Search Results
Working Paper
The Role of Dispersed Information in Pricing Default: Evidence from the Great Recession
The recent Global Games literature makes important predictions on how financial crises unfold. We test the empirical relevance of these theories by analyzing how dispersed information affects banks' default risk. We find evidence that precise information acts as a coordination device which reduces creditors' willingness to roll over debt to a bank, thus increasing both its default risk and its vulnerability to changes in expectations. We establish two new results. First, given an unfavorable median forecast, less dispersed beliefs greatly increase default risk; this is consistent with ...
Discussion Paper
Runs on Stablecoins
Stablecoins are digital assets whose value is pegged to that of fiat currencies, usually the U.S. dollar, with a typical exchange rate of one dollar per unit. Their market capitalization has grown exponentially over the last couple of years, from $5 billion in 2019 to around $180 billion in 2022. Notwithstanding their name, however, stablecoins can be very unstable: between May 1 and May 16, 2022, there was a run on stablecoins, with their circulation decreasing by 15.58 billion and their market capitalization dropping by $25.63 billion (see charts below.) In this post, we describe the ...
Working Paper
Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?
Similar to the more traditional money market funds (MMFs), stablecoins aim to provide investors with safe, money-like assets. We investigate similarities and differences between these two investment products. Like MMFs, stablecoins suffer from “flight-to-safety” dynamics: we document net flows from riskier to safer stablecoins on days of crypto-market stress and estimate a discrete “break-the-buck” threshold of $1, below which stablecoin redemptions accelerate. We then focus on two specific stablecoin runs, in 2022 and 2023, showing that the same flight-to-safety dynamics also ...
Discussion Paper
The Impact of Natural Disasters on the Corporate Loan Market
Natural disasters are usually associated with an increase in the demand for credit by both households and companies in the affected regions. However, if capacity constraints preclude banks from meeting the local increase in demand, the banks may reduce lending elsewhere, thus propagating the shock to unaffected areas. In this post, we analyze the corporate loan market and find that banks, particularly those with lower capital, reduce credit provisioning to distant regions unaffected by natural disasters. We also find that shadow banks only partially offset the reduction in bank credit, so ...
Working Paper
Interest on Reserves and Arbitrage in Post-Crisis Money Markets
Currently, Eurodollars and fed funds markets combined trade about $220 billion in funds daily, the vast majority of which with overnight tenor. In this paper, we document several features of these wholesale unsecured dollar funding markets. Using daily confidential data on wholesale unsecured borrowing and reserve balances, we show that foreign banks, which make up most of the trading volumes in these markets, keep around 99% of each additional Eurodollar and 80% of each fed fund borrowed as reserve balances. With these risk-free trades, banks earn the spread between interest on reserves and ...
Discussion Paper
Cyberattacks and Supply Chain Disruptions
Cybercrime is one of the most pressing concerns for firms. Hackers perpetrate frequent but isolated ransomware attacks mostly for financial gains, while state-actors use more sophisticated techniques to obtain strategic information such as intellectual property and, in more extreme cases, to disrupt the operations of critical organizations. Thus, they can damage firms’ productive capacity, thereby potentially affecting their customers and suppliers. In this post, which is based on a related Staff Report, we study a particularly severe cyberattack that inadvertently spread beyond its ...
Working Paper
Liquidity Regulation and Financial Intermediaries
We document several effects of the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) rule on dealers' financing and intermediation of securities. For identification, we exploit the fact that the US implementation is more stringent than that in foreign jurisdictions. In line with LCR incentives, US dealers reduce their reliance on repos as a way to finance inventories of high-quality assets and increase the maturity of lower-quality repos relative to foreign dealers; additionally, US dealers cut back on trades that downgrade their own collateral. Dealers are nevertheless still providing significant maturity ...
Working Paper
The Political Origin of Home Bias: The Case of Europe
We show that politics is at the root of the banks-sovereign nexus that exacerbated the Eurozone crisis. First, government-owned banks or banks with politicians in the board of directors display higher home bias in sovereign debt compared to privately-owned banks throughout the 2010-2013 period. Second, only government-owned banks increased the home bias during the sovereign crisis (moral suasion). We exploit the fact that equity injections (bail-outs) by domestic governments were not directly targeted to politically connected banks to show that, upon receiving such assistance, only ...
Discussion Paper
Shining a Light on the Shadows: Dealer Funding and Internalization
In this note, we use new confidential supervisory data to take a first look at the practice of internalization and examine some of its implications.
Report
Pirates without Borders: The Propagation of Cyberattacks through Firms’ Supply Chains
We document the supply chain effects of the most damaging cyberattack in history. The disruptions propagated from the directly hit firms to their customers, causing a four-fold amplification of the initial drop in profits. These losses were larger for affected customers with fewer alternative suppliers. Internal liquidity buffers and increased borrowing, mainly through bank credit lines, helped firms navigate the shock. The cyberattack also led to persisting adjustments to the supply chain network, with affected customers more likely to create new relationships with alternative suppliers and ...