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Following the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, short-term credit markets were severely disrupted. In response, the Federal Reserve implemented new and unconventional facilities to help restore liquidity. Many existing analyses of these interventions are confounded by identification problems because they rely on aggregate data. Two unique micro datasets allow us to exploit both time series and cross-sectional variation to evaluate one of the most unusual of these facilities—the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (AMLF). The AMLF extended collateralized loans to depository institutions that purchased asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) from money market funds, helping these funds meet the heavy redemptions that followed Lehman’s bankruptcy. The program, which lent $150 billion in its first 10 days of operation, was wound down with no credit losses to the Federal Reserve. Our findings indicate that the facility was effective as measured against its dual objectives: it helped stabilize asset outflows from money market mutual funds, and it improved liquidity in the ABCP market. Using a differences-in-differences approach we show that after the facility was implemented, money market fund outflows decreased more for those funds that held more eligible collateral. Similarly, we show that yields on AMLF-eligible ABCP decreased significantly relative to those on otherwise comparable AMLF-ineligible commercial paper.

Optimal Portfolio Choice with Predictability in House Prices and Transaction Costs
by Stefano Corradin, José L. Fillat, and Carles Vergara-Alert

We study a model of portfolio choice, in which housing prices are predictable and adjustment costs must be paid when there is a housing transaction. We show that two state variables affect the agent’s decisions: (i) his wealth-house ratio; and (ii) the time-varying expected growth rate of housing prices. The agent buys (sells) his housing assets only when the wealth-house ratio reaches an optimal upper (lower) boundary. These boundaries are time-varying and depend on the expected growth rate of housing prices. Finally, we use household level data from the PSID and SIPP surveys to test and support the main implications of the model, as well as portfolio rules and holdings of housing asset.

Fair Value Accounting: Villain or Innocent Victim?
Exploring the Links Between Fair Value Accounting, Bank Regulatory Capital, and the Recent Financial Crisis
by Sanders Shaffer

There is a popular belief that the confluence of bank capital rules and fair value accounting helped trigger the recent financial crisis. The claim is that questionable valuations of long term investments based on prices obtained from illiquid markets created a pro-cyclical effect whereby mark to market adjustments reduced regulatory capital forcing banks to sell off investments which further depressed prices. This ultimately led to bank instability and the credit effects that reached a peak late in 2008. This paper analyzes a sample of large banks to attempt to measure the strength of the link between fair value accounting, regulatory capital rules, pro-cyclicality and financial contagion. The focus is on large banks because they value a significant portion of their balance sheets using fair value. They also hold investment portfolios that contain illiquid assets in large enough volumes to possibly affect the market in a pro-cyclical fashion. The analysis is based on a review of recent historical financial data. The analysis does not reveal a clear link for most banks in the sample, but rather suggests that there may have been other more significant factors putting stress on bank regulatory capital.

Your House or Your Credit Card, Which Would You Choose? Personal Delinquency Tradeoffs and Precautionary Liquidity Motives
by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jonathan Morse

This paper presents evidence that precautionary liquidity concerns lead many individuals to pay credit card bills even at the cost of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures. While the popular press and some recent literature have suggested that this choice may emerge from steep declines in housing prices, we find evidence that individual-level liquidity concerns are more important in this decision. That is, choosing credit cards over housing suggests a precautionary liquidity preference.

By linking the mortgage delinquency decisions to individual-level credit conditions, we are able to assess the compound impact of reductions in housing prices and retrenchment in the credit markets. Indeed, we find the availability of cash-equivalent credit to be a key component of the delinquency decision. We find that a one standard deviation reduction in available credit elicits a change in the predicted probability of mortgage delinquency that is similar in both direction and nearly double in magnitude to a one standard deviation reduction in housing price changes (the values are -25% and -13% respectively). Our findings are consistent with consumer finance literature that finds individuals have a preference for preserving liquidity-even at significant cost.

This paper replaces QAU09-5.

