The U.S. Postal Savings System and the collapse of building and loan associations during the Great Depression

Building and loan associations (B&Ls) financed over half of new houses constructed in the United States during the 1920s but they lost their predominance within the following decades as they were pushed to convert into Savings and Loans (S&Ls). This study examines whether the U.S. government-insured Postal Savings System attracted funds away from B&Ls precisely when they needed them the most in the Great Depression. Annual town- and county-level data from 1920 through 1935 for three states show that the sudden rise in local postal savings was associated with local downturns in B&Ls. Using a panel vector autoregression, we find that postal savings significantly reduced the amount of money in B&Ls, yet B&Ls had no significant effect on postal savings banks. Alternatively, postal savings had no significant effect on commercial banks. The results suggest that this competitive dynamic prevented B&Ls from rebounding in the mid-1930s and helped contributed to Great Depression's local real estate lending decline.     

担保，连带责任与小额信贷合同

文章通过建立委托代理模型,对农村小额信贷市场中担保贷款以及随机配对连带责任贷款的贷款合同设定进行了分析.现有研究缺乏对于担保贷款的分析,对连带责任贷款的分析也大多建立在正向配对的假设上.通过对担保贷款与连带责任贷款进行的模型化分析,得出了相应的次优合同信以及借贷双方的剩余.研究结论表明,担保贷款合同可以达到最优合同安排的状态,而随机配对的连带责任贷款仅能达到次优的资源配置效果.在推行连带责任贷款的同时,探索有效的担保形式,发展担保贷款,是小额信贷业务发展的有效途径.     

Broker Compensation Patterns and Trends: 2005–2009

Changes in the mortgage industry have been swiftly effected over the past few years. Many of the changes have come about as a response to the high level of observed delinquencies and defaults on residential mortgages as house prices plummeted, and others have evolved from continuing concerns about the treatment of borrowers during the mortgage origination process. The segmented mortgage industry of the early part of the decade, with loans being originated in the prime, subprime and government mortgage sectors, has been largely replaced with a bifurcated system. By year end 2010, the FHA/VA (government sector) combined with the conventional, conforming market share of originations was 90.8?%. In this paper, we examine some of the observed trends and changes in the types and levels of broker compensation that existed before the regulatory change that brought about the implementation of the Federal Reserve Board??s (FRB) new loan officer compensation rule. Among other questions, we examine the variance in broker compensation across geographies, across lenders, across borrower types, and across loan products. The intent of this ex post analysis is to provide an understanding of the potential impacts of the declining broker industry on both access to mortgage loans and on the pricing of mortgage originations.     

Lenders’ Response to Peer and Customer Restatements

We investigate whether restatements announced by economically related firms influence the contract terms a borrower receives from lenders. A restatement by a major customer firm increases the loan spread of a borrower by 11 basis points, on average. The contagion effects of customer restatements are higher (45 basis points) when a borrower's switching costs are high. Restatements by peer firms in the same industry also increase a borrower's loan spread, and this increase occurs regardless of restatement severity. Moreover, the sensitivity of loan spread to peer restatements is significantly greater when the restating peer firms are also in the bank's lending portfolio, suggesting that a lender's personal experience with restatements in an industry makes it more attuned to the potential implications of these restatements for the borrowing firm. Finally, our results suggest that lenders utilize information from peer restatements to anticipate future restatements by the borrowing firm.     

农村友情借贷的供给约束与金融支持研究

本文对友情借贷发展的特点进行了总结概括,并从关系网络、自身经济状况、数量规模约束和稳定性等方面分析了友情借贷供给的制约因素。在此基础上,探讨了对友情借贷隐性征信及信用保障的借鉴。最后,就新型金融机构对农户的金融支持方面提出了探索农村土地承包经营权和宅基地使用权抵押贷款、养老保险证质押贷款、农户特殊消费贷款、完善抵押担保的替代技术等创新业务。     

