Collateral damage
Political Borders and Bank Lending in Post-Crisis America
Matthieu Chavaz & Andrew Rose
NBER Working Paper, November 2016
Abstract:
We use spatial discontinuities associated with congressional district borders to identify the effect of political influences on American banks' lending. We show that recipients of the 2008 public capital injection program (TARP) increased mortgage and small business lending by 23% to 60% more in areas located inside their home-representative's district than elsewhere. The impact is stronger if the representative supported the TARP in Congress, was subsequently re-elected, and received more political contributions from the financial industry. Together, these results suggest that political considerations influence credit allocation in a politically mature system like the United States without the formal possibility of political interference in lending decisions, and that this influence is larger if the flows between banks and politicians are reciprocal.
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Differential Access to Capital from Financial Institutions by Minority Entrepreneurs
Darius Palia
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2016, Pages 756-785
Abstract:
This article examines whether minority small business borrowers have the same access to loans from financial institutions as similar white borrowers. Using matching methods, I find that African-American borrowers are rejected at an approximately 30 percent higher probability than similar white borrowers. I also find that the impact of unobservable variables has to be greater than 85 percent the impact of observable variables to show no discrimination. This bound seems to be a high number given that I have controlled for a large number of borrower, firm, and lender characteristics. No such differential effect is found for Asian and other minority borrowers. I also find equal expected default losses between African-American and white borrowers. These results are consistent with the information-based, laissez faire, and group hoarding theories of discrimination, and against the taste-based theory of discrimination.
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The Making of Hawks and Doves: Inflation Experiences and Voting on the FOMC
Ulrike Malmendier, Stefan Nagel & Zhen Yan
University of California Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
We show that personal lifetime experiences of inflation significantly affect the hawkish or dovish leanings of central bankers. We link experience-based inflation expectations to the desired level of nominal interest rates using a forward-looking formulation of the Taylor rule. Using data of the FOMC voting history from March 1951 to January 2014, we estimate that a one standard-deviation increase in experience-based forecasts increases the unconditional probability of a hawkish dissent by about one third, and decreases the unconditional probability of a dovish dissent also by about one third. FOMC members also use a significantly more hawkish tone in their speeches if they have experienced high inflation in their lives so far. Aggregating over all FOMC members present at a meeting, we establish a significantly positive relationship between their average inflation experience and the Fed Funds Rate target decided at the meeting. Finally, inflation experiences have a strong direct impact on FOMC members' inflation forecasts as reported in their semiannual Monetary Policy Reports to Congress, suggesting that experiences affect beliefs. Our findings imply that even professionals are affected by their lifetime experiences of macroeconomic outcomes and shed new light on the importance of FOMC appointments.
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The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking
Antonio Falato & David Scharfstein
NBER Working Paper, September 2016
Abstract:
We present evidence that pressure to maximize short-term stock prices and earnings leads banks to increase risk. We start by showing that banks increase risk when they transition from private to public ownership through a public listing or an acquisition. The increase in risk is greater than for a control group of banks that intended but failed to transition from private to public ownership, a result that is robust to using a plausibly exogenous instrument for failed transitions. The increase in risk is also greater than for a control group of banks that were acquired but did not change their listing status. We establish that pressure to maximize short-term stock prices helps to explain these findings by showing that the increase in risk is larger for newly public banks that are more focused on short-term stock prices and performance.
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The effect of "sunshine" on policy deliberation: The case of the Federal Open Market Committee
John Woolley & Joseph Gardner
Social Science Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does an increase in transparency affect policy deliberation? Increased government transparency is commonly advocated as beneficial to democracy. Others argue that transparency can undermine democratic deliberation by, for example, causing poorer reasoning. We analyze the effect of increased transparency in the case of a rare natural experiment involving the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). In 1994 the FOMC began the delayed public release of verbatim meeting transcripts and announced it would release all transcripts of earlier, secret, meetings back into the 1970s. To assess the effect of this change in transparency on deliberation, we develop a measure of an essential aspect of deliberation, the use of reasoned arguments. Our contributions are twofold: we demonstrate a method for measuring deliberative reasoning and we assess how a particular form of transparency affected ongoing deliberation. In a regression model with a variety of controls, we find increased transparency had no independent effect on the use of deliberative reasoning in the FOMC. Of particular interest to deliberative scholars, our model also demonstrates a powerful role for leaders in facilitating deliberation. Further, both increasing participant equality and more frequent expressions of disagreement were associated with greater use of deliberative language.
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Government as Borrower of First Resort
Gilles Chemla & Christopher Hennessy
Journal of Monetary Economics, December 2016, Pages 1-16
Abstract:
Optimal government bond supply is examined under asymmetric information and safe asset scarcity. Corporations issue junk debt when demand for safe debt is high since uninformed investors then migrate to risky overheated debt markets. Uninformed demand stimulates informed speculation, driving debt prices toward fundamentals, encouraging pooling at high leverage. As borrower of first resort, government can issue bonds, siphoning off uninformed demand for risky corporate debt, reducing wasteful informed speculation. Government bonds eliminate pooling at high leverage or improve risk sharing in such equilibria. Optimal government bond supply is increasing in demand for safe assets and non-monotonic in marginal Q.
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Much Ado About Nothing? New Evidence on the Effects of Payday Lending on Military Members
Susan Payne Carter & William Skimmyhorn
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We evaluate the effect that payday loan access has on credit and labor market outcomes of individuals in the U.S. Army. Using the conditional random assignment of servicemembers to different locations, we employ three identification strategies: cross-sectional variation in state policies, within-term variation in payday lending access, and a difference-in-difference analysis using the national Military Lending Act. We find few adverse effects of payday loan access on servicemembers when using any of these methods even when we examine dozens of subsamples that explore potential differential treatment effects.
