Beyond the Transaction: Banks and Mortgage Default of Low‐Income Homebuyers

We evaluate the effects of the lending institution and soft information on mortgage loan performance for low‐income homebuyers. We find that even after controlling for the propensity of a borrower to get a loan from a local bank based on observable characteristics, those who receive a loan from a local bank branch are significantly less likely to become delinquent or default than other bank or nonbank borrowers, consistent with an unobserved information effect. These effects are most pronounced for loans originated to borrowers with marginal credit, where soft information may have a stronger effect. These findings support previous research on information‐driven lending, and provide additional explanation for observed differences in mortgage loan performance between bank and nonbank lenders.     

Credit Scoring and the Availability of Small Business Credit in Low‐ and Moderate‐Income Areas

This paper estimates that credit scoring is associated with about a $3,900 increase in small business lending per sample banking organization, per low‐ and moderate‐income (LMI) area served, and this effect is roughly equivalent to that estimated for higher‐income areas. For our sample, this corresponds to a $536 million increase in small business credit in LMI areas in 1997 than otherwise would have been the case. This effect appears to be driven by increased out‐of‐market lending by banking organizations, as in‐market lending generally declines. Overall, it does not appear that credit scoring has a disparate impact on LMI areas.     

Credit Reporting, Relationship Banking, and Loan Repayment

How does information sharing between lenders affect borrowers repayment behavior? We show—in a laboratory credit market—that information sharing increases repayment rates, as borrowers anticipate that a good credit record improves their access to credit. This incentive effect of information sharing is substantial when repayment is not third‐party enforceable and lending is dominated by one‐shot transactions. If, however, repeat interaction between borrowers and lenders is feasible, the incentive effect of credit reporting is negligible, as bilateral banking relationships discipline borrowers. Information sharing nevertheless affects market outcome by weakening lenders' ability to extract rents from relationships.     

Two Extensive Margins of Credit and Loan‐to‐Value Policies

We analyze a model of mortgage markets, housing tenure choice, heterogeneous agents, and default with closed form solutions. We uncover new insights which may inspire empirical work, and we ground already established insights in a series of tractable expressions. Then we study optimal loan‐to‐value (LTV) regulation and show that the choice of an LTV cap should balance the opposing forces of access to homeownership and the negative externalities associated with default. Homeownership affordability concerns induce procyclical elements into optimal regulation which attenuate the countercyclical regulation justified by the negative default externalities.     

Bank Lending Standards and Access to Lines of Credit

This paper examines how changes in bank lending standards are related to the availability of bank lines of credit for private and comparable public firms. Overall, we find that access to lines of credit is more contingent on bank lending standards for private than for public firms. The impact of bank lending standards is however asymmetric: while private firms are less likely than public firms to gain access to new lines when credit market conditions are tight, we find no difference between public and private firms in terms of their use or retention of pre‐existing lines. We also find that private firms without lines of credit use more trade credit when bank lending standards are tight, which is suggestive of a supply effect. Overall, the evidence suggests that “credit crunches” are likely to have a disproportionate impact on private firms. However, pre‐existing banking relationships appear to mitigate the impact of these contractions on private firms.     

Building Stable Mortgage Markets: Lessons from Canada's Experience

The global financial crisis illustrated the high costs of boom–bust cycles in housing and mortgage markets and the importance of implementing policy frameworks that mitigate the risk of these events. This article discusses elements of Canada's policy framework that contributed to the relatively good performance of its mortgage market in recent years, including supervisory practices and mortgage underwriting standards. Lender recourse and the nondeductibility of mortgage interest payments played a complementary role. Ongoing policy challenges are also identified, including the need for monitoring to ensure the current prolonged period of low interest rates does not lead to levels of debt and house prices that create future instability in housing and mortgage markets.     