Measuring Transparency in the Dutch Mortgage Market

Summary This paper is an empirical study of pricing in the Dutch mortgage market. For a narrowly defined set of endowment mortgages (with a fixed lending rate of 10 years), we find that the price dispersion within lenders is larger than the dispersion across lenders. Prices remain dispersed across lenders, even after controlling for characteristics of the borrower, the municipality and the government bond rate. Apparently, the mortgage market is not fully transparent, which impedes competition in the mortgage market. We also find that the price dispersion for mortgages sold by banks is smaller than that for mortgages sold by other lenders. A likely explanation is that lenders using middlemen have higher agency costs. We wish to express our gratitude to the National Mortgage Guarantee (Nationale Hypotheek Garantie) in Zoetermeer, in particular Karel Schiffer and Hans Mersmann, for providing us access to their data as well as for their hospitality. We are grateful to Wim van Assenbergh, Harry Garretsen, Ralph de Haas, Jan Lemmen, Clemens Kool, Job Swank and two anonymous referees of this journal for their comments on previous versions of this article.     

土地承包经营权抵押标的及其贷款操作:11省(区、市)个案

以宁夏等11省(区、市)的土地承包经营权抵押实践为研究对象,归纳现阶段实践中借贷双方、抵押标的以及抵押贷款模式等方面的主要特征,并用案例研究方法深入剖析宁夏同心县土地经营权抵押贷款试验的实质:农户以土地经营权为抵押反担保获得土地协会保证担保后向信用社贷款;对信用社和贷款农户而言,不是农户土地承包经营权这一物的抵押(担保)贷款,而是以土地协会和其他农户为保证人的保证(担保)贷款。在讨论土地承包经营权抵押贷款时应在清晰界定其概念基础上,区分不同方式、不同抵押标的。     

Debt dilution in 1920s America: lighting the fuse of a mortgage crisis

The idea that real estate could have contributed to banking crises during the Great Depression has been downplayed due to the conservatism of mortgage contracts at the time. For instance, loan‐to‐value ratios often did not exceed 50 per cent. Using newly discovered archival documents and data from 1934, this article uncovers a darker side of 1920s US mortgage lending: the so‐called ‘second mortgage system’. As borrowers often could not make a 50 per cent down payment, a majority of them took second mortgages at usurious rates. As theory predicts, debt dilution, even in the presence of seniority rules, can be highly detrimental to both junior and senior lenders. The probability of default on first mortgages was likely to increase, and commercial banks were more likely to foreclose. Through foreclosure they would still be able to retrieve 50 per cent of the property value, but often after a protracted foreclosure process. This would have put further strain on banks during liquidity crises. This article is thus a timely reminder that second mortgages, or ‘piggyback loans’ as they are called today, can be hazardous to lenders and borrowers alike. It provides further empirical evidence that debt dilution can be detrimental to credit.     

Why are mortgage rates so uniform?

Conclusion Any reasonable model of mortgage lending concludes that interest rates depend on loan and borrower characteristics. In this paper, the rate is a function of the loan-to-value ratio, the parameters of the densities of future price of housing and income, deposit rate, and cost of foreclosure. Nevertheless, in practice, each lender charges only one rate to all borrowers. This is first explained by the difficulty of estimation of the parameters of the density functions. Since lenders cannot categorize their borrowers, they treat them uniformly and set minimum standards to minimize the risk of default by each borrower. Mortgage insurance, moreover, enables lenders to lend risklessly outside of the range in which they can operate risklessly on their own. Second, mortgage rate uniformity is explained by the lenders' risk aversion. Third, when borrowers are separated into discrete categories, uniform rates can result from perfect categorization of borrowers with respect to the future value of the relevant random variables. It is more likely, however, that lenders cannot categorize borrowers perfectly and that interest rates vary substantially among categories. As rates jump from one category to the next and borrowers are reluctant to gain small increases in loan size at significantly higher rates, lenders respond by offering only the basic category of loans.     

