Cindy M. Vojtech

The Real Consequences of Bank Mortgage Lending Standards

We examine the real effects of changes in bank mortgage loan underwriting standards by combining responses to the Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, application information from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and local housing market measures over 1990 to 2013. Tightened standards are associated with a 1 percentage point increase in denial rates and a 5 percent fall in loan issuance, controlling for applicant pool changes, but no change for predominantly securitizing banks. In areas with more exposure to banks that have tightened standards, mortgage delinquency rates, house prices, new home sales, and residential construction employment fall substantially.

Bank Profitability and Debit Card Interchange Regulation: Bank Responses to the Durbin Amendment

The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 alters the competitive structure of the debit card payment processing industry and caps debit card interchange fees for banks with over

Why Are Net Interest Margins of Large Banks So Compressed

10 billion in assets. Market participants predicted that debit card issuers would offset the reduction in debit interchange revenue by increases in customer account fees. Some participants also predicted that banks would cut costs in response to the law by reducing staff and shutting down branches. Using a difference-in-differences testing strategy, we show that debit interchange fee income fell for treated banks, leading to a fall in noninterest income. We also find that banks only partially offset this loss with deposit fees. We document that treated banks neither reduced costs nor strategically avoided the

Bank Failures, Capital Buffers, and Exposure to the Housing Market Bubble

10 billion threshold.

The Impact of the Current Expected Credit Loss Standard (CECL) on the Timing and Comparability of Reserves

This note analyzes recent trends in net interest margins (NIMs) at domestic bank holding companies.

The Effects of Liquidity Regulation on Bank Demand in Monetary Policy Operations

We empirically document that banks with greater exposure to high home price-to-income ratio regions in 2005 and 2006 have higher mortgage delinquency and charge-off rates and significantly higher probabilities of failure during the last financial crisis even after controlling for capital, liquidity, and other standard bank performance measures. While high price-to-income ratios present a greater likelihood of house price correction, we find no evidence that banks managed this risk by building stronger capital buffers. Our results suggest that there is scope for improved measures of mortgage loan risk that could be considered for regulatory and risk management applications.

Bank Income and Adjustment to Debit Card Interchange Regulation

The new forward-looking credit loss provisioning standard, CECL, is intended to promote proactive provisioning as loan loss reserves can be conditioned on expectations of the economic cycle. We study the degree to which one modeling decision–expectations about the path of future house prices – affects the size and timing of provisions for first-lien residential mortgage portfolios. While we find that provisions are generally less pro-cyclical compared to the current incurred loss standard, CECL may complicate the comparability of provisions across banks and time. Market participants will need to disentangle the degree to which variation in provisions across firms is driven by underlying risk versus differences in modeling assumptions.

Corporate Governance Responses to Director Rule Changes

We estimate the effects of the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR), a liquidity requirement for banks, on the tenders that banks submit in Term Deposit Facility operations, a Federal Reserve tool created to manage the quantity of bank reserves. We identify these effects using variation in LCR requirements across banks and a change over time that allowed term deposits to count toward the LCR. Banks subject to the LCR submit tenders more often and submit larger tenders than exempt banks when term deposits qualify for the LCR. These results suggest that liquidity regulation affects bank demand in monetary policy operations.

The Relationship Between Information Asymmetry and Dividend Policy

The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 alters the competitive structure of the debit card payment processing industry and caps debit card interchange fees for banks with over

How Have Banks Been Managing the Composition of High-Quality Liquid Assets?

10 billion in assets. Market participants predicted that debit card issuers would offset the reduction in debit interchange revenue by increases in customer account fees. Some participants also predicted that banks would cut costs in response to the law by reducing staff and shutting down branches. Using a difference-in-differences testing strategy, we show that debit interchange fee income fell for treated banks, leading to a fall in noninterest income. We also find that banks only partially offset this loss with deposit fees. We document that treated banks neither reduced costs nor strategically avoided the