A Question of Liquidity: The Great Banking Run of 2008?
by Judit Montoriol-Garriga and Evan Sekeris

The current financial crisis has given rise to a new type of bank run, one that affects both the banks’ assets and liabilities. In this paper we combine information from the commercial paper market with loan level data from the Survey of Terms of Business Loans to show that during the 2007-2008 financial crises banks suffered a run on credit lines. First, as in previous crises, we find an increase in the usage of credit lines as commercial spreads widen, especially among the lowest quality firms. Second, as the crises deepened, firms drew down their credit lines out of fear that the weakened health of their financial institution might affect the availability of the funds going forward. In particular, we show that these precautionary draw-downs are strongly correlated with the perceived default risk of their bank. Finally, we conclude that these runs on credit lines have weakened banks further, curtailing their ability to effectively fulfill their role as financial intermediaries.

Market Proxies, Correlation, and Relative Mean-Variance Efficiency:
Still Living with the Roll Critique
by Todd Prono

A pricing restriction is developed to test the validity of the CAPM conditional on a prior belief about the correlation between the true market return and the proxy return used in the test. Distinguishing this pricing restriction from competing tests also based upon the relative efficiency of the proxy return is a consideration for the proxy’s mismeasurement of the market return. Failure to account for this mismeasurement biases tests of the CAPM towards rejection by overstating the inefficiency of the proxy. A time-varying version of this pricing restriction links mismeasurement of the market return to time-variation in beta.

Forgive and Forget: Who Gets Credit After Bankruptcy and Why?
by Ethan Cohen-Cole Burcu Duygan-Bump, and Judit Montoriol-Garriga

Conventional wisdom about individuals who have gone bankrupt is that they and it very difficult to get credit for at least some time after their bankruptcy. However, there is very little non-survey based empirical evidence on the availability of credit post-bankruptcy. This paper makes two contributions using data from one of the largest credit bureaus in the US. First, we show that individuals who file for bankruptcy can indeed get credit very quickly after they file. Indeed, 90% of individuals have access to some sort of credit within the 18 months after filing for bankruptcy, and 66% have unsecured credit. Second, we show that those individuals who are effectively the least punished and can get the easiest access to credit after bankruptcy tend to be the ones who have shown the least ability and propensity to repay their debt prior to declaring bankruptcy. In fact, a significant fraction of individuals at the bottom of the credit quality spectrum seem to receive more credit after filing than before. We interpret the widespread credit access and the difference in credit provision across borrower types as evidence that lenders target at-risk borrowers. By means of a simple stylized model we show that this observation is consistent with a pro t maximizing lender whose optimal strategy involves segmenting borrowers by observable credit quality and bankruptcy status and that offers credit contracts to each group. This interpretation is also in line with survey evidence that shows that lenders repeatedly solicit debtors to borrow after bankruptcy, with unsecured credit card being the easiest one to obtain.

The Option Value of Consumer Bankruptcy
by Ethan Cohen-Cole

This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on the causes of consumer bankruptcy. It presents the consumer bankruptcy decision as an irreversible choice that has an embedded real option value. This allows the use of well known framework for the study of decision making under ncertainty. The principal empirical finding is that cross-sectional variances of economic factors, such as unemployment, are strong predictors of bankruptcy rates and are consistent with the implications of the real options model. This supports anecdotal evidence that individuals are facing increased economic uncertainty and that suggests that uninsurable economic shocks are poorly characterized by local information. Finally, the paper concludes that policy regarding hanges in the bankruptcy rate may have been disproportionately focused on credit variables such as utilization rates and supply of credit rather than exposure to risk.

The Balance Sheet Channel
by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Enrique Martinez-Garcia

In this paper, we study the role of the credit channel of monetary policy in a synthesis model of the economy. Through the use of a well-specified banking sector and a regulatory capital constraint on lending, we provide an alternate mechanism that can potentially explain the periods of asymmetry in monetary policy without appealing to ad-hoc central bank preferences. This is accomplished through the characterization of the external finance premium that includes bank leverage and systemic risk.

Household Bankruptcy Decision: The Role of Social Stigma vs. Information Sharing
by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Burcu Duygan-Bump

Using a large sample of individual credit information provided by a US credit bureau, this paper investigates the empirical relevance of stigma and information sharing on household bankruptcy and its trend. Many observers of bankruptcy patterns have conjectured that there exists an increased willingness to default that reflects a diminution of social stigma. In this paper, we use a new methodology to disentangle stigma and social learning—two acknowledgedly important social factors affecting default. Although our results indicate a large and important role for stigma, changes in information costs seem to be the more relevant factor in explaining the observed bankruptcy trends. Furthermore, we show that this aggregate trend disguises enormous heterogeneity. While social factors appear quite important among the very poor and less educated, stigma seems to have increased and information costs to have decreased among these very groups. On the contrary, we show that it is primarily among the elatively rich and well educated that stigma has declined. These compositional findings further suggest that the overall increase in the bankruptcy rates cannot be explained by a decrease in social stigma. We argue that the secular increase in bankruptcy is more likely attributable to decreased information costs rather than to changes in social stigma.

