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9 posts from "February 2020"
February 26, 2020

Did Subprime Borrowers Drive the Housing Boom?

The role of subprime mortgage lending in the U.S. housing boom of the 2000s is hotly debated in academic literature. One prevailing narrative ascribes the unprecedented home price growth during the mid-2000s to an expansion in mortgage lending to subprime borrowers. This post, based on our recent working paper, “Villains or Scapegoats? The Role of Subprime Borrowers in Driving the U.S. Housing Boom,” presents evidence that is inconsistent with conventional wisdom. In particular, we show that the housing boom and the subprime boom occurred in different places.

February 24, 2020

Understanding Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Models: Insights from a PRANK

To shed light on the macroeconomic consequences of heterogeneity, Acharya and Dogra develop a stylized HANK model that contains key features present in more complicated HANK models.

February 19, 2020

At the New York Fed: Fourteenth Annual Joint Conference with NYU‑Stern on Financial Intermediation

Blickle, Kovner, and Viswanathan share a synopsis of a recent conference featuring new research in financial intermediation and expert perspectives on corporate credit markets.

Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Intermediation | Permalink
February 13, 2020

Firm‑Level Shocks and GDP Growth: The Case of Boeing’s 737 MAX Production Pause

Events specific to large firms can have significant effects on the macroeconomy. The recent pause in Boeing’s 737 MAX production is a striking example of such an event or “shock.” This post provides a back-of-the envelope calculation of how the “737 MAX shock” could impact U.S. GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020.

Posted at 7:00 am in Macroeconomics | Permalink
February 12, 2020

Reading the Tea Leaves of the U.S. Business Cycle—Part Two

New work by Richard Crump, Domenico Giannone, and David Lucca finds labor market data to be the most reliable information for dating the U.S. business cycle.

February 11, 2020

Charging into Adulthood: Credit Cards and Young Consumers

The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data today released the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the fourth quarter of 2019. Total household debt balances grew by $193 billion in the fourth quarter, marking a $601 billion increase in household debt balances in 2019, the largest annual gain since 2007. The main driver was a $433 billion annual upswing in mortgage balances, also the largest since 2007.

Posted at 11:04 am in Credit, Household Finance | Permalink
February 10, 2020

Reading the Tea Leaves of the U.S. Business Cycle—Part One

Richard Crump, Domenico Giannone, and David Lucca discuss different conceptual approaches to dating the business cycle and study their past performance for the U.S. economy.

February 5, 2020

The Affordable Care Act and For‑Profit Colleges

Getting health insurance in America is intimately connected to choosing whether and where to work. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the U.S. health insurance market may influence, and be influenced by, the market for higher education—which itself is closely tied to the labor market. In this post, and the staff report it is based on, we investigate the effects of the largest overhaul of health insurance in the U.S. in recent decades—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) — on college enrollment choices.

Posted at 7:00 am in Education | Permalink
February 3, 2020

Have the Risk Profiles of Large U.S. Bank Holding Companies Changed?

After the global financial crisis, regulatory changes were implemented to support financial stability, with some changes directly addressing capital and liquidity in bank holding companies (BHCs) and others targeting BHC size and complexity. Although the overall size of the largest U.S. BHCs has not decreased since the crisis, the organizational complexity of these same organizations has declined, with less notable changes being observed in their range of businesses and geographic scope (Goldberg and Meehl forthcoming). In this post, we explore how different types of BHC risks—risks that can influence the probability that a BHC is stressed, as well as the chance of systemic implications—have changed over time. The results are mixed: Levels of most BHC risks currently tend to be higher than in the years immediately preceding the crisis, but are markedly lower than the levels seen during and immediately following the crisis.

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