Estimating the effect of Federal Reserve's announcements of Large-Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) programs on corporate credit risk is complicated by the simultaneity of policy decisions and movements in prices of risky financial assets, as well as by the fact that both interest rates of assets...

We construct a novel U.S. data set that matches bank holding company credit default swap (CDS) positions to detailed U.S. credit registry data containing both loan and corporate bond holdings to study the effects of banks' CDS use on corporate credit quality. Banks may use CDS to mitigate agency...

As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the 19th century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands, but...

The U.S. mortgage crisis that began in 2007 generated questions about the role played by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), in its causes. Some have claimed that the Affordable Housing Goals (AHGs), introduced by Congress through the GSE Act of 1992, and the...

The U.S. mortgage crisis that began in 2007 generated questions about the role played by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), in its causes. Some have claimed that the Affordable Housing Goals (AHGs), introduced by Congress through the GSE Act of 1992, and the...

This paper examines consistency in the estimates of probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD) that nine large U.S. banks assign to syndicated loans for regulatory capital purposes. Using internal bank data on loans that had PDs and LGDs assigned by more than one bank, we find...

The new forward-looking credit loss provisioning standard, CECL, is intended to promote proactive provisioning as loan loss reserves can be conditioned on expectations of the economic cycle. We study the degree to which one modeling decision–expectations about the path of future house...

We find that that the Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) standard would slightly dampen fluctuations in bank lending over the economic cycle. In particular, if the CECL standard had always been in place, we estimate that lending would have grown more slowly leading up to the financial crisis...

In this paper, we exploit a natural experiment in which thrifts in several states witnessed an exogenous reduction in supervisory attention to assess the effect of supervision on financial institutions' willingness to take risk. We show that the affected institutions took on much more risk than...

I develop a model where the sovereign debt capacity depends on the capitalization of domestic banks. Low-capital banks optimally tilt their government bond portfolio toward domestic securities, linking their destiny to that of the sovereign. If the sovereign risk is sufficiently high,...