Looking Behind the Aggregates: A Reply to “Facts and Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008”
by Ethan Cohen-Cole, Burcu Duygan-Bump, José Fillat, and Judit Montoriol-Garriga

As Chari et al (2008) point out in a recent paper, aggregate trends are very hard to interpret. They examine four common claims about the impact of financial sector phenomena on the economy and conclude that all four claims are myths. We argue that to evaluate these popular claims, one needs to look at the underlying composition of financial aggregates. Our findings show that most of the commonly argued facts are indeed supported by disaggregated data.

GARCH-Based Identification and Estimation of Triangular Systems
by Todd Prono

Diagonal GARCH is shown to support identification of the triangular system and is argued as a higher moment analog to traditional exclusion restrictions used for determining suitable instruments. The estimator for this result is ML in the case where a distribution for the GARCH process is known and GMM otherwise. For the GMM estimator, an alternative weighting matrix is proposed.

Household Debt Repayment Behaviour: What Role Do Institutions Play?
by Burcu Duygan-Bump and Charles Grant

Household debt repayment behavior has been understudied, especially empirically, despite the heightened debate on rising household debt, personal bankruptcy filings, and arrears. In this paper, we use data from the European Community Household Panel to analyze the determinants of household debt arrears. The paper's primary aim is to understand the role of institutions in household arrears by exploiting cross-country differences and the panel nature of the data set. We start our analysis by showing that falling into arrears has important long-term consequences for employment, self-employment, home-ownership, and health. Next, we show how arrears themselves are the result of adverse events that affect a household, such as bad health or unemployment. Finally, we show that there are important cross-country differences in how households react to these adverse events. These differences can be partly explained by local financial and judicial institutions. Indicators covering contract enforcement and the degree of credit information sharing are used to capture the costs associated with default. In particular, we show that while adverse shocks are highly important, the extent to which they affect household debt repayment depends crucially on the penalty for defaulting.

Is Obesity Contagious? Social Networks vs. Environmental Factors in the Obesity Epidemic
by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason M. Fletcher
Forthcoming, Journal of Health Economics.

This note’s aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler’s claim (NEJM July 26, 2007) that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known in the economics literature that failure to include contextual effects can lead to spurious inference on “social network effects.” We replicate the NEJM results using their specification and a complementary dataset. We find that point estimates of the “social network effect” are reduced and become statistically indistinguishable from zero once standard econometric techniques are implemented. We further note the presence of estimation bias resulting from use of an incorrectly specified dynamic model.

Credit Card Redlining
by Ethan Cohen-Cole

This paper evaluates the presence of racial disparities in the issuance of consumer credit. Using a unique and proprietary database of credit histories from a major credit bureau, this paper links location-based information on race with individual credit files. After controlling for the influence of such other place-specific factors as crime, housing vacancy rates, and general population demographics, the paper finds qualitatively large differences in the amount of credit offered to similarly qualified applicants living in Black versus White areas. An instrumental variables approach allows the paper to distinguish between issuer-provided credit (supply) and utilization of credit (demand), where instruments for demand are derived from social theory à la Veblen (i.e., `keeping up with the Joneses'). The results suggest that the observed differences in credit lines by racial composition of neighborhood are largely driven by issuer decisions rather than by demand.

Loss Distribution Estimation, External Data and Model Averaging
by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Todd Prono
Forthcoming, Journal of Financial Risk Management.

This paper will discuss a proposed method for the estimation of loss distribution using information from a combination of internally derived data and data from external sources. The relevant context for this analysis is the estimation of operational loss distributions used in the calculation of capital adequacy. We present a robust, easy-to-implement approach that draws on Bayesian inferential methods. The principal intuition behind the method is to let the data itself determine how they should be incorporated into the loss distribution. This approach avoids the pitfalls of managerial choice on data weighting and cut-off selection and allows for the estimation of a single loss distribution.

