Sumit Agarwal, Ricardo Correa, Bernardo Morais, Jessica Roldán and Claudia Ruiz-OrtegaWe study how banks’ exposure to a large set of related and suddenly-distressed borrowers impacts their commercial lending and risk taking. Using Mexican credit registry data, we examine the effect of the 2014 collapse in energy prices.
Dario Caldara, Matteo Iacoviello, and David YuThis paper introduces a monthly shortage index spanning 1900 to the present, constructed from 25 million newspaper articles. The index captures shortages across industry, labor, food, and energy, and spikes during economic crises and wars. We validate the index and show that it provides information beyond traditional macroeconomic indicators.
Marco Migueis, Michael Suher, and Jessie XuWe test whether minimum account balances to avoid fees, maintenance fee amounts, and nonsufficient funds charges are systematically different in LMI and majority-minority communities relative to other communities and find that they are generally higher.
Elena Falcettoni and Vegard Mokleiv NygaardWe propose a new way to classify individuals without a bank account, accounting for their actual interest in being banked. Analogous to how unemployment statistics are defined and estimated, we differentiate the individuals that do not have a bank account and would like to have one (the “unbanked”) from individuals that do not have a bank account and are not interested in having one (the “out of banking population”).
Matteo Iacoviello, Ricardo Nunes, and Andrea PrestipinoWe study optimal credit market policy in a stochastic, quantitative, general equilibrium, infinite-horizon economy with collateral constraints tied to housing prices. Collateral constraints yield a competitive equilibrium that is Pareto inefficient. Taxing housing in good states and subsidizing it in recessions leads to a Pareto-improving allocation for borrowers and savers.
Samuel K. Hughes and Joseph B. NicholsAs financial intermediaries, banks have a key role in producing information and managing the risks on diverse loan portfolios. An important input into this process is ongoing collection of financial performance from borrowers.
Andrea StellaUsing data on U.S. manufacturing plants, I estimate a production function model that includes agglomeration intensity as a component of total factor productivity and allows agglomeration benefits to vary across establishments, which can lead to sorting. I find that agglomeration benefits decline with unobserved establishment-level raw productivity.
Matthew R. Darst, Sotirios Kokas, Alexandros Kontonikas, Jose-Luis Peydro, and Alexandros P. VardoulakisWe show that the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy is limited by how banks adjust credit supply and manage liquidity risk in response to fragile non-bank funding. For identification, we use granular U.S. administrative data on deposit accounts and loan-level commitments, matched with bank-firm supervisory balance sheets.
Marco Migueis, Sydney PeirceThis study assesses whether the introduction of the GSIB surcharge requirement resulted in GSIBs reducing the systemic risk posed by their activities. We find limited evidence of GSIBs managing their activities to avoid increases in their surcharges. For a sample of international banks, proximity to surcharge thresholds is associated to a decrease in the growth of intra-financial system liabilities, underwriting activities, and holdings of trading and available-for-sale securities.
Mark Robinson, Pedro Silos, and Diego VilánWe show that the secular decline in real interest rates in the United States, which began in the early 1980s and persisted for nearly four decades, reduced the labor’s share of output and the unemployment rate, and increased earnings inequality. We establish this link using a model of frictional labor markets, estimated from household-level data, in which unemployment risk is only partially insurable.
