014, Pages 62-79
Abstract:
This paper studies intercreditor conflict arising from political interference in the bankruptcy process. The U.S. government's intervention in the 2009 reorganizations of Chrysler and GM purportedly elevated claims of the auto union over those of the automakers' senior creditors in violation of bankruptcy priority rules. Critics predicted that businesses would experience an increase in their borrowing costs because of the risk that politically-powerful junior claimants might now leap-frog other creditors. We examine the financial market where this effect would be most detectible, the market for bonds of highly unionized companies. We find no evidence that bondholders of unionized firms reacted negatively to the government intervention and reject the claim that investors viewed the reorganizations as establishing a precedent for priority jumping by organized labor.
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The System Worked: Global Economic Governance during the Great Recession
Daniel Drezner
World Politics, January 2014, Pages 123-164
Abstract:
Prior to 2008, numerous international relations scholars had predicted a looming crisis in global economic governance. Policy analysts have only reinforced this perception since the financial crisis, declaring that we live in a "G-Zero" world. This article takes a closer look at the global response to the financial crisis and reveals a more optimistic picture. Despite initial shocks that were more severe than the 1929 financial crisis, global economic governance structures responded quickly and robustly. Whether one measures results by outcomes, outputs, or process, formal and informal governance structures displayed surprising resiliency. Multilateral economic institutions performed well in crisis situations to reinforce open economic policies, especially in contrast to the 1930s. While there are areas where governance has either faltered or failed, on the whole, the system has worked. Misperceptions about global economic governance persist because the Great Recession has disproportionately affected the core economies; analysts have conflated national with global governance; and the efficacy of past periods of global economic governance has been badly overestimated. Why the system has worked better than expected remains an open question, but we can tentatively conclude that both the power of the United States and the resilience of neoliberal economic ideas were underestimated.
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Crises and Confidence: Systemic Banking Crises and Depositor Behavior
Una Okonkwo Osili & Anna Paulson
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We show that individuals who have experienced a systemic banking crisis are 11 percentage points less likely to use banks in the U.S. than otherwise similar individuals who emigrated from the same country but did not live through a crisis. This finding is robust to controlling for exposure to other macroeconomic events and to various methods for addressing potential bias due to migrant self-selection. Consistent with the view that personal experience plays an important role in decision-making, the effects are larger for individuals who were older and more likely to have had wealth entrusted to the banking system at the time of the crisis and for people who experienced crises in countries without deposit insurance.
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Anat Admati et al.
Stanford Working Paper, October 2013
Abstract:
We examine the pervasive view that "equity is expensive," which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly for society and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are fallacious, irrelevant to the policy debate by confusing private and social costs, or very weak. For example, the return on equity contains a risk premium that must go down if banks have more equity. It is thus incorrect to assume that the required return on equity remains fixed as capital requirements increase. It is also incorrect to translate higher taxes paid by banks to a social cost. Policies that subsidize debt and indirectly penalize equity through taxes and implicit guarantees are distortive. And while debt's informational insensitivity may provide valuable liquidity, increased capital (and reduced leverage) can enhance this benefit. Finally, suggestions that high leverage serves a necessary disciplining role are based on inadequate theory lacking empirical support. We conclude that bank equity is not socially expensive, and that high leverage at the levels allowed, for example, by the Basel III agreement is not necessary for banks to perform all their socially valuable functions and likely makes banking inefficient. Better capitalized banks suffer fewer distortions in lending decisions and would perform better. The fact that banks choose high leverage does not imply that this is socially optimal. Except for government subsidies and viewed from an ex ante perspective, high leverage may not even be privately optimal for banks. Setting equity requirements significantly higher than the levels currently proposed would entail large social benefits and minimal, if any, social costs. Approaches based on equity dominate alternatives, including contingent capital. To achieve better capitalization quickly and efficiently and prevent disruption to lending, regulators must actively control equity payouts and issuance. If remaining challenges are addressed, capital regulation can be a powerful tool for enhancing the role of banks in the economy.
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Michael Chow & William Dunkelberg
Business Economics, October 2013, Pages 214-223
Abstract:
In the early years following the financial collapse, federal officials and others believed that banks were not making loans to creditworthy small firms, who have accounted for most of the job creation in the United States in recent decades. Acting on this belief, a number of programs were created to increase bank lending to small firms. Overall, however, the data collected since the 2007/8 financial crisis suggest that the explanation for slow loan growth in the small business sector is not a result of supply constraints but rather a result of anemic loan demand among small firms. Thus, recent programs intended to increase small business borrowing through easing credit supply were doomed to fail. The weak demand for credit among small firms is representative of the sluggish performance of the small business economy postrecession, a marked contrast to the robust performance of larger firms and a reflection of a bifurcated economy.