Demonstration Effects in Preventive Care
by Ritesh Banerjee, Ethan Cohen-Cole, and Giulio Zanella

Using a unique dataset composed of female employees at a large medical organization, this paper explores the role of social interactions among female co-workers and neighbors in the decision to obtain breast cancer screening exams. In our theoretical framework, the experience of other women is salient because it alters the tolerance for ambiguity about their own vulnerability, via a comparative ignorance effect. We find that the social multiplier ranges from 2 to 3: the equilibrium effect of an exogenous shock that impacts the probability of performing a mammogram is two to three times the shock itself. We perform a number of checks: among other things, these reveal (in agreement with the model and our intuition) that such a social effect is stronger for women whose job (according to the O*NET dictionary of occupations) offers more opportunities for social interaction, and weaker for individuals directly involved in health care, such as doctors and nurses.

Information Diffusion Based Explanations of Asset Pricing Anomalies
by Athanasios Bolmatis and Evan G. Sekeris

In this paper we develop information based factors which outperform other popular factors used in the multifactor pricing literature such as the Fama and French size and book-to-market factors. The first factor is based on the age of an asset, measured by the number of months since the asset’s IPO, while the second factor is based on the percentage of trading days an asset does not trade in a given year. Both factors attempt to capture the quality and speed of information diffusion on the market. Our information factors perform particularly well on momentum portfolios, which, Hong et al (2000) have shown to result from gradual-information diffusion. This gradual information diffusion explanation is consistent with the information argument underlying our factors, namely that, assets plagued with information problems can be miss-priced for sustained periods of time. Furthermore, our multifactor model successfully prices most industry portfolios and performs as well as the Fama and French model when pricing the 25 size/book-to-market sorted portfolios.

Asset Liquidity, Debt Valuation and Credit Risk
by Ethan Cohen-Cole

This paper presents a structural debt valuation model that links default probabilities and recovery rates of corporate securities to asset market liquidity. This linking is advantageous for risk management and regulation of financial institutions in that it provides a method of calibrating the relationship between probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD). Two innovations in the paper are the placing of the default point in a model of debt valuation into general equilibrium and conditioning this point on market factors such as asset liquidity. These allow one to derive implications on the correlation between various components of the model. Specifically, it finds two relationships between the probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD) of a debt instrument; temporal correlations are positive and cross-sectional ones negative. Such findings confirm the intuition of existing reduced form approaches and provide the ability to inspect other properties of the relationship that derive from theory. For example, one can use the model to forecast LGD. Some empirical validation of the theoretical results is provided.

Unpacking Social Interactions
by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Giulio Zanella
Forthcoming, Economic Inquiry.

As empirical work in identifying social e¤ects becomes more prevalent, researchers are beginning to struggle with identifying the composition of social interactions within any given reference group. In this paper, we present a simple econometric methodology for the separate identification of multiple social interactions. The setting under which we achieve separation is special, but is likely to be appropriate in many applications.

Model Uncertainty and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment
by Ethan Cohen-Cole, Steven Durlauf, Jeffrey Fagan, Daniel Nagin
Forthcoming, American Economic and Law Review

The reintroduction of capital punishment after the end of the Supreme Court moratorium has permitted researchers to employ state level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects. However, no scholarly consensus exists as to their magnitude. A key reason this has occurred is that the use of alternative models across studies produces differing estimates of the deterrent effect. Because differences across models are not well motivated by theory, the deterrence literature is plagued by model uncertainty. We argue that the analysis of deterrent effects should explicitly recognize the presence of model uncertainty in drawing inferences. We describe methods for addressing model uncertainty and apply them to understand the disparate findings between two major studies in the deterrence literature, finding that evidence of deterrent effects appears, while not nonexistent, is weak.

The Relative Efficiency of Endogenous Proxies: Still Living with the Roll Critique
by Todd Prono

Revised: March 2008

This paper presents a new method for identifying triangular systems of time-series data. Identification is the product of a bivariate GARCH process. Relative to the literature on GARCH-based identification, this method distinguishes itself both by allowing for a time-varying covariance and by not requiring a complete estimation of the GARCH parameters. Estimation follows OLS and standard univariate GARCH and ARMA techniques, or GMM. A Monte Carlo study of the GMM estimator is provided. The identification method is then applied in testing a conditional version of the CAPM.