Loan Sales and Borrowers’ Accounting Conservatism

We examine whether initial loan sales in the secondary loan market relate to borrowing firms’ accounting conservatism. We find that borrowing firms exhibit a significant decline in accounting conservatism after the initial loan sales. We show that the decline in borrower conservatism is more pronounced for firms that borrow from lenders with lower monitoring incentives and for firms that have lower incentives to supply conservatism. The baseline results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. Collectively, we provide corroborative evidence that lead lenders’ monitoring incentives enforce accounting conservatism in the private debt market, and that lead lenders play a more prominent role than secondary loan market participants in shaping corporate (conservative) reporting.     

我国房地产抵押贷款证券化的法律制度构建初探

房地产抵押贷款证券化因能够将流动性较差的抵押贷款资产组群后证券化从而在市场上流通变现,因而深得多方市场主体青睐。然而在目前情况下,开展真正意义上的房地产抵押贷款证券化尚存在一系列法律制度上的障碍。本文从房地产抵押贷款证券化的业务模式入手分析了相关的法律问题,并对其从宏观法律角度提出了法律制度设计方案。     

我国当前宏观经济形势与财政政策选择

起源于美国的金融风暴的爆发与蔓延,影响到了实体经济。我国财政政策也由稳健型转型为积极的财政政策,以拉动内需,促进消费,刺激经济。积极财政政策的推行成功地减少了经济危机对我国的负面影响,但也在实施的过程中出现了一些问题。本文全面分析了拉动内需的积极财政政策,针对当前宏观经济形势的变化全面分析了拉动内需的积极财政政策措施,并对这些财政政策引发的效应进行分析,针对存在问题给出了应对对策以及注意事项。     

Commercial Lenders' Use of Accounting Information in Interaction with Source Credibility*

Abstract. The credibility of individual commercial borrowers, which lenders refer to as “character,” affects lenders' use of accounting information. This effect of source credibility is subtle compared to the effect of external audits on the use of financial statements in other contexts. It is hypothesized that accounting facts must be positive (supporting loan approval) for character facts to influence lenders' judgments and loan decisions. Character facts will not affect judgments or loan decisions significantly when accounting facts are negative (supporting loan denial). This accounting/character interaction is predicted to become stronger as lenders gain experience and develop criteria for evaluating character. In an experiment, lenders read a loan application that contained facts concerning accounting, character, and other information; the accounting and character facts were manipulated to be either positive or negative, resulting in four versions of the application. The lenders recommended approval or denial of the loan and estimated the likelihood that the loan would be fully repaid (a risk estimate). Interactive effects of accounting and character facts on lenders' loan decisions and risk estimates were found, but the accounting/character interactions generally did not vary with experience level. One notable difference was that experienced lenders never approved loans when accounting facts were negative, but inexperienced lenders sometimes did.     

存货质押贷款中银行对借款人的甄别—分离均衡

抵押贷款仅考虑借款人信用风险,存货质押贷款还应考虑质物价格风险。当银行时借款人事前违约概率具有不对称信息时,在DannyBen—shahar抵押贷款模型基础上,综合考虑借款人信用风险和质物价格风险,证明存在高风险借款人选择（高利率、高贷款价值比）合同,低风险借款人选择（低利率、低贷款价值比合同）的唯一分离均衡。     

个人按揭贷款中的陷阱分析及对策建议

个人按揭贷款中存在很多陷阱,目前此类相关文章都是从保护银行的角度出发,而从保护借款人利益的角度进行分析的文章却几乎没有,鉴于此,本文对个人贷款与还款过程中常见的风险与陷阱进行分析,并提出一些解决措施。     

Regime change and debt default: the case of Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman empire following World War One

We consider the effect of the three largest regime changes following World War One on the foreign debt repayments of the succeeding regimes. The Bolsheviks repudiated the Tsarist debt, both external and internal in early 1918, and could not borrow internationally until the 1970s. The Austro-Hungarian successor states, with the exception of Romania, remained on good terms with lenders, and quickly gained access to foreign capital. However, the Ottoman successor states entered into protracted negotiations before accepting responsibility for a share of the debt, which meant they faced a lengthy delay before being able to re-enter the international capital market. We analyze these events using a game theoretical model of incomplete information, whereby capital markets can not directly observe a government’s ‘type.’ We find that there were two main economic reasons why countries did not settle their debts after their regimes changed. Some countries, in particular Russia, did not value continued credit market access as highly as before, and second that international lenders will not trust a regime in default with a new loan.     

