Search Results
Journal Article
Homebuilders, Affiliated Financing Arms and the Mortgage Crisis
The authors? findings indicate that homebuilder financing affiliates do make loans to observably riskier borrowers, but the loans made by homebuilders have lower delinquency rates than those made by unaffiliated lenders, even when loan and borrower characteristics are held constant.
Working Paper
Regulatory incentives and consolidation: the case of commercial bank mergers and the Community Reinvestment Act
Bank regulators are required to consider a bank?s record of providing credit to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and individuals in approving bank applications for mergers and acquisitions. We test the hypothesis that banks strategically prepare for the regulatory and public scrutiny associated with a merger or acquisition by increasing their lending to low-and moderate-income individuals in anticipation of acquiring another institution. We find evidence in favor of this hypothesis. In particular, we show that the higher the percentage of the institution?s mortgage originations in a ...
Conference Paper
Prospects for immigrant-native wealth assimilation: evidence from financial market participation
Because financial transactions are important for wealth accumulation, and rely on trust and confidence in institutions, the financial market behavior of immigrants can provide important insights into the assimilation process. Compared to the native-born, immigrants are less likely to own savings and checking accounts and these differences tend to persist over time. Our results suggest that a large share of the immigrant-native gap in financial market participation is driven by group differences in education, income, and geographic location. For a given immigrant, the likelihood of financial ...
Journal Article
Default rates on prime and subprime mortgages: differences & similarities
For the past several years, the news media have carried countless stories about soaring defaults among subprime mortgage borrowers. Although concern over this segment of the mortgage market is certainly justified, subprime mortgages only account for about onequarter of the total outstanding mortgages in the United States. The remaining 75 percent are prime loans that are made to borrowers with good credit, who fully document their income and make traditional down payments. While default rates on prime loans are significantly lower than those on subprime loans, they are also increasing ...
Working Paper
The Life Insurance Industry and Systemic Risk: A Bond Market Perspective
The 2008 financial crisis brought a focus on the potential for a large insurance firm to contribute to systemic risk. Among the concerns raised was that a negative shock to insurers could lead to a ?fire sale? of corporate bonds, a market where insurers are among the largest participants. This paper discusses the existing evidence on life insurance firms and systemic risk, with a focus on the investment grade corporate bond market. We provide some tentative evidence that life insurers tend to absorb liquidity risk by purchasing bonds when the bonds are less liquid than average. However, we do ...
Working Paper
Risk taking and the quality of informal insurance: gambling and remittances in Thailand
More than 35% of Thai households either give or receive remittances, and remittances account for about one-third of the income of the receiving households. Remittance relationships may be an important source of protection against adverse events for the individuals involved. This paper provides evidence that remittances behave in a way that is consistent with insurance: they are sensitive to shocks to regional rainfall and they respond to household level events. The paper goes on to consider how the quality of insurance that is offered through remittances affects household risk taking ...
Speech
Staying Ahead of the Curve: Twenty-Five Years of Consumer Finance Excellence
Philadelphia Fed President and CEO Anna Paulson welcomed participants to the 13th biennial New Perspectives on Consumer Behavior in Credit and Payments Conference today, celebrating 25 years of leadership in consumer credit and payments research. In her remarks, President Paulson reflected on the evolution of consumer finance, the Consumer Finance Institute’s expanding research portfolio, and the importance of understanding household financial behavior for economic policy and stability.
Speech
Economic Trends and Opportunities for Philadelphia
Philadelphia Fed President and CEO Anna Paulson delivered a keynote speech at the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia's annual State of the Economy event, where she presented her economic outlook based on national trends and data from around the Third District.
Working Paper
Bank crises and investor confidence
In addition to their direct effects, episodes of financial instability may decrease investor confidence. Measuring the impact of a crisis on investor confidence is complicated by the fact that it is difficult to disentangle the effect of investor confidence from coincident direct effects of the crisis. In order to isolate the effects of financial crises on investor confidence, we study the investment behavior of immigrants in the U.S. Our findings indicate that systemic banking crises have important effects on investor behavior. Immigrants who have experienced a banking crisis in their ...