Working papers are academic research by SF Fed economists and affiliates intended for publication in scholarly journals. This section contains working papers on monetary economics and macro-finance topics that have been authored or co-authored by SF Fed Economists.
-
Credit Supply, Prices, and Non-price Mechanisms in the Mortgage Market
John Mondragon
I use an episode of relatively tight credit supply in the jumbo mortgage market to quantify the importance of price and non-price credit supply mechanisms in explaining changes in borrowing. Following market disruptions in March 2020, borrowers with jumbo loans saw significantly tighter credit supply conditions relative to borrowers with conforming loans. As a result, jumbo borrowers were 50 percent less likely to refinance and when they refinanced they borrowed 4-6 percent less than counterfactual borrowers facing looser credit conditions. The reduction in borrowing may have been caused by both an increase in the price and a change in a non-price mechanism, a decline in the availability of cash-out refinances. Decomposing the total effect into a price and cash-out channel, I find that that the cash-out channel accounts for two to three times as much of the decline as the price effect, and together both explain 70-80 percent of the total decline. This suggests that non-price mechanisms can be least as important as prices in clearing credit markets, a fact which is not adequately explained by current models of credit markets.
-
Industrial Composition of Syndicated Loans and Banks’ Climate Commitments
Galina Hale, Brigid Meisenbacher, Rami Najjar, Fernanda Nechio
In the past two decades, a number of banks joined global initiatives aimed to mitigate climate change by “greening” their asset portfolios. We study whether banks that made such commitments have a different emission exposure of their portfolios of syndicated loans than banks that did not. We rely on loan-level information with global coverage combined with country-industry information on emissions. We find that all banks have reduced their loan-emission exposures over the last 8 years. However, we do not find differences between banks that did and those that did not signal their sustainability goals, with the exception of early signers of Principles of Responsible Investments (PRI), who already had lower exposure to emissions through their syndicated lending. In addition, banks that signed PRI shortened the maturity of the loans extended to highly-emitting industries but only temporarily. Thus, we conclude that banks reduced their exposure to climate transition risks on average, but voluntary climate commitments did not contribute to syndicated loan reallocation away from highly-emitting sectors.
-
Quantitative Easing, Bond Risk Premia and the Exchange Rate in a Small Open Economy
Jens H. E. Christensen, Xin Zhang
We assess the impact of large-scale asset purchases, commonly known as quantitative easing (QE), conducted by Sveriges Riksbank and the European Central Bank (ECB) on bond risk premia in the Swedish government bond market. Using a novel arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of nominal and real bond prices that accounts for bond-specific safety premia, we find that Sveriges Riksbank’s bond purchases raised inflation and short-rate expectations, lowered nominal and real term premia and inflation risk premia, and increased nominal bond safety premia, suggestive of signaling, portfolio rebalance, and safe asset scarcity effects. Furthermore, we document spillover effects of ECB’s QE programs on Swedish bond markets that are similar to the Swedish QE effects only after controlling for exchange rate fluctuations, highlighting the importance of exchange rate dynamics in the transmission of QE spillover effects.
-
Demographics and Real Interest Rates Across Countries and Over Time
Carlos Carvalho, Andrea Ferrero, Felipe Mazin, Fernanda Nechio
We explore the implications of demographic trends for the evolution of real interest rates across countries and over time. To that end, we develop a tractable three-country general equilibrium model with imperfect capital mobility and country-specific demographic trends. We calibrate the model to study how low-frequency movements in a country’s real interest rate depend on its own and other countries’ demographic factors, given a certain degree of financial integration. The more financially integrated a country is, the higher the sensitivity of its real interest rate to global developments is, and the less its own real rate determinants matter. We then estimate panel error correction models relating real interest rates to many of its possible determinants-demographics included-imposing some restrictions motivated by lessons from our structure model. Results corroborate the importance of accounting for time-varying financial integration, and show global factors and life expectancy are relevant determinants of real interest rates.
-
Bank Risk-Taking, Credit Allocation, and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from China
Zheng Liu, Xiaoming Li, Yuchao Peng, Zhiwei Xu
Using confidential loan-level data from a large Chinese bank, we examine how Basel III implementation influenced the responses of bank risk-taking to monetary policy shocks. We use a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, exploiting disparities in lending behavior between high- and low-risk bank branches before and after the new regulations. Our findings reveal a novel risk-weighting channel through which monetary policy easing significantly reduced bank risk-taking. However, this risk reduction was achieved by shifting lending towards ostensibly low-risk state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with government guarantees, despite their lower average productivity. Our findings suggest a tradeoff facing China’s monetary policy between curbing bank risks and addressing credit misallocation.