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Housing price changes
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The Risks of Pricing New Insurance Products: The Case of Long-Term Care
This article examines what happens when incorrect assumptions are made in pricing new insurance products. The focus is on the mispricing of long-term care (LTC) insurance?which led to the insolvency of Penn Treaty.1
Conference Paper
Is three a crowd? competition among regulators in banking
In some industries, firms are able to choose who regulates them. There is a long debate over whether regulatory competition is beneficial or whether it leads to a ?race for the bottom.? We introduce another aspect to this discussion. Regulators may desire a ?quiet life?, taking actions intended to minimize the effort they spend on work. Using banking as an example, we test this ?quiet life? hypothesis against other explanations of regulatory behavior. Banks are able to switch among three options for a primary federal regulator: the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC. We examine why they ...
Working Paper
The effect of market size structure on competition: the case of small business lending
Banking industry consolidation has raised concern about the supply of small business credit since large banks generally invest lower proportions of their assets in small business loans. However, we find that the likelihood that a small business borrows from a bank of a given size is roughly proportional to the local market presence of banks of that size, although there are exceptions. Moreover, small business loan interest rates depend more on the size structure of the market than on the size of the bank providing the credit, with markets dominated by large banks generally charging lower ...
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 ...
Conference Paper
Regulatory competition: why do banks change regulators?
Conference Paper
Risk and capitalization in banking
Conference Paper
The size of the banking industry and managerial entrenchment
Working Paper
The role of lenders in the home price boom
This paper examines the relationship between real estate prices during the home price boom from the late 1990s into 2005 and competition among mortgage lenders. The mortgage lending business, especially with the rise of the originate-to-distribute model, had competitors with very different non- mortgage activities and regulation. I show that in local markets, when banks increased their share of mortgages relative to lenders such as mortgage brokers, home prices started increasing at a faster pace. Home prices also affected market shares, but primarily through changes at the national level. ...