Search Results
Working Paper
Safe Collateral, Arm’s-Length Credit: Evidence from the Commercial Real Estate Market
There are two main creditors in commercial real estate: arm?s-length investors and banks. We model commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) as the less informed source of credit. In equilibrium, these investors fund properties with a low probability of distress and banks fund properties that may require renegotiation. We test the model using the 2007-2009 collapse of the CMBS market as a natural experiment, when banks funded both collateral types. Our results show that properties likely to have been securitized were less likely to default or be renegotiated, consistent with the model. ...
Working Paper
The cross-market spillover of economic shocks through multi-market banks
This paper investigates the mortgage lending of banks operating in multiple U.S. metropolitan areas during the housing market collapse of 2007-2009. Some metro areas in the U.S. suffered much greater mortgage defaults than others. We use this regional variation to identify whether high mortgage delinquencies in some markets affected multi-market banks' mortgage lending in other markets. Our results show that multi-market banks reduced local mortgage lending in response to delinquencies in other markets, consistent with the view that local economic shocks can be transmitted to other regions ...
Working Paper
The bank lending channel of monetary policy and its effect on mortgage lending
The bank lending channel of monetary policy suggests that banks play a special role in the transmission of monetary policy. We look for this special role by examining the business strategies of banks as it relates to mortgage funding and mortgage lending. "Traditional banks" have a large supply of excess core deposits and specialize in information-intensive lending to borrowers (which is proxied here using mortgage lending in subprime communities), whereas "market-based banks" are funded with managed liabilities and mainly lend to relatively easy-to-evaluate borrowers. We predict that ...
Working Paper
Safe Collateral, Arm's-Length Credit : Evidence from the Commercial Real Estate Mortgage Market
When collateral is safe, there are less opportunities for things to go wrong. We examine matching between collateral and creditors in the commercial real estate mortgage market by comparing loans in commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) conduits and bank portfolios. We model CMBS financing as lower cost but less informed, such that only safe collateral is funded by CMBS. This prediction is tested using the 2007-2009 shutdown of the CMBS market as a natural experiment. The loans funded by banks that would have been securitized are less likely to default or be renegotiated, indicating ...
Working Paper
Bank core deposits and the mitigation of monetary policy
We consider the business strategy of some banks that provide relationship loans (where they have loan origination and monitoring advantages relative to capital markets) with core deposit funding (where they can pass along the benefit of a sticky price on deposits). These "traditional banks" tend to lend out less than the deposits they take in, so they have a "buffer stock" of core deposits. This buffer stock of core deposits can be used to mitigate the full effect of tighter monetary policy on their bank-dependent borrowers. In this manner, the business strategy of "traditional banks" ...
Working Paper
Insider rates vs. outsider rates in lending
The presence of private information about a firm can affect the competition among potential lenders. In the Sharpe (1990) model of information asymmetry among lenders (with the von Thadden (2004) correction), an uninformed outside bank faces a winner?s curse when competing with an informed inside bank. This paper examines the model?s prediction for observed interest rates at an inside vs. outside bank. Although the outside bank wins more bad firms than the inside bank, the winner?s curse also causes the outside rate conditional on firm type to be lower in expectation than the inside rate ...
Working Paper
Differences across originators in CMBS loan underwriting
Differences in the organizational structure of CMBS loan originators may reflect differences in the incentives they face for underwriting risky loans. We treat an originator's type--that is, commercial bank, investment bank, insurance company, finance company, conduit lender, or foreign-owned entity--as a proxy for incentives related to warehousing risk, balance sheet lending, and regulatory constraints. After controlling for observable credit characteristics of over 30,000 loans securitized into CMBS after 1999, we find considerable differences in loan performance across originator types. ...
Working Paper
The effect of TARP on bank risk-taking
One of the largest responses of the U.S. government to the recent financial crisis was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). TARP was originally intended to stabilize the financial sector through the increased capitalization of banks. However, recipients of TARP funds were then encouraged to make additional loans despite increased borrower risk. In this paper, we consider the effect of the TARP capital injections on bank risk taking by analyzing the risk ratings of banks? commercial loan originations during the crisis. The results indicate that, relative to non-TARP banks, the risk of ...
Working Paper
The systemic risk of European banks during the financial and sovereign debt crises
We propose a hypothetical distress insurance premium (DIP) as a measure of the European banking systemic risk, which integrates the characteristics of bank size, default probability, and interconnectedness. Based on this measure, the systemic risk of European banks reached its height in late 2011 around ? 500 billion. We find that the sovereign default spread is the factor driving this heightened risk in the banking sector during the European debt crisis. The methodology can also be used to identify the individual contributions of over 50 major European banks to the systemic risk measure. ...
Newsletter
Promise and Peril: Managing the Uncertainty of Rapid Innovation and a Changing Economy
The Chicago Fed?s Supervision and Regulation Department and DePaul University?s Center for Financial Services held their tenth annual risk conference on March 29?30, 2017. The conference brought together financial industry professionals, academics, and regulators to discuss the rapid pace of technological innovation in financial services, as well as the uncertainty of the changing economy through the lens of risk management.