The crypto boom and crash of 2020-22 demonstrated that (i) cryptocurrencies with fluctuating values are extremely risky and highly volatile assets, and (ii) cryptocurrencies known as “stablecoins” are vulnerable to systemic runs whenever there are serious doubts about the adequacy of...

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit InsuranceCorporation (FDIC) have adopted several recent measures that attempt to confer benefits and privileges of banks on nonbank providers of financial services and commercial firms. The OCC’s and FDIC’s...

Our analysis reveals that banks could develop capital-constrained by holding nonperforming household debts supported by central bank liquidity. We demonstrate the sequential responses to nonperforming assets on retained earnings, capital reserve, and new equity issuance. With capital reserves,...

How do changes in market structure impact accessibility to credit? Following the introduction of publicly disclosed Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review stress tests, market shares of affected banks shrunk by about 2.1 pp. Impact significantly differs across regions, with shares dropping an...

In November 2021, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG) issued a report analyzing the rapid expansion and growing risks of the stablecoin market. PWG’s report determined that stablecoins pose a wide range of potential hazards, including the risks of inflicting large losses...

We study how shocks to banks transmit to both the price and non-price terms of loans, in a model of multidimensional contracting between heterogeneous risky borrowers and intermediaries with limited lending capacity. The elasticities of loan demand and default rates to interest rates are...

Borrower-based macroprudential (MP) policies - such as caps on loan-to-value (LTV) ratios and debt-service-to-income (DSTI) limits - contain the build-up of systemic risk by reducing the probability and conditional impact of a crisis. While LTV/DSTI limits can increase inequality at...

The pandemic crisis has accelerated the entry of financial technology (“fintech”) firms into the banking industry. Some of the new fintech banks are owned or controlled by commercial enterprises. Affiliations between commercial firms and fintech banks raise fresh concerns about the dangers...

There has been a great deal of interest recently in understanding the potential role of fintech firms in expanding credit access to the underbanked and credit-constrained consumers. We explore the supply side of fintech credit, focusing on unsecured personal loans and mortgage loans. We...

We exploit a large and unexpected increase in the Colombian insurance threshold to investigate how depositors respond to higher deposit insurance. Monthly depositor-level records from a major bank show that the level and growth rate of deposits rise with higher coverage. Individuals who were...