Although major changes in mortgage finance have occurred since the subprime bust, several issues remain unresolved, centering on the roles of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA. We analyze how some reforms might affect house prices in a framework rich enough to simulate the impact of several reforms which change mortgage interest rates and/or loan-to-value (LTV) ratios of first time home buyers, the key drivers of house prices in recent decades. Simulations suggest that ending the GSE interest rate subsidy would have small effects, while changes in capital requirements or maximum FHA loan size limits would have larger effects.

In the financial crisis and recession induced by the Covid-19 pandemic, many investment-grade firms became unable to borrow from securities markets. In response, the Fed not only reopened its commercial paper funding facility but also announced it would purchase newly issued and seasoned corporate bonds rated as investment grade before the Covid pandemic. We assess the effectiveness of this program using long sample periods, spanning the Great Depression through the Great and Covid Recessions. Findings indicate that the announcement of corporate bond backstop facilities helped stop risk premia from rising further than they had by late-March 2020. In doing so, these backstop facilities limited the role of external finance premia in amplifying the macroeconomic impact of the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, the corporate bond programs blend the roles of the Federal Reserve in conducting monetary policy via its balance sheet, acting as a lender of last resort, and pursuing credit policies.

In the 2000 s, U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) prices experienced a boom and bust as dramatic as the more widely analyzed swings in house prices and contributed significantly to bank failures. We model short-run and long-run movements in capitalization rates (rent-to-price-ratio) and risk premia for office building and apartments. In the mid-2000s’ boom, CRE prices were mainly driven by declines in required risk premia that stemmed from a weakening of capital requirements. In the bust, CRE price declines were initially driven by a jump in general risk premia and later by a tightening of effective capital requirements on commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) from the Dodd-Frank Act. The subsequent recovery in CRE prices was induced and sustained by unusually low real Treasury yields. We conclude that macro-prudential regulation of leverage may help limit asset price booms by preventing sharp declines in risk premia.

Economic policy uncertainty affects decisions of households, businesses, policy makers and financial intermediaries. We first examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty on aggregate bank credit growth. Then we analyze commercial bank entity level data to gauge the effects of policy uncertainty on financial intermediaries’ lending. We exploit the cross-sectional heterogeneity to back out indirect evidence of its effects on businesses and households. We ask (i) whether, conditional on standard macroeconomic controls, economic policy uncertainty affected bank level credit growth, and (ii) whether there is variation in the impact related to banks’ balance sheet conditions; that is, whether the effects are attributable to loan demand or, if impact varies with bank level financial constraints, loan supply. We find that policy uncertainty has a significant negative effect on bank credit growth. Since this impact varies meaningfully with some bank characteristics – particularly the overall capital-to-assets ratio and bank asset liquidity-loan supply factors at least partially (and significantly) help determine the influence of policy uncertainty. Because other studies have found important macroeconomic effects of bank lending growth on the macroeconomy, our findings are consistent with the possibility that high economic policy uncertainty may have slowed the U.S. economic recovery from the Great Recession by restraining overall credit growth through the bank lending channel.

We construct Monetary Services (Divisia) Indexes at various levels of aggregation (the broadest of which is M4) from the late 1940s through 1967 employing methods designed to permit these historical series to be spliced to corresponding series currently published by the Center for Financial Stability (CFS), which begin in 1967. The annualized growth rate of our MSI M2 during 1947 to 1967 generally lies between the growth rates of conventional M1 and M2, while the growth rate of MSI M3 is below that of conventional M3 over the same period. Using spliced series, we find that the velocities of the MSI exhibit gradual upward trends from the late 1940s through 1978, with distinct upward shifts in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, while the velocity of conventional M3 trends downward between 1953 and 1982. Using a Fourier demand model, we find elastic substitution between M1 and the non-M1 components of MSI M3 up to 1967, but inelastic substitution between bank and thrift deposits.