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Deposit Insurance: Theories and Facts
Charles Calomiris & Matthew Jaremski
Annual Review of Financial Economics, 2016, Pages 97-120
Abstract:
Economic theories posit that bank liability insurance is designed to serve the public interest by mitigating systemic risk in the banking system through the reduction of liquidity risk. Political theories, however, see liability insurance as serving the private interests of banks, bank borrowers, and depositors, potentially at the expense of the public interest. Empirical evidence - both historical and contemporary - supports the private-interest approach, as liability insurance has been associated with increases, rather than decreases, in systemic risk. Exceptions to this rule are rare and reflect design features that prevent moral hazard and adverse selection. Prudential regulation of insured banks has generally not been a very effective tool in limiting the systemic risk increases associated with liability insurance. This likely reflects purposeful failures in regulation; if liability insurance is motivated by private interests, then there would be little point to removing the subsidies it creates through strict regulation. The same logic explains why more effective policies for addressing systemic risk are not employed in place of liability insurance. The politics of liability insurance thus should not be narrowly construed to encompass only the vested interests of bankers. Indeed, in many countries, liability insurance has been installed as a pass-through subsidy targeted to particular classes of bank borrowers.
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An Evaluation of Friedman's Monetary Instability Hypothesis
Joshua Hendrickson
Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, I examine what I call Milton Friedman's Monetary Instability Hypothesis. Drawing on Friedman's work, I argue that there are two main components to this view. The first component is the idea that deviations between the public's demand for money and the supply of money are an important source of economic fluctuations. The second component of this view is that these deviations are primarily caused by fluctuations in the supply of money rather than the demand for money. Each of these components can be tested independently. To do so, I estimate an otherwise standard New Keynesian model, amended to include a money demand function consistent with Friedman's work and a money growth rule, for a period from 1875 to 1963. This structural model allows me to separately identify shocks to the money supply and shocks to money demand. I then use variance decompositions to assess the relative importance of shocks to the supply and demand for money. I find that shocks to the monetary base can account for up to 28% of the fluctuations in output whereas money demand shocks can account for less than 1% of such fluctuations. This provides support for Friedman's view.
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Rushing into the American Dream? House Prices Growth and the Timing of Homeownership
Sumit Agarwal, Luojia Hu & Xing Huang
Review of Finance, October 2016, Pages 2183-2218
Abstract:
We use the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel data set to empirically examine how past house price growth influences the timing of homeownership. We find that the median individual in metropolitan areas with the highest quartile house price growth becomes a homeowner 5 years earlier than that in areas with the lowest quartile house price growth. The result is consistent with a life cycle housing-demand model in which high past price growth increases expectations of future price growth thus accelerating home purchases at young ages. We show that extrapolative expectations formed by homebuyers are a necessary channel to explain the result.
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The Shifting Demand for Housing by American Renters and Its Impact on Household Budgets: 1940-2010
Denise DiPasquale & Michael Murray
Journal of Regional Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
From 1940 to 1960 across 20 large U.S. cities, rental housing's price fell, renters' incomes rose, rent's share in household budgets fell, and, as expected, renters' real housing consumption increased. From 1970 to 2010, rental housing's price increased, renters' incomes decreased, but, unexpectedly, renters' real housing consumption increased. We find neither demographics nor housing supply factors account for the anomalous post-1970 increase in renters' housing consumption. We conclude that after 1970 there was a nationwide increase in renters' preferences for housing consumption. With incomes falling, renters increased housing consumption by decreasing consumption of other necessities including food, clothing, and transportation.
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Minimum Payments and Debt Paydown in Consumer Credit Cards
Benjamin Keys & Jialan Wang
NBER Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
Using a dataset covering one quarter of the U.S. general-purpose credit card market, we document that 29% of accounts regularly make payments at or near the minimum payment. We exploit changes in issuers' minimum payment formulas to distinguish between liquidity constraints and anchoring as explanations for the prevalence of near-minimum payments. Nine to twenty percent of all accounts respond more to the formula changes than expected based on liquidity constraints alone, representing a lower bound on the role of anchoring. Disclosures implemented by the CARD Act, an example of one potential policy solution to anchoring, resulted in fewer than 1% of accounts adopting an alternative suggested payment. Based on back-of-envelope calculations, the disclosures led to $62 million in interest savings per year, but would have saved over $2 billion per year if all anchoring consumers had adopted the new suggested payment. Our results show that anchoring to a salient contractual term has a significant impact on household debt.
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The Price of Homeowners: An Examination of the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit
Erik Hembre
University of Illinois Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
A major policy response to the 2008 housing crisis was the First-time Homebuyer Tax Credit, worth up to $8,000. To estimate the tax credit effects on homeownership, I construct a quarterly first-time homebuyer time-series using American Housing Survey data. Using both an event-study and a difference-in-difference framework, I estimate the tax credit induced 301,900 first-time homeowners and calculate the government paid $24,180 per additional homeowner. I find no evidence that first-time homebuyers bought more expensive houses or increased default rates. Estimating state and MSA-level effects I find a strong correlation between effect size and average home values, with a doubling in average home values implying a drop in effect size by 19.7 percentage points. These local effects also reveal larger effects in areas with smaller housing busts, had lower mortgage delinquency rates, and have higher housing supply elasticity.