Impact of international development aid on FDI along the Belt and Road

Both IDA and FDI are very important external financing channels for B&R countries. Considering B&R countries as the sample, this paper analyzes the impact of the IDA received by B&R countries on their FDI from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on the different research objectives and data availability, the empirical analysis is considered as two sections. In the time series analysis, we use VECM model and the impulse response function to test the dynamic effects of different types of IDA on the FDI from the perspective of donor countries, and find that whether in the short, medium or long term, the complementary factor form of the aid to the recipient countries can promote FDI, and the material capital form of the aid to the recipient countries can crowd out their FDI. In the panel regression analysis, we examine the overall impact of the total amount of IDA accepted by the B&R recipient countries on FDI, including the direct impact of IDA on FDI and the moderating effects of institutional environment. Considering the direct impact, the results of the fixed effect regression analysis confirm the significantly negative effects of total IDA accepted by B&R recipient countries on their FDI. In the regression analysis of controlling endogeneity problem, the product terms of IDA variables and institutional environment variables are added to the regression models, and the results show that the institutional environment has significantly positive moderating effects in the process of IDA influencing FDI, indicating that the interaction between IDA and institutional environment helps to improve the impact of IDA on FDI and increase the attractiveness of recipient countries to FDI.     

Mortgage Finance Markets: Lessons from the Past and Keys to the Future

This special section of the journal provides an empirical examination of the mortgage market to help identify key market participants, how incentives affected behavior, and how participation in the market changed over time. The findings will help to identify lessons that can be applied to the regulation and structure of the mortgage finance industry in the future. In particular the research examines loan product choice in the subprime market under different regulatory regimes, mortgage broker compensation market penetration, and the changing role of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).     

Bank Monitoring and Financial Reporting Quality: The Case of Accounts Receivable–Based Loans*

Using novel receivable-based loan data, we study the effect of aging-report loan covenants on borrowers' accounts receivable reporting quality. Our purpose is to highlight a channel that lenders use to obtain private information and to understand whether lenders' information acquisition affects the financial reporting quality of borrowers. Compared to receivable-based borrowers without aging-report requirements (control firms), borrowers with such requirements (test firms) increase their receivable reporting quality significantly after loan initiations. The shift in reporting quality is more pronounced when borrowers have weak bargaining power. Our results lend support to the argument that lender information access affects borrowers' reporting quality.     

The liquidity trap: Japan, 1996–2001 versus the United States, 1933–1940

Keynes’ “liquidity trap” rarely occurs. But when it does, it has a tremendously adverse effect on the economy concerned. Such was the case of the United States in the 1930s and now that of contemporary Japan. In a liquidity trap, monetary policy pushes the money interest rate to the zero level while expanding the money supply (M1) at a faster rate than nominal GDP. Conventional theory explains this phenomenon as the result of money demand that becomes infinitely interest-elastic at the zero rate, rendering ineffective the rapidly expanding money supply established by the monetary authorities.In this paper, we show that the liquidity trap is a multifaceted phenomenon not limited to the money market. It involves the bank loan market, the bank deposit market, and the bond market interacting together. Of these, the most important is the bank loan market and the least important is the bank deposit market, whose deposit supply becomes horizontal at the zero rate. They are met by relatively interest-inelastic bank loan demand and bank deposit demand. Hence, the causality is completely reversed from the conventional understanding.We give empirical evidence in support of our theory based on data from the United States, 1933–1940 and Japan, 1996–2001. Far apart in time and space, the two cases are remarkably alike and, hence, provide strong supporting evidence.