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Working Paper
The age of reason: financial decisions over the lifecycle
The sophistication of financial decisions varies with age: middle-aged adults borrow at lower interest rates and pay fewer fees compared to both younger and older adults. We document this pattern in ten financial markets. The measured effects cannot be explained by observed risk characteristics. The sophistication of financial choices peaks around age 53 in our cross-sectional data. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that financial sophistication rises and then falls with age, although the patterns that we observe represent a mix of age effects and cohort effects.
Working Paper
Is Lending Distance Really Changing? Distance Dynamics and Loan Composition in Small Business Lending
Has information technology improved small businesses' access to credit by hardening the information used in loan underwriting and reducing the importance of proximity to lenders? Previous research, pointing to increasing average lending distances, suggests that it has. But this conclusion can obscure differences across loans and lenders. Using over 20 years of Community Reinvestment Act data on small business lending, we find that while average distances have increased substantially, distances at individual banks remain unchanged. Instead, average distance has increased because a small group ...
Discussion Paper
The Effects of Credit Score Migration on Subprime Auto Loan and Credit Card Delinquencies
In the early stages of the pandemic, income support and forbearance programs led consumer loan delinquency rates to fall to near-record lows for borrowers across the credit score distribution. Since the second half of 2021, however, delinquency rates have risen, and by 2023:Q3, overall rates for auto and credit card loans had risen above their pre-pandemic levels.
Working Paper
Behavioral Economics and Macroeconomic Models
Over the past 20 years, macroeconomists have incorporated more and more results from behavioral economics into their models. We argue that doing so has helped fixed deficiencies with standard approaches to modeling the economy--for example, the counterfactual absence of inertia in the standard New Keynesian model of economic fluctuations. We survey efforts to use behavioral economics to improve some of the underpinnings of the New Keynesian model--specifically, consumption, the formation of expectations and determination of wages and employment that underlie aggregate supply, and the ...
Discussion Paper
How the Largest Bank Holding Companies Grew: Organic Growth or Acquisitions?
In this note, we decompose growth into that related to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and to all other sources; discuss factors that have affected growth and consolidation; describe our data sources and methodology; and present results.
Working Paper
Cross-border diversification in bank asset portfolios
Taking the mean-variance portfolio model as a benchmark, we compute the optimally diversified portfolio for banks located in France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. under different assumptions about currency hedging. We compare these optimal portfolios to the actual cross-border assets of banks from 1995-1999 and try to explain the deviations. We find that banks over-invest domestically to a considerable extent and that cross-border diversification entails considerable gain. Banks underweight countries which are culturally less similar or have capital controls in place. Capital controls have ...
Working Paper
Sticky deposit rates
We examine the dynamics of eleven different deposit rates for a panel of over 2,500 branches of about 900 depository institutions observed weekly over ten years. We replicate previous work showing that rates are downwards-flexible and upwards-sticky, and show that a simple menu cost model can generate this behavior. The degree of asymmetric rigidity varies substantially by deposit type, bank size, and across branches of the same bank. In the absence of such stickiness, depositors would have received as much as $100 billion more in interest per year during periods when market rates were ...
Working Paper
Changes in bank lending standards and the macroeconomy
Identifying the macroeconomic effects of credit supply disruptions is difficult because many of the same factors that influence the supply of bank loans can also affect the demand for credit. Using bank-level responses to the Federal Reserve's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, we decompose the reported changes in lending standards--a commonly-used indicator of changes in credit supply conditions--into a component that captures the change in banks' lending posture in response to bank-specific and macroeconomic factors that also affect loan demand and a residual component, which provides a ...
Journal Article
How do private firms use credit lines?
The authors find that firms that face higher upfront commitment fees, risk premium spreads or usage fees have smaller credit lines, while those with higher overdraft fees have larger ones. Firms with greater profit growth in the past have larger credit lines, while those with more internal funds or higher volatility in profit growth have smaller credit lines. The results for line utilization are quite similar.