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Working Paper
Recourse as Shadow Equity: Evidence from Commercial Real Estate Loans
We study the role that recourse plays in the commercial real estate loan contracts of the largest U.S. banks. We find that recourse is valued by lenders and is treated as a substitute for conventional equity. At origination, recourse loans have rate spreads that are at least 20 basis points lower and loan-to-value ratios that are around 3 percentage points higher than non-recourse loans. Dynamically, recourse affects loan modification negotiations by providing additional bargaining power to the lender. Recourse loans were half as likely to receive accommodation during the COVID-19 pandemic, ...
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 ...
Conference Paper
Differences across originators iin CMBS loan underwritten
Working Paper
No News is Bad News: Monitoring, Risk, and Stale Financial Performance in Commercial Real Estate
As financial intermediaries, banks have a key role in producing information and managing the risks on diverse loan portfolios. An important input into this process is ongoing collection of financial performance from borrowers. Using supervisory data on commercial real estate loans (CRE), this paper studies relationships between the content and timeliness of borrower-reported performance, internal bank risk ratings, and subsequent loan performance. Banks heavily rely on borrower reporting when setting risk ratings, despite the fact that borrowers with stale financials are more likely to ...
Working Paper
Intermediary Segmentation in the Commercial Real Estate Market
Banks, life insurers, and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) lenders originate the vast majority of U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) loans. While these lenders compete in the same market, they differ in how they are funded and regulated, and therefore specialize in loans with different characteristics. We harmonize loan-level data across the lenders and review how their CRE portfolios differ. We then exploit cross-sectional differences in loan portfolios to estimate a simple model of frictional substitution across lender types. The substitution patterns in the model match well the ...
Report
An Analysis of the Impact of the Commercial Real Estate Concentration Guidance
This paper analyzes aspects of the interagency guidance issued in 2006, titled “Concentrations in Commercial Real Estate Lending, Sound Risk Management Practices.”1 The recent financial crisis and recession provide an opportunity to consider the relationship between the guidance and banks’ commercial real estate (CRE) concentrations and performance during the downturn. This paper also analyzes how the share of banking institutions with high levels of CRE concentration, as defined in the guidance, has changed over time (part 2); documents the effect of CRE concentrations on bank failures ...
Discussion Paper
From Plans to Starts: Examining Recent Trends in Manufacturing Plant Construction
Manufacturing structures investment is the largest component by value of U.S. nonresidential structure investment and has been growing quickly in the post-pandemic period. Figure 1 documents the significant extent to which the construction of manufacturing plants has contributed to growth in overall nonresidential construction. The surge in investment in manufacturing construction has occurred despite the higher interest rate environment, driven by government incentives associated with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS), and market forces such as increased ...
Working Paper
Nominal mortgage contracts and the effects of inflation on portfolio allocation
Households who wish to extract home equity through refinancing their mortgage face a hidden transaction cost. The real value of the fixed nominal mortgage payment declines over time with inflation. The change in the real value of the mortgage payments from taking on a new mortgage is positive and an increasing function of inflation; higher inflation thus discourages households from re-balancing their portfolio as frequently as they would otherwise. The life cycle model developed in this paper demonstrates how the share of total wealth held in housing is sensitive to the rate of inflation, ...
Conference Paper
A model of CMBS spreads
The market for securitized commercial mortgages is still fairly new, dating back only to the mid-1990s. As the market developed, and both rating agencies and investors became more comfortable with the product and the associated risks, the level of credit support behind given tranches steadily declined. At the same time on-the-run spreads also declined. This paper develops a series of models of both on-the-run CMBS spreads and spreads on newly-issued CMBS. Unlike the on-the run spreads, we can observed differences in credit quality and credit support for the newly-issued securities and ...
Discussion Paper
Nonresidential construction spending is likely not as weak as it seems
Unlike any other major component of GDP, private investment in nonresidential structures excluding drilling and mining (henceforth "NRS") has steadily declined since the start of 2020. Figure 1 shows the evolution of GDP as well as the main components of private domestic final demand since 2019.