The Pricing of Sequential Bank Loans

The theory of financial intermediation assigns banks a unique role in the resolution of information asymmetry. Banks, in general, obtain private information about the borrower and the project during the screening of loan applicants and during the monitoring of loan recipients. Incumbent banks, in particular, utilize information obtained while monitoring previous loan extensions to resolve information asymmetry when granting subsequent loans. We examine the rate on a sequence of loans to a borrower and find that the incumbent bank information advantage has finite magnitude and is quickly reflected in the pricing of the second loan. We also find that the lending relationship does not deteriorate to the detriment of the borrower. This study also provides further evidence supporting the hypothesis that an incumbent bank resolves information asymmetry during the monitoring of loan extensions.     

Trade Credit,the Financial Crisis,and SME Access to Finance

Mounting evidence indicates that firms, particularly SMEs, suffered from a significant credit crunch during this crisis. We analyze for the first time whether trade credit provided an alternative source of external finance to SMEs during the crisis. Using firm‐level Spanish data we find that credit constrained SMEs depend on trade credit, but not bank loans, and that the intensity of this dependence increased during the financial crisis. Unconstrained firms, in contrast, are dependent on bank loans but not on trade credit.     

Monetary Policy,Bank Lending,and the Risk‐Pricing Channel

This paper identifies a monetary policy channel through the risk pricing of bank debt in the market for jumbo certificates of deposit (jumbo CDs). Adverse policy shocks increase debt holder perceptions of bank default, increasing the risk premia for some banks, thereby decreasing their external funding of loans. The results show that contractionary policy increases the sensitivity of jumbo‐CD spreads to leverage and asset risk for small banks, and to leverage for large banks. The results also show a distributional and aggregate effect on banking system jumbo CDs and total loans, producing a risk‐pricing (or market discipline) channel. This channel has implications for monetary and regulatory policies, and financial stability.     

The Cross‐Market Spillover of Economic Shocks through Multimarket Banks

This study investigates the mortgage lending of banks operating in multiple U.S. metropolitan areas during the housing market collapse of 2007–09. We show that multimarket banks reduced local portfolio lending in response to high overall mortgage delinquencies in their other markets, consistent with the view that local economic shocks can be transmitted to other regions through banks’ internal capital markets. This spillover was greatest when the bank lacked a branch presence and when the market was highly peripheral to the bank in terms of its total mortgage lending. These effects were not fully offset by securitization or other portfolio lenders.     

Bank‐Owned Life Insurance and Bank Risk

The use of bank‐owned life insurance (BOLI) has more than tripled since 2001 and has caught the attention of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. I find increases in BOLI lead to higher levels of liquidity risk, credit risk, and interest rate risk. Robustness tests confirm these results and suggest over‐ and underinvestment in BOLI and use of BOLI as a tax shelter contribute to risk increases. Results indicate that the concerns expressed by regulators are warranted, and suggest insurance may not always have the intended effect of reducing firm risk because of unintended consequences or misuse.     

Time‐Varying Capital Requirements and Disclosure Rules: Effects on Capitalization and Lending Decisions

We investigate how banks’ capital and lending decisions respond to changes in bank‐specific capital and disclosure requirements. We find that an increase in the bank‐specific regulatory capital requirement results in a higher bank capital ratio, brought about via less asset risk. A decrease in the requirement implies more lending to firms but also less Tier 1 capital and higher bank leverage. We do not observe differences between confidential and public disclosure of capital requirements. Our results empirically illustrate a tradeoff between bank resilience and a fostering of the economy through more bank lending using banks’ capital requirement as policy instrument.     

Credit Crunch Caused by Bank Failures and Self‐Selection Behavior in Lending Markets

This study investigates how bank failures affect the real economy from the lenders’ perspective. Using experimental settings of unique bank failures in Japan, this paper identifies the credit crunch effect by bank failures. The main findings are the following. First, bank failures decrease the investments of the client firms by approximately 30%. Second, the high investment growth/level firms deal with unhealthy banks. These choices generate a self‐selection bias of 30–80%. Third, there is no evidence that bank‐failure shock is related to the firms’ accessibility to other financial sources.     

