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Report
Zombies at Large? Corporate Debt Overhang and the Macroeconomy
With business leverage at record levels, the effects of corporate debt overhang on growth and investment have become a prominent concern. In this paper, we study the effects of corporate debt overhang based on long-run cross-country data covering the near-universe of modern business cycles. We show that business credit booms typically do not leave a lasting imprint on the macroeconomy. Quantile local projections indicate that business credit booms do not affect the economy’s tail risks either. Yet in line with theory, we find that the economic costs of corporate debt booms rise when ...
Working Paper
Supervising Failing Banks
This paper studies the role of banking supervision in anticipating, monitoring, and disciplining failing banks. We document that supervisors anticipate most bank failures with a high degree of accuracy. Supervisors play an important role in requiring troubled banks to recognize losses, taking enforcement actions, and ultimately closing failing banks. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in supervisory strictness during the Global Financial Crisis. Stricter supervision leads to more loss recognition, reduced dividend payouts, and an increase in the likelihood and speed of ...
Working Paper
Bank Capital Redux: Solvency, Liquidity, and Crisis
Higher capital ratios are unlikely to prevent a financial crisis. This is empirically true both for the entire history of advanced economies between 1870 and 2013 and for the post-WW2 period, and holds both within and between countries. We reach this startling conclusion using newly collected data on the liability side of banks? balance sheets in 17 countries. A solvency indicator, the capital ratio has no value as a crisis predictor; but we find that liquidity indicators such as the loan-to-deposit ratio and the share of non-deposit funding do signal financial fragility, although they add ...
Journal Article
The Fed and Its Shadow: A Historical View
Central bank policies have always incorporated both a discretionary or active component and a passive component. Successful central banking has required a coordination of the two components. After a period of apparent dormancy, the passive component of monetary policy has emerged from the shadows and become relevant for Federal Reserve policy today.
Working Paper
Money, Banking, and Old-School Historical Economics
We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This area has been largely unaffected by the so-called new econometric methods that seek to prove causality in reduced form settings. We discuss why historical macroeconomics is less amenable to such methods, discuss the underlying concepts of causality, and emphasize that models remain the backbone of our ...
Journal Article
The political origins of Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act
At the height of the financial crisis of 2007-09, the Federal Reserve conducted emergency lending under authority granted to it in the third paragraph of Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act. This article explores the political and legislative origins of the section, focusing on why Congress chose to endow the central bank with such an authority. The author describes how in the initial passage of the act in 1913, Congress demonstrated its steadfast commitment to the ?real bills? doctrine in two interrelated ways: 1) by limiting what assets the Fed could purchase, discount, and use as ...
Report
Who Can Tell Which Banks Will Fail?
We study the run on the German banking system in 1931 to study whether depositors anticipate which banks will fail. We find that deposits decline by around 20 percent during the run. There is an equal outflow of retail and non-financial wholesale deposits from both failing and surviving banks. In contrast, we find that interbank deposits decline almost exclusively for failing banks. Our evidence suggests that while regular depositors are uninformed, banks have precise information about which banks will fail. In turn, banks being informed allows the interbank market to continue providing ...
Working Paper
How Cyclical Is Bank Capital?
Using annual data since 1834 and quarterly data since 1959, I find a negative correlation between output and current and lagged values of the bank capital ratio, but a positive correlation with leading values, although except for the period since 1996 the numbers are mostly small and usually insignificant. The most significant correlations tend to reflect movements in bank assets, rather than capital itself, and although the pattern of aggregate correlations matches those of large banks, small banks show a different pattern, with strongly pro-cyclical capital ratios (counter-cyclical ...
Working Paper
Betting the House
Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection ...
Working Paper
The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles
This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks? balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of mortgage lending to households. Household debt to asset ratios have risen substantially in many countries. Financial stability risks have been increasingly linked to real estate lending booms which are typically followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. Housing finance has come to play a ...