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Subprime Cohorts and Loan Performance
Geetesh Bhardwaj & Rajdeep Sengupta
Journal of Banking & Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Loan performance of subprime originations during the boom years of 2004-2006 is contrasted with that of subprime originations during the early period of 2000-2002. A counterfactual technique is developed to determine how originations during the early period would perform in a different environment, namely, the environment faced by originations of 2004, 2005, and 2006. In an environment where house prices are increasing rapidly, low credit score originations do not show high rates of default - as was witnessed for 2000-2002 cohorts. However, in an environment of stagnant or deteriorating home prices, low credit score originations show significantly higher rates of default than high credit score originations. With a greater proportion of low credit score originations, earlier cohorts of 2000-2002 were no less vulnerable to the environment faced by cohorts of 2004-2006. In essence, these results raise concerns about the viability of all cohorts of subprime originations because of their reliance on the appreciation of the underlying collateral rather than the creditworthiness of the borrower.
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Marc Flandreau & Joanna Kinga Sławatyniec
Financial History Review, December 2013, Pages 237-257
Abstract:
This article challenges the 'regulatory license' view that reliance by regulators on the output of rating agencies in the 1930s 'caused' the agencies to become a central part of the fabric of the US financial system. We argue that long before the 1930s, courts began using ratings as financial-community-produced norms of prudence. This created 'a legal license' problem, very analogous to the 'regulatory license' problem, and gave rise to conflicts of interest not unlike those that have been discussed in the context of the subprime crisis. Rating agencies may have had substantial responsibility for the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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Did CDS trading improve the market for corporate bonds?
Sanjiv Das, Madhu Kalimipalli & Subhankar Nayak
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Financial innovation through the creation of new markets and securities impacts related markets as well, changing their efficiency, quality (pricing error), and liquidity. The credit default swap (CDS) market was undoubtedly one of the salient new markets of the past decade. In this paper we examine whether the advent of CDS trading was beneficial to the underlying secondary market for corporate bonds. We employ econometric specifications that account for information across CDS, bond, equity, and volatility markets. We also develop a novel methodology to utilize all observations in our data set even when continuous daily trading is not evidenced, because bonds trade much less frequently than equities. Using an extensive sample of CDS and bond trades over 2002-2008, we find that the advent of CDS was largely detrimental. Bond markets became less efficient, evidenced no reduction in pricing errors, and experienced no improvement in liquidity. These findings are robust to various slices of the data set and specifications of our tests.
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Market-Based Bank Capital Regulation
Jeremy Bulow
Stanford Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
Today's regulatory rules, especially the easily-manipulated measures of regulatory capital, have led to costly bank failures. We design a robust regulatory system such that (i) bank losses are credibly borne by the private sector (ii) systemically important institutions cannot collapse suddenly; (iii) bank investment is counter-cyclical; and (iv) regulatory actions depend upon market signals (because the simplicity and clarity of such rules prevents gaming by firms, and forbearance by regulators, as well as because of the efficiency role of prices). One key innovation is "ERNs" (equity recourse notes -- superficially similar to, but importantly distinct from, "cocos") which gradually "bail in" equity when needed. Importantly, although our system uses market information, it does not rely on markets being "right."
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Unintended Consequences of LOLR Facilities: The Case of Illiquid Leverage
Viral Acharya & Bruce Tuckman
NBER Working Paper, December 2013
Abstract:
While the direct effect of lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facilities is to forestall the default of financial firms that lose funding liquidity, an indirect effect is to allow these firms to minimize deleveraging sales of illiquid assets. This unintended consequence of LOLR facilities manifests itself as excess illiquid leverage in the financial sector, can make future liquidity shortfalls more likely, and can lead to an increase in default risks. Furthermore, this increase in default risk can occur despite the fact that the combination of LOLR facilities and reduced asset sales raises the prices of illiquid assets. The behavior of U.S. broker-dealers during the crisis of 2007-2009 is consistent with the unintended consequence just described. In particular, given the Federal Reserve's LOLR facilities, broker-dealers could afford to try to wait out the crisis. While they did reduce traditional measures of leverage to varying degrees, they failed to reduce sufficiently their illiquid leverage, which contributed to their failures or near failures. Several mechanisms that might address this unintended consequence of LOLR facilities are explored: condition LOLR access and terms on the financial health of borrowers; condition LOLR access and terms on asset sales and deleveraging; and, especially, instead of supporting troubled financial firms, open LOLR facilities to financially sound, potential buyers of illiquid assets.