Capital Market Regimes and Bank Structure in Europe

We hypothesize that fundamental features that distinguish European capital markets have predictably influenced emerging national differences in bank capitalization and loan growth. Using bank‐level data from 13 European countries, 1998 to 2004, we find evidence of positive effects of “equity‐friendly” market features on bank capitalization and positive effects of both “equity‐friendly” and “credit‐friendly” market features on loan growth. The findings are strongest in small banks and in banks with cooperative charters. Our results suggest that ongoing and prospective integration of European banking markets is mitigated by relatively static features of the equity and credit markets on which banks rely.     

High‐Cost Credit and Consumption Smoothing

In this paper, I show that high‐cost credit helps households smooth consumption following periods of temporary financial distress. After experiencing distress—that is, extreme weather events—I find that access to high‐cost payday lending mitigates declines in overall spending and nondurable goods spending generally. The results are particularly concentrated among households with a higher propensity to use payday credit or that have limited alternatives: lower income households, households with less than a college degree, and households with low levels of saving. These results highlight the consumption‐smoothing role that high‐cost credit plays for households with limited access to other types of credit.     

A Reexamination of Credit Rationing in the Stiglitz and Weiss Model

We reexamine Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) credit rationing by simultaneously considering adverse selection and moral hazard. If returns of the projects are ranked by first‐order stochastic dominance, neither adverse selection nor moral hazard exists. If the projects have equalized expected returns, moral hazard does not exist, and credit rationing due to adverse selection occurs under extreme conditions. If the projects are ranked by second‐order stochastic dominance (SSD), adverse selection and moral hazard may coexist, logically restoring credit rationing, but SSD imposes strict limitations on lenders’ ability to classify borrowers. In general, our results do not support significance of credit rationing.     

The Coordination Role of Stress Tests in Bank Risk‐Taking

We examine whether stress tests distort banks' risk‐taking decisions. We study a model in which a regulator may choose to rescue banks in the event of concurrent bank failures. Our analysis reveals a novel coordination role of stress tests. Disclosure of stress‐test results informs banks of the failure likelihood of other banks, which can reduce welfare by facilitating banks' coordination in risk‐taking. However, conducting stress tests also enables the regulator to more effectively intervene banks, coordinating them preemptively into taking lower risks. We find that, if the regulator has a strong incentive to bail out, stress tests improve welfare, whereas if the regulator's incentive to bail out is weak, stress tests impair welfare.     

Bank Panics,Government Guarantees,and the Long‐Run Size of the Financial Sector: Evidence from Free‐Banking America

Governments attempt to increase the confidence of financial market participants by making implicit or explicit guarantees of uncertain credibility. Confidence in these guarantees presumably alters the size of the financial sector, but observing the long‐run consequences of failed guarantees is difficult. We look to America's free‐banking era and compare the consequences of a broken guarantee during the Indiana‐centered Panic of 1854 to the Panic of 1857 in which guarantees were honored. Our estimates of a model of endogenous market structure indicate substantial negative long‐run consequences to financial depth when panics cast doubt upon a government's ability to honor its guarantees.       

The Co‐movement of Credit Default Swap,Bond and Stock Markets: an Empirical Analysis

We analyse the relationship between credit default swap (CDS), bond and stock markets during 2000–2002. Focusing on the intertemporal co‐movement, we examine monthly, weekly and daily lead‐lag relationships in a vector autoregressive model and the adjustment between markets caused by cointegration. First, we find that stock returns lead CDS and bond spread changes. Second, CDS spread changes Granger cause bond spread changes for a higher number of firms than vice versa. Third, the CDS market is more sensitive to the stock market than the bond market and the strength of the co‐movement increases the lower the credit quality and the larger the bond issues. Finally, the CDS market contributes more to price discovery than the bond market and this effect is stronger for US than for European firms.