The Basel regime is an international system of capital adequacy regulation designed to strengthen banks’ financial health and the safety and soundness of the financial system as a whole. It [...]
We provide novel estimates of the timing, magnitudes, and potential determinants of the start of the last housing boom across American neighborhoods and metropolitan areas (MSAs) using a rich new [...]
While the current capital adequacy framework, Basel II, aims to make banks’ capital requirements more sensitive to the underlying risk of the assets, it may also introduce an additional source [...]
Building an unbalanced panel of United States (US) bank holding company (BHC) and commercial bank balance-sheet data from 1986 to 2008, we examine the relationship between short-term capital buffer and [...]
We explore a mostly undocumented but important dimension of the housing market crisis: the role played by real estate investors. Using unique credit-report data, we document large increases in the [...]
We develop a model of banking industry dynamics to study the relation between commercial bank market structure, business cycles, and borrower default frequencies. We analyze an environment where a small [...]
During the financial crisis that started in 2007, the U.S. government has used a variety of tools to try to rehabilitate the U.S. banking industry. Many of those strategies were [...]
More than 40 years ago, Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) guided the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) through Congress, seeking to improve the operations of the credit reporting industry. The complexities [...]
The last fifteen years have been marked by a dramatic boom-bust cycle in real estate prices, accompanied by economically large fluctuations in international capital flows. We argue that changes in [...]
This paper analyzes the cyclical effects of bank capital requirements in a simple model with credit market imperfections. Lending rates are set as a premium over the cost of borrowing [...]