Federal Reserve

FEDS Paper: Access to Capital and the IPO Decision: An Analysis of US Private Firms

Andres Almazan, Nathan Swem, Sheridan Titman, Gregory WeitznerWe analyze firms’ IPO decisions using detailed financial data on US private firms. We find that firms with higher external capital needs are more likely to go public. Following the IPO, firms increase their investment and debt issuance, resulting in leverage ratios close to their pre-IPO levels. Finally, newly public firms borrow from an expanded pool of lenders at improved terms, with a decrease in the within-firm dispersion in banks’ private risk assessments.

FEDS Paper: Settlement Speed and Financial Stability

Agostino Capponi and Jin-Wook ChangThis paper investigates how settlement speed affects financial stability in payment networks, taking into account netting benefits, liquidity costs, and counterparty risks. Our analysis reveals that faster settlements have ambiguous effects on systemic risk and social welfare. The optimal settlement speed is determined by the network structure and the trade-off between netting efficiency and liquidity costs on one hand, and the probability of counterparty defaults on the other.

FEDS Paper: The Collateral Channel and Bank Credit(Revised)

Arun Gupta, Horacio Sapriza, and Vladimir YankovWe examine the firm-level and aggregate effects of the collateral channel using administrative bank-firm-loan level data. We introduce novel instrumental variables related to the efficiency of federal district bankruptcy courts and show their importance as predictors of collateral use and banks' expected losses given default across collateral types.

FEDS Paper: Does Financial Stress Affect Commodity Futures Traders' Positions?(Revised)

Shengwu Du, Travis D. Nesmith, and Yang HeppeFinancial stress can impact trading behavior in the U.S. commodity futures markets. To clarify the impact, we study absolute changes and relative exposure dynamics in traders' positions during two recent crises: the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature of these two crises are very distinct, and we find that traders behaved quite differently.

FEDS Paper: Declining Search Frictions, Unemployment, and Growth Revisited

Juan Carlos Córdoba, Anni T. Isojärvi, and Haoran LiThis paper revisits the conditions under which search models generate balanced growth paths (BGPs)—equilibria where unemployment, vacancies, and job flows remain steady as search frictions decline. Martellini and Menzio (2020) claim that such paths exist only when matches are “inspection goods” and match quality follows a Pareto distribution. We show that these conditions are sufficient but not necessary.

FEDS Paper: Do the Rich Really Save More? Answering an Old Question Using the SCF with Direct Measures of Lifetime Earnings and an Expanded Wealth Concept

Elizabeth Llanes, Jeffrey Thompson, and Alice Henriques VolzThe question of whether affluent households save at a higher rate than other parts of the distribution has been asked by economists on numerous occasions since the 1950s. It is standard in this research to define affluent, or “rich,” households as those with high lifetime earnings or income to better ground the empirical question in relevant theory.

FEDS Paper: Understanding Preferences for Payment Cards using Household Scanner Data

Marc Rysman, Shuang Wang, and Krzysztof WozniakWe use consumer panel scanner data to examine households' payment choices, a new application of such data. In particular, we study the long-term shift towards payment cards, as well as the role of transaction size in determining choices. We find that idiosyncratic household preferences are a key driver of payment choice.

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