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Does Financing Spur Small Business Productivity? Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Karthik Krishnan, Debarshi Nandy & Manju Puri
Duke University Working Paper, November 2013
Abstract:
We analyze how increased access to financing affects firm productivity using a large sample of manufacturing firms from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). We exploit a natural experiment following the interstate bank branching deregulations that increased access to bank financing and relate these deregulations to firm level total factor productivity (TFP). Our results indicate that firms' TFP increased subsequent to their states implementing interstate bank branching deregulations and these increases in productivity following the deregulation were long lived. Further, TFP increases following the bank branching deregulations are significantly greater for financially constrained firms. In particular, using a quasi-regression discontinuity (RD) approach, we show that firms that are close to but not eligible for financial support from the U.S. Small Business Administration (and are thus more financially constrained) have higher TFP increases after the deregulation than firms that just satisfy eligibility criteria (and are hence less financially constrained). Our results are consistent with the idea that increased access to financing can increase financially constrained firms' access to additional productive projects that they may otherwise not be able to take up. Our results emphasize that availability of financing is important for improving the productivity of existing entrepreneurial and small firms.
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Bank Failure, Relationship Lending, and Local Economic Performance
John Kandrac
Federal Reserve Working Paper, October 2013
Abstract:
Whether bank failures have adverse effects on local economies is an important question for which there is conflicting and relatively scarce evidence. In this study, I use county-level data to examine the effect of bank failures and resolutions on local economies. Using quasi-experimental techniques as well as cross-sectional variation in bank failures, I show that recent bank failures were followed by significantly lower income and compensation growth, higher poverty rates, and lower employment. Additionally, I find that the structure of bank resolution appears to be important. Resolutions that include loss-sharing agreements tend to be less deleterious to local economies, supporting the notion that the importance of bank failure to local economies stems from banking and credit relationships. Finally, I show that markets with more inter-bank competition are more strongly affected by bank failure.
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Competition and Voluntary Disclosure: Evidence from Deregulation in the Banking Industry
Jeffrey Burks et al.
University of Chicago Working Paper, October 2013
Abstract:
We use the relaxation of interstate branching restrictions under the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) to examine how increases in competition affect incumbents' voluntary disclosure choices. States implemented IBBEA over several years and to varying degrees, allowing us to identify the effect of increased competition on the voluntary disclosure decisions of both public and private banks. We find that increases in competition are associated with increases in the level of voluntary disclosure. Specifically, we find an overall increase in press releases and, in particular, an increase in those containing forward-looking, earnings-related, and capital structure-related disclosures. Consistent with incumbents increasing the disclosure of bad news to deter new entry, the tone of press releases becomes less positive and more negative after entry barriers are lowered.
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Securitization and Loan Performance: Ex Ante and Ex Post Relations in the Mortgage Market
Wei Jiang, Ashlyn Aiko Nelson & Edward Vytlacil
Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the relation between securitization and loan performance using a comprehensive dataset from a major national mortgage lender. Loans remaining on the bank's balance sheet ex post incurred higher delinquency rates than sold loans, contrasting the negative relation between screening efforts and ex ante probability of loan sale explored by prior studies. Moreover, the performance gap between sold and retained loans was wider among the subsample of loans that were perceived as easier to resell. The investors' seeming advantage over the originating bank can mostly be explained by information revealed during the time between loan origination and sale.
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Hsieh Fushing et al.
International Journal of Forecasting, forthcoming
Abstract:
What do the behavior of monkeys in captivity and the financial system have in common? The nodes in such social systems relate to each other through multiple and keystone networks, not just one network. Each network in the system has its own topology, and the interactions among the system's networks change over time. In such systems, the lead into a crisis appears to be characterized by a decoupling of the networks from the keystone network. This decoupling can also be seen in the crumbling of the keystone's power structure toward a more horizontal hierarchy. This paper develops nonparametric methods for describing the joint model of the latent architecture of interconnected networks in order to describe this process of decoupling, and hence provide an early warning system of an impending crisis.