Search Results
Working Paper
Foreign Investment, Regulatory Arbitrage, and the Risk of U.S. Banking Organizations
This study investigates the implications of cross-country differences in banking regulation and supervision for the international subsidiary locations and risk of U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs). We find that U.S. BHCs are more likely to operate subsidiaries in countries with weaker regulation and supervision and that such location decisions are associated with elevated BHC risk and higher contribution to systemic risk. The quality of BHCs? internal controls and risk management play an important role in these location choices and risk outcomes. Overall, our study suggests that U.S. banking ...
Working Paper
The FOMC versus the Staff: Do Policymakers Add Value in Their Tales?
Using close to 40 years of textual data from FOMC transcripts and the Federal Reserve staff's Greenbook/Tealbook, we extend Romer and Romer (2008) to test if the FOMC adds information relative to its staff forecasts not via its own quantitative forecasts but via its words. We use methods from natural language processing to extract from both types of document text-based forecasts that capture attentiveness to and sentiment about the macroeconomy. We test whether these text-based forecasts provide value-added in explaining the distribution of outcomes for GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and ...
Journal Article
The Zero Lower Bound Remains a Medium-Term Risk
Financial markets—specifically derivatives—contain information about the range of probable future short-term interest rates. The information from this statistical distribution can help measure the perceived risk of interest rates returning to the zero lower bound in the future. The risk varies over time, driven mainly by the expected level of interest rates. At longer forecast horizons, a higher risk of returning to the lower bound primarily reflects a higher amount of uncertainty. Currently, the perceived risk appears slim over the next few years but is significant at longer horizons.
Journal Article
Risk of Business Insolvency during Coronavirus Crisis
Many businesses had amassed high levels of debt, or leverage, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of precaution or necessity, firms increased their borrowing further after the onset. Although the shock to those firms’ value significantly increased their risk, measured by their distance-to-default, the default risk remains relatively small for most corporate debt. Nevertheless, the amount of outstanding liabilities among firms with elevated risk of insolvency is more than two times higher than at the peak of the global financial crisis.
Journal Article
Climate Risk and the Fed: Preparing for an Uncertain Certainty
While the severity and scope of a changing climate remains unclear, the consensus is that it poses a significant risk to the global economy and financial system. As monetary policymakers, the Fed’s job is to navigate this uncertainty by anticipating the potential changes and understanding their implications.
Working Paper
Domestic bond markets and inflation
This paper explores the relationship between inflation and the existence of a local, nominal, publicly-traded, long-maturity, domestic-currency bond market. Bond holders are exposed to capital losses through inflation and therefore represent a potential anti-inflationary force; we ask whether their influence is apparent both theoretically and empirically. We develop a simple theoretical model with heterogeneous agents where the issuance of such bonds leads to political pressure on the government to choose a lower inflation rate. We then check this prediction empirically using a panel of data, ...
Working Paper
International Trade Risk and the Role of Banks
International trade exposes exporters and importers to substantial risks. To mitigate these risks, firms can buy special trade finance products from banks. This paper explores under which conditions and to what extent firms use these products. We find that letters of credit and documentary collections cover about 10 percent of U.S. exports and are preferred for larger transactions, indicating substantial fixed costs. Letters of credit are employed the most for exports to countries with intermediate contract enforcement. Compared to documentary collections, they are used for riskier ...
Working Paper
Why Have Interest Rates Fallen Far Below the Return on Capital
Risk-free rates have been falling since the 1980s while the return on capital has not. We analyze these trends in a calibrated OLG model with recursive preferences, designed to encompass many of the "usual suspects'' cited in the debate on secular stagnation. Declining labor force and productivity growth imply a limited decline in real interest rates and deleveraging cannot account for the joint decline in the risk free rate and increase in the risk premium. If we allow for a change in the (perceived) risk to productivity growth to fit the data, we find that the decline in the risk-free rate ...
Working Paper
Interest Rates or Haircuts? Prices Versus Quantities in the Market for Collateralized Risky Loans
Markets for risky loans clear on two dimensions - an interest rate (or equivalently a spread above the riskless rate) and a specification of the amount of collateral per dollar of lending. The latter is summarized by the margin or "haircut" associated with the loan. Some key models of endogenous collateral constraints imply that the primary equilibrating force will be in the form of haircuts rather than movements in interest rate spreads. Indeed, an important benchmark model, derived in a two-state world, implies that haircuts will adjust to render all lending riskless, and that a loss of ...
Working Paper
Risk Management for Monetary Policy Near the Zero Lower Bound
As projections have inflation heading back toward target and the labor market continuing to improve, the Federal Reserve has begun to contemplate an increase in the federal funds rate. There is however substantial uncertainty around these projections. How should this uncertainty affect monetary policy? In many standard models uncertainty has no effect. In this paper, we demonstrate that the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates implies that the central bank should adopt a looser policy when there is uncertainty. In the current context this result implies that a delayed liftoff is ...