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,...

We empirically document that banks with greater exposure to high home price-to-income ratio regions in 2005 and 2006 have higher mortgage delinquency and charge-off rates and significantly higher probabilities of failure during the last financial crisis even after controlling for capital,...

The convention in calculating trading costs in corporate bond markets is to assume that dealers provide liquidity to non-dealers (customers) and calculate average bid-ask spreads that customers pay dealers. We show that customers often provide liquidity in corporate bond markets, and thus,...