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Journal Article
The Macroeconomic Fallout of Shutting Down the Banking System
During the 2008–09 financial crisis, the U.S. government arranged bailouts of major banks to prevent a suspension of bank deposits, where banks cease paying checks and refuse depositors’ requests to withdraw funds. Although these bailouts likely helped firms and households continue to make payments, they have been debated due to potential moral hazard concerns as well as the high cost to taxpayers. Assessing the costs and benefits of preventing deposit suspensions is difficult, as nationwide bank suspensions have not occurred since the Great Depression.To circumvent this challenge, Qian ...
Working Paper
Assessing Regulatory Responses to Banking Crises
During banking crises, regulators must decide between bailouts or liquidations, neither of which are publicly popular. However, making a comprehensive assessment of regulators requires examining all their decisions against their dual objectives of preserving financial stability and discouraging moral hazard. I develop a Bayesian latent class model to assess regulators on these competing objectives and evaluate banking and savings and loan (S&L) regulators during the 1980s crises. I find that the banking authority (FDIC) conformed to these objectives whereas the S&L regulator (FSLIC), which ...
Journal Article
Dampened Demand for Bank Loans Reflects Supply Bottlenecks, Not a Weakness in the Recovery
Throughout the pandemic, banks have experienced weak business loan demand. Although banks expectdemand to grow as the worst of the pandemic wanes and the economy recovers, loan demand mayremain weak in some industries due to persistent supply chain bottlenecks.
Journal Article
Community Bank Funding Is Getting Costlier and Riskier
Banks’ core funding has been under pressure since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began raising rates in early 2022. As depositors shift funds out of low-yielding savings and noninterest-bearing deposit accounts and into more lucrative alternative investments, community banks have increasingly turned to longer-maturity deposits and borrowings to finance their balance sheets. Although these funding sources allow banks to retain their asset size, they are both more expensive and potentially less stable.
Journal Article
Government Assistance and Moral Hazard: Evidence from the Savings and Loan Crisis
When regulators intervene to rescue failing financial institutions, they may lead banks to expect future assistance and increase their risk-taking. To avoid incentivizing risky behavior, regulators often try to signal that they will not assist banks in a future crisis. Regulations passed during the savings and loan (S&L) crisis in the 1980s provide a rare example of policies that in fact discouraged risk-taking. After a wave of S&L failures, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) liquidated or sold some failed S&Ls but assisted others to keep them in operation. In 1989, ...
Journal Article
PPP Raised Community Bank Revenue but Lowered Profitability
Community banks have played an outsized role in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), disbursing 37 percent of all PPP loans despite holding only 18 percent of outstanding bank loans. Although participation boosted community banks’ revenue by supporting asset and interest income growth, it appears to have lowered their profitability, at least initially: low interest rates and deferred fee collection on PPP loans reduced banks’ earning margins.
Working Paper
Risk-Shifting, Regulation, and Government Assistance
This paper examines an episode when policy response to a financial crisis effectively incentivized financial institutions to reallocate their portfolios toward safe assets. Following a shift to a regime of enhanced regulation and scaled-down public assistance during the savings and loan crisis in 1989, I find that thrifts with a high probability of failure increased their composition of safe assets relative to thrifts with a low probability of failure. The findings also show a shift to safe assets among stock thrifts relative to mutual thrifts, thereby providing evidence of risk-shifting from ...
Working Paper
Government Loan Guarantees during a Crisis: The Effect of the PPP on Bank Lending and Profitability
We study bank responses to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and its effects on lender balance sheets and profitability. To address the endogeneity between bank decisions and balance sheet effects, we develop a Bayesian joint model that examines the decision to participate, the intensity of participation, and ultimate balance sheet outcomes. Overall, lenders were driven by risk-aversion and funding capacity rather than profitability in their decision to participate and the intensity of their participation. Indeed, with greater participation intensity, banks experienced sizable growth in ...
Working Paper
Payments Crises and Consequences
Banking-system shutdowns during contractions scar economies. Four times in the lastforty years, governors suspended payments from state-insured depository institutions. Suspensionsof payments in Nebraska (1983), Ohio (1985), and Maryland (1985), which wereshort and occurred during expansions, had little measurable impact on macroeconomic aggregates.Rhode Island’s payments crisis (1991), which was prolonged and occurred duringa recession, lengthened and deepened the downturn. Unemployment increased. Outputdeclined, possibly permanently relative to what might have been. We document these ...
Journal Article
Bank Deposit Rates Haven't Kept Pace with Yields on Other Investments, but Depositors Are Staying Anyway
Bank deposit outflows continued during 2023 despite rising deposit rates. One possible explanation is that deposit rate increases have not kept pace with rising yields on other investments. For example, spreads between bank deposit rates and yields on deposit substitutes such as money market funds have reached historically high levels. Although the outlook for deposit rates depends on the policy rate path, deposit levels are likely to remain stable under alternative policy scenarios.