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Journal Article
The Main Street Lending Program
The Main Street Lending Program was created to support credit to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations that were harmed by the pandemic, particularly those that were unsupported by other pandemic-response programs. It was the most direct involvement in the business loan market by the Federal Reserve since the 1930s and 1940s. Main Street operated by buying 95 percent participations in standardized loans from lenders (mostly banks) and sharing the credit risk with them. It would end up supporting loans to more than 2,400 borrowers and co-borrowers across the United ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Tax and Credit-Event Risk Components of Credit Spreads
This paper argues that tax liabilities explain a large fraction of observed short-maturity investment-grade (IG) spreads, but credit-event premia do not. First, we extend Duffie and Lando (2001) by permitting management to issue both debt and equity. Rather than defaulting, managers of IG firms who receive bad private signals conceal this information and service existing debt via new debt issuance. Consistent with empirical observation, this strategy implies that IG firms have virtually zero credit-event risk (at least until they become ?fallen angels"). Second, we provide empirical evidence ...
Working Paper
The Effects of the 1930s HOLC \"Redlining\" Maps
In the wake of the Great Depression, the Federal government created new institutions such as the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to stabilize housing markets. As part of that effort, the HOLC created residential security maps for over 200 cities to grade the riskiness of lending to neighborhoods. We trace out the effects of these maps over the course of the 20th and into the early 21st century by linking geocoded HOLC maps to both Census and modern credit bureau data. Our analysis looks at the difference in outcomes between residents living on a lower graded side versus a higher graded ...
Working Paper
Bank Incentives and the Effect of the Paycheck Protection Program
We assess the role of banks in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and unprecedented small-business support program instituted as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. In 2020, the PPP administered more than $525 billion in loans and grants to small businesses through the banking system. First, we provide empirical evidence of heterogeneity in the allocation of PPP loans. Firms that were larger and less affected by the COVID-19 crisis received loans earlier, even in a within-bank analysis. Second, we develop a model of PPP allocation through banks that is ...
Journal Article
GSE guarantees, financial stability, and home equity accumulation
Before 2008, the government?s ?implicit guarantee? of the securities issued by the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to practices by these institutions that threatened financial stability. In 2008, the Federal Housing Finance Agency placed these GSEs into conservatorship. Conservatorship was intended to be temporary but has now reached its tenth year, and policymakers continue to weigh options for reform. In this article, the authors assess both implicit and explicit government guarantees for the GSEs. They argue that adopting a legislatively defined ...
Working Paper
Explaining the Life Cycle of Bank-Sponsored Money Market Funds: An Application of the Regulatory Dialectic
In this paper, we present empirical evidence of the regulatory dialectic in the prime institutional money market fund (PI-MMF) industry. The “regulatory dialectic”, developed by Kane (1977, 1981), describes how banks and regulators react to each other. For decades, a cap on commercial deposit interest rates fueled dramatic growth in bank-sponsored PI-MMFs as a form of shadow banking. During the growth period, banks with more commercial deposits were more likely to enter the PI-MMF industry in an effort to keep their commercial customers in affiliated subsidiaries. However, the 2008 crisis ...
Working Paper
Optimal Bailouts in Banking and Sovereign Crises
We study optimal bailout policies amidst banking and sovereign crises. Our model features sovereign borrowing with limited commitment, where domestic banks hold government debt and extend credit to the private sector. Bank capital shocks can trigger banking crises, prompting the government to consider extending guarantees over bank assets. This poses a trade-off: Larger bailouts relax financial frictions and increase output, but increase fiscal needs and default risk (creating a ‘diabolic loop’). Optimal bailouts exhibit clear properties. The fraction of banking losses the bailouts cover ...
Working Paper
Navigating Higher Education Insurance: An Experimental Study on Demand and Adverse Selection"
We conduct a survey-based experiment with 2,776 students at a non-profit university to analyze income insurance demand in education financing. We offered students a hypothetical choice: either a federal loan with income-driven repayment or an income-share agreement (ISA), with randomized framing of downside protections. Emphasizing income insurance increased ISA uptake by 43%. We observe that students are responsive to changes in contract terms and possible student loan cancellation, which is evidence of preference adjustment or adverse selection. Our results indicate that framing specific ...
Journal Article
Credit risk transfer, informed markets, and securitization
Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) funded the U.S. housing bubble, while the ensuing bust resulted in systemic risk and the global financial crisis of 2007-09. In the run-up to the crisis, MBS pricing failed to reveal the growing credit risk. This article draws lessons from this failure that could inform the use of credit risk transfers (CRTs) to price credit risk. The author concludes that the CRT market, as currently constituted, could have appropriately priced and revealed credit risk during the bubble years because it met three key requirements: 1) transparency, through the full provision ...
Journal Article
Pricing government credit: a new method for determining government credit risk exposure
A growing debate centers on how best to recognize (and price) government interventions in the capital markets. This study applies a method for estimating and valuing the government?s exposure to credit risk through its loan and guarantee programs. The authors use the mortgage portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as examples of how policymakers could employ this method in pricing the government?s program credit risk. Building on the cost of capital approach, the method captures each program?s possible tail loss over and above its expected value. The authors then use a capital allocation ...