Search Results
Working Paper
Measuring Consumption with Credit Card Data: Benchmarking and Beyond
We introduce a novel monthly county-level consumption dataset constructed from spending data on over 350 million credit cards in the Federal Reserve’s Y-14M reports, covering over 3,000 U.S. counties since 2014. We first show that the data closely track traditional consumption measures, explaining 92 percent of the variation in monthly adjusted personal consumption expenditures (PCE) growth at the national level, capturing meaningful cross-sectional variation in annual adjusted PCE growth at the state level, and reproducing the impulse response of official consumption measures to identified ...
Working Paper
Measuring Consumption with Credit Card Data: Benchmarking and Beyond
We introduce a novel monthly county-level consumption dataset constructed from spending data on over 350 million credit cards in the Federal Reserve’s Y-14M reports, covering over 3,000 U.S. counties since 2014. We first show that the data closely track traditional consumption measures, explaining 92 percent of the variation in monthly adjusted personal consumption expenditures (PCE) growth at the national level, capturing meaningful cross-sectional variation in annual adjusted PCE growth at the state level, and reproducing the impulse response of official consumption measures to identified ...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Shock and Consumer Credit: Evidence from Credit Card Data
We use credit card data from the Federal Reserve Board's FR Y-14M reports to study the impact of the COVID-19 shock on the use and availability of consumer credit across borrower types from March through August 2020. We document an initial sharp decrease in credit card transactions and outstanding balances in March and April. While spending starts to recover by May, especially for risky borrowers, balances remain depressed overall. We find a strong negative impact of local pandemic severity on credit use, which becomes smaller over time, consistent with pandemic fatigue. Restrictive public ...
Working Paper
COVID-19 as a Stress Test: Assessing the Bank Regulatory Framework
The widespread economic damage caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic poses the first major test of the bank regulatory reforms put in place following the global financial crisis. This study assesses this framework, with an emphasis on capital and liquidity requirements. Leading up to the COVID-19 crisis, banks were well-capitalized and held ample liquid assets, reflecting in part heightened requirements. Capital requirements were comparable across major jurisdictions, despite differences in the implementation of the international Basel standards. The overall robust capital and liquidity ...
Working Paper
Who Pays For Your Rewards? Redistribution in the Credit Card Market
We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution between consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers. To probe the underlying mechanisms, we exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level and show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving naive consumers with higher unpaid balances. Naive consumers also follow a sub-optimal balance-matching heuristic when repaying their credit ...
Working Paper
The Long-Run Real Effects of Banking Crises: Firm-Level Investment Dynamics and the Role of Wage Rigidity
I study the long-run effects of credit market disruptions on real firm outcomes and how these effects depend on nominal wage rigidity at the firm level. Exploiting variation in firms' refinancing needs during the global financial crisis, I trace out firms' investment and growth trajectories in response to a credit supply shock. Financially shocked firms exhibit a temporary investment gap for two years, resulting in a persistent accumulated growth gap six years after the crisis. Shocked firms with rigid wages exhibit a significantly steeper drop in investment and an additional long-run growth ...
Discussion Paper
Estimated Quarterly Levels of Bank Lending Standards and Credit Availability
Levels of bank lending standards are an important gauge of the availability of credit to businesses and households, especially during times of high economic uncertainty. Yet while the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices (SLOOS) asks directly about banks' changes in standards each quarter, it only asks about levels once a year, in July.
Discussion Paper
Analyzing the Community Bank Leverage Ratio
This note analyzes the newly introduced Community Bank Leverage Ratio ("CBLR") framework. The analysis covers the framework's eligibility, its capital stringency, and its potential impact on system-wide capital levels under a hypothetical adverse scenario.