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Report
How do global banks scramble for liquidity? Evidence from the asset-backed commercial paper freeze of 2007
Afonso, Gara; Acharya, Viral V.; Kovner, Anna (2013-08-01)
We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity following the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market freeze of August 2007 and its implications for corporate borrowing. Commercial banks in the United States raised dollar deposits and took advances from Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs), while foreign banks had limited access to such alternative dollar funding. Relative to before the ABCP freeze and relative to their non-dollar lending, foreign banks with ABCP exposure charged higher interest rates to corporations for dollar-denominated syndicated loans. The results point to a funding risk ...
Staff Reports , Paper 623

Working Paper
The private premium in public bonds
Wei, Chenyang; Kovner, Anna (2012)
This paper is the first to document the presence of a private premium in public bonds. We find that spreads are 31 basis points higher for public bonds of private companies than for bonds of public companies, even after controlling for observable differences, including rating, financial performance, industry, bond characteristics and issuance timing. The estimated private premium increases to 40 to 50 basis points when a propensity matching methodology is used or when we control for fixed issuer effects. Despite the premium pricing, bonds of private companies are no more likely to default or ...
Working Papers , Paper 12-7

Journal Article
Opinion: Resisting the Siren Song of Easy Money
Kovner, Anna (2026-03-17)
In Homer's "The Odyssey," Odysseus has his crew tie him to the ship's mast to resist the deadly temptation of the sirens' song. A modern equivalent of this might be the screen time limits you set on your phone to help yourself limit any time wasting from scrolling in the face of algorithms designed to hold your attention. These are both examples of what economists call a commitment device — a mechanism by which you commit now to protect your future self from temptation. When the Federal Reserve was founded, the debate around its design took into account the siren song of easy money and ...
Econ Focus , Volume 26 , Issue Q1/Q2 , Pages 32

Discussion Paper
Becoming More Alike? Comparing Bank and Federal Reserve Stress Test Results
Hirtle, Beverly; McKay, Eric; Kovner, Anna (2014-07-21)
Stress tests have become an important method of assessing whether financial institutions have enough capital to operate in bad economic conditions. Under the provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, both the Federal Reserve and large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) are required to do annual stress tests and to disclose these results to the public. While the BHCs’ and the Federal Reserve’s projections are made under the same macroeconomic scenario, the results differ, primarily because of differences in the models used to make the projections. In this post, we look at the 2014 stress test ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20140721

Discussion Paper
Regulatory Changes and the Cost of Capital for Banks
Zborowski, Brandon; Van Tassel, Peter; Kovner, Anna (2018-10-01)
In response to the financial crisis nearly a decade ago, a number of regulations were passed to improve the safety and soundness of the financial system. In this post and our related staff report, we provide a new perspective on the effect of these regulations by estimating the cost of capital for banks over the past two decades. We find that, while banks? cost of capital soared during the financial crisis, after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA), banks experienced a greater decrease in their cost of capital than nonbanks and nonbank financial intermediaries (NBFI).
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20181001a

Discussion Paper
Measuring the Forest through the Trees: The Corporate Bond Market Distress Index
Boyarchenko, Nina; Kovner, Anna; Shachar, Or; Crump, Richard K. (2021-02-22)
With more than $10.4 trillion outstanding as of Q3:2020, the U.S. corporate bond market is a significant source of funding for most large U.S. corporations. While prior literature offers a variety of measures to capture different aspects of corporate bond market functioning, there is little consensus on how to use those measures to identify periods of distress in the market as a whole. In this post, we describe the U.S. Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), which offers a single measure to quantify joint dislocations in the primary and secondary corporate bond markets. As detailed in a ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20210222

Report
The private premium in public bonds
Wei, Chenyang; Kovner, Anna (2012)
This paper is the first to document the presence of a private premium in public bonds. We find that spreads are 31 basis points higher for public bonds of private companies than for bonds of public companies, even after controlling for observable differences, including rating, financial performance, industry, bond characteristics and issuance timing. The estimated private premium increases to 40-50 basis points when a propensity matching methodology is used or when we control for fixed issuer effects. Despite the premium pricing, bonds of private companies are no more likely to default or be ...
Staff Reports , Paper 553

Journal Article
Supervising large, complex financial institutions: what do supervisors do?
Lucca, David O.; Haughwout, Andrew F.; Hirtle, Beverly; Eisenbach, Thomas M.; Kovner, Anna; Plosser, Matthew (2017-23-01)
The supervision of large, complex financial institutions is one of the most important, but least understood, activities of the Federal Reserve. Supervision entails monitoring and oversight to assess whether firms are engaged in unsafe or unsound practices, and to ensure that firms take appropriate action to correct such practices. It is distinct from regulation, which involves the development and promulgation of the rules under which firms operate. This article brings greater transparency to the Federal Reserve?s supervisory activities by considering how they are structured, staffed, and ...
Economic Policy Review , Issue 23-1 , Pages 57-77

Report
COVID Response: The Commercial Paper Funding Facility
Boyarchenko, Nina; Crump, Richard K.; Kovner, Anna; Leonard, Deborah (2021-09-01)
The Federal Reserve reestablished the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF 2020) in response to the disruptions in the commercial paper market triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic shutdowns. The CPFF 2020 was designed to support market functioning and provide a liquidity backstop for the commercial paper market. This paper provides an overview of the CPFF 2020, including detailing the facility’s design, documenting its usage, and describing its impact on commercial paper markets. In addition, we compare the market conditions and facility design in CPFF 2020 to that ...
Staff Reports , Paper 982

Journal Article
Do big banks have lower operating costs?
Zhou, Lily; Kovner, Anna; Vickery, James (2014-12)
This study examines the relationship between bank holding company (BHC) size and components of noninterest expense (NIE) in order to shed light on the sources of scale economies in banking. Drawing on detailed expense information provided by U.S. banking firms in the memoranda of their regulatory filings, the authors find a robust negative relationship between size and normalized measures of NIE. The relationship is strongest for employee compensation expenses and components of ?other? noninterest expense such as information technology and corporate overhead expenses. In addition, the authors ...
Economic Policy Review , Issue Dec , Pages 1-27

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