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Journal Article
Bankers, regulators absorb lessons of Silicon Valley Bank failure as new tests emerge
Ben Munyan, director of supervisory policy in the Banking Supervision Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, discusses the challenges the banking industry faces in an era of rapidly rising interest rates and how Texas institutions have fared.
Journal Article
Texas’ cheap housing edge slipping away as resilient demand outpaces supply
Housing affordability has declined in Texas, a top destination for domestic and international migrants drawn by its historically low cost of living.
Report
Determinants of mortgage default and consumer credit use: the effects of foreclosure laws and foreclosure delays
The mortgage default decision is part of a complex household credit management problem. We examine how factors affecting mortgage default spill over to other credit markets. As home equity turns negative, homeowners default on mortgages and HELOCs at higher rates, whereas they prioritize repaying credit cards and auto loans. Larger unused credit card limits intensify the preservation of credit cards over housing debt. Although mortgage non-recourse statutes increase default on all types of housing debt, they reduce credit card defaults. Foreclosure delays increase default rates for both ...
Report
Barriers to household risk management: evidence from India
Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce the consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this potential remains unfulfilled. This paper studies the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in the event of insufficient rainfall during the primary monsoon season. We first document relatively low adoption of this new risk management product: Only 5-10 percent of households purchase the insurance, even though they overwhelmingly cite rainfall variability as their most ...
Report
Bad credit, no problem? Credit and labor market consequences of bad credit reports
Credit reports are used in nearly all consumer lending decisions and, increasingly, in hiring decisions in the labor market, but the impact of a bad credit report is largely unknown. We study the effects of credit reports on financial and labor market outcomes using a difference-in-differences research design that compares changes in outcomes over time for Chapter 13 filers, whose personal bankruptcy flags are removed from credit reports after seven years, to changes for Chapter 7 filers, whose personal bankruptcy flags are removed from credit reports after ten years. Using credit bureau ...
Journal Article
Price Dispersion When Stores Sell Multiple Goods
A notable feature of most markets is that firms are multiproduct, in the sense that they offer for sale more than one single type of good. In this paper, I discuss a recent paper, Kaplan et al. (2016), that explores both empirically and theoretically price dispersion in a multiproduct setting. I discuss, with some detail, their empirical strategy and main empirical findings: a big part of price dispersion for a good in an area comes from stores with the same overall price level pricing individual goods in persistently different ways. I then go over the simple model proposed by the authors ...
Discussion Paper
Climate Change and Consumer Finance: A Very Brief Literature Review
Extant research shows that climate change can impose significant costs on consumers’ wealth and finances. Both sea-level rise and flooding from hurricane events led to high price declines and thus wealth loss for homes in coastal areas or in disaster-struck areas, with effects lingering for a number of years in some cases. In terms of consumer finance, while the average consumer is not always significantly negatively affected by a disaster, the vulnerable groups (those with low credit scores and who are low income) can be severely affected, experiencing higher rates of delinquencies and ...
Working Paper
The Effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions on Financial Wellbeing
We examine the effect of the Medicaid expansions under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on consumer, financial outcomes using data from a major credit reporting agency for a large, national sample of adults. We employ the synthetic control method to compare individuals living in states that expanded Medicaid to those that did not. We find that the Medicaid expansions significantly reduced the number of unpaid bills and the amount of debt sent to third-party collection agencies among those residing in zip codes with the highest share of low-income, uninsured ...
Report
Credit Access and Mobility during the Flint Water Crisis
How do credit-constrained communities cope with the financial consequences of environmental crises? Beginning in April 2014, the residents of Flint, Michigan, were exposed to lead-contaminated water resulting from a series of governmental missteps. In this paper, we use the spatial distribution of lead and galvanized pipes in Flint to study the effect of the crisis on households’ financial health, including loan balances, repayment of outstanding debt, and Equifax Risk Scores, as well as on household mobility. We find that relatively more affected households, as measured by exposure to lead ...
Reciprocal deposit networks provide means to exceed FDIC’s $250,000 account cap
Because of their prominence, reciprocal deposits are important in the broader discussion of deposit insurance. Though they have the potential to increase banks’ moral hazard, they also bring increased trust and safety to the banking system.