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Jel Classification:G3 

Discussion Paper
Flood Risk and Firm Location Decisions in the Fed’s Second District

The intensity, duration, and frequency of flooding have increased over the past few decades. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 99 percent of U.S. counties have been impacted by a flooding event since 1999. As the frequency of flood events continues to increase, the number of people, buildings, and agriculture exposed to flood risk is only likely to grow. As a previous post points out, measuring the geographical accuracy of such risk is important and may impact bank lending. In this post, we focus on the distribution of flood risk within the Federal Reserve’s ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20231114

Discussion Paper
The Private Premium in Public Bonds?

In a 2012 New York Fed study, Chenyang Wei and I find that interest rate spreads on publicly traded bonds issued by companies with privately traded equity are about 31 basis points higher on average than spreads on bonds issued by companies with publicly traded equity, even after controlling for risk and other factors. These differences are economically and statistically significant and they persist in the secondary market. We control for many factors associated with bond pricing, including risk, liquidity, and covenants. Although these controls account for some of the absolute pricing ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20120516

Discussion Paper
Why Did the Recent Oil Price Declines Affect Bond Prices of Non-Energy Companies?

Oil prices plunged 65 percent between July 2014 and December of the following year. During this period, the yield spread?the yield of a corporate bond minus the yield of a Treasury bond of the same maturity?of energy companies shot up, indicating increased credit risk. Surprisingly, the yield spread of non?energy firms also rose even though many non?energy firms might be expected to benefit from lower energy?related costs. In this blog post, we examine this counterintuitive result. We find evidence of a liquidity spillover, whereby the bonds of more liquid non?energy firms had to be sold to ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20161005

Discussion Paper
Did Investor Sentiment Affect Credit Risk around the 2016 Election?

Immediately following the presidential election of 2016, both consumer and investor sentiments were buoyant and financial markets boomed. That these sentiments affect financial asset prices is not so surprising, given past stock market evidence and episodes such as the dot-com bubble. Perhaps more surprising, the risk of corporate default—which is driven mainly by firms’ financial health but also by bond liquidity—also fell following the election, as indicated by lower yield spreads. In this post, I show that, although expectations of better corporate and macroeconomic conditions were ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20171129

Discussion Paper
Does Bank Monitoring Affect Loan Repayment?

Banks monitor borrowers after originating loans to reduce moral hazard and prevent loan losses. While monitoring represents an important activity of bank business, evidence on its effect on loan repayment is scant. In this post, which is based on our recent paper, we shed light on whether bank monitoring fosters loan repayment and to what extent it does so.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20221202

Discussion Paper
Is Your Apartment Breaking because Your Landlord Is Broke?

Thirty-one percent of housing units in the United States are rental units, and rental housing is unique because unlike in the case of homeownership, renters rely on the property owner for maintenance spending. From the property owner’s perspective, building maintenance is an important investment necessary to keep the asset in good condition. However, like all investments, it is only possible to maintain a building with sufficient financial resources. In a recent staff report, I examine the relationship between a building’s financing constraints and its maintenance. I find that financially ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20230310

Journal Article
How Much Have Record Corporate Profits Contributed to Recent Inflation?

Andrew Glover, José Mustre-del-Río, and Alice von Ende-Becker present evidence that markup growth was a major contributor to inflation in 2021. Specifically, markups grew by 3.4 percent over the year, whereas inflation, as measured by the price index for Personal Consumption Expenditures, was 5.8 percent, suggesting that markups could account for more than half of 2021 inflation. However, the timing and cross-industry patterns of markup growth are more consistent with firms raising prices in anticipation of future cost increases, rather than an increase in monopoly power or higher demand.
Economic Review , Volume vol.108 , Issue no.1 , Pages 13

Journal Article
Capital Reallocation and Capital Investment

Corporate debt levels have grown substantially during the 10-year recovery from the global financial crisis. This debt might be expected to finance investments that support firm expansion, as the U.S. economy has experienced strong growth over the last 10 years. However, much of the corporate debt has been used to reallocate capital through mergers and acquisitions rather than to fund investment activity. Perhaps as a result, some market watchers have expressed concerns that corporations are crowding out, rather than complementing, new investment. {{p}} David Rodziewicz and Nicholas Sly show ...
Economic Review , Issue Q II , Pages 33-52

Discussion Paper
The Making of Fallen Angels—and What QE and Credit Rating Agencies Have to Do with It

Riskier firms typically borrow at higher rates than safer firms because investors require compensation for taking on more risk. However, since 2009 this relationship has been turned on its head in the massive BBB corporate bond market, with risky BBB-rated firms borrowing at lower rates than their safer BBB-rated peers. The resulting risk materialized in an unprecedented wave of “fallen angels” (or firms downgraded below the BBB investment-grade threshold) at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this post, based on a related Staff Report, we claim that this anomaly has been driven by a ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220216a

Discussion Paper
Weathering the Storm: Who Can Access Credit in a Pandemic?

Credit enables firms to weather temporary disruptions in their business that may impair their cash flow and limit their ability to meet commitments to suppliers and employees. The onset of the COVID recession sparked a massive increase in bank credit, largely driven by firms drawing on pre-committed credit lines. In this post, which is based on a recent Staff Report, we investigate which firms were able to tap into bank credit to help sustain their business over the ensuing downturn.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20201013a

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