Seung Jung Lee

The credit crunch and fall in employment during the Great Recession

We study how a bank credit crunch—a dramatic worsening of firm and consumer access to bank credit, such as the one observed over the Great Recession—translates into job losses in U.S. manufacturing industries. To identify the impact of the recent credit crunch, we rely on differences in the degree of dependence on external finance and of tangibility of assets across manufacturing industries and in the sensitivity of these industries׳ output to changes in the supply of consumer credit. We find that, for employment, household access to bank loans matters more than firm access to bank loans. In addition, we show that, over the recent financial crisis, tightening access to commercial and industrial loans and, in particular, consumer installment loans may have contributed significantly to the drop in employment in the manufacturing sector.

Estimating Changes in Supervisory Standards and Their Economic Effects

The disappointingly slow recovery in the U.S. from the depths of the financial crisis once again focused attention on the relationship between financial frictions and economic growth. Some bankers and borrowers suggested that unnecessarily tight supervisory policies were a constraint on new lending that hindered the recovery. This paper explores one aspect of supervisory policy: whether the standards used to assign commercial bank CAMELS ratings have changed materially over time (1991–2013). Models incorporating time-varying parameters or economy-wide variables suggest that standards used in the assignment of CAMELS ratings over the post-crisis period generally were in line with historical experience. Indeed, each of the models used suggests that the variation in supervisory standards has been relatively small in absolute terms over most of the sample period. However, we show that when this measure of supervisory stringency becomes elevated, it has a noticeable dampening effect on lending activity in subsequent quarters.

Prudential Policies and Their Impact on Credit in the United States

We analyze how two types of recently used prudential policies affected the supply of credit in the United States. First, we test whether the U.S. bank stress tests had any impact on the supply of mortgage credit. We find that the first Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) stress test in 2011 had a negative effect on the share of jumbo mortgage originations and approval rates at stress-tested banks?banks with worse capital positions were impacted more negatively. Second, we analyze the impact of the 2013 Supervisory Guidance on Leveraged Lending and subsequent 2014 FAQ notice, which clarified expectations on the Guidance. We find that the share of speculative-grade term-loan originations decreased notably at regulated banks after the FAQ notice.

The Credit Crunch and Fall in Employment During the Great Recession

We study how a bank credit crunch—a dramatic worsening of firm and consumer access to bank credit, such as the one observed over the Great Recession—translates into job losses in U.S. manufacturing industries. To identify the impact of the recent credit crunch, we rely on differences in the degree of dependence on external finance and of tangibility of assets across manufacturing industries and in the sensitivity of these industries׳ output to changes in the supply of consumer credit. We find that, for employment, household access to bank loans matters more than firm access to bank loans. In addition, we show that, over the recent financial crisis, tightening access to commercial and industrial loans and, in particular, consumer installment loans may have contributed significantly to the drop in employment in the manufacturing sector.

Bank Lending Channels During the Great Recession

We study the existence and economic significance of bank lending channels that affect employment in U.S. manufacturing industries. In particular, we address the question of how a dramatic worsening of firm and consumer access to bank credit, such as the one observed over the Great Recession, translates into job losses in these industries. To identify these channels, we rely on differences in the degree of external finance dependence and of asset tangibility across manufacturing industries and in the sensitivity of these industries’ output to changes in the supply of consumer credit. We show that household access to bank loans matters more for employment than firm access to local bank loans. Our results suggest that, over the recent financial crisis, tightening access to commercial and industrial loans and consumer installment loans explains jointly about a quarter of the drop in employment in the manufacturing sector. In addition, a decrease in the availability of home equity loans explains an extra one-tenth of the drop.

Mapping heat in the U.S. financial system

We provide a framework for assessing the build-up of vulnerabilities to the U.S. financial system. We collect forty-six indicators of financial and balance-sheet conditions, cutting across measures of valuation pressures, nonfinancial borrowing, and financial-sector health. We place the data in economic categories, track their evolution, and develop an algorithmic approach to monitoring vulnerabilities that can complement the more judgmental approach of most official-sector organizations. Our approach picks up rising imbalances in the U.S. financial system through the mid-2000s, presaging the financial crisis. We also highlight several statistical properties of our approach: most importantly, our summary measures of system-wide vulnerabilities lead the credit-to-GDP gap (a key gauge in Basel III and related research) by a year or more. Thus, our framework may provide useful information for setting macroprudential policy tools such as the countercyclical capital buffer.

Bank Capital Ratios and the Structure of Nonfinancial Industries

We exploit variation in commercial bank capital ratios across states to identify the impact of commercial bank balance sheet pressures manifested through changes in capital ratios on employment in the manufacturing sector. For industries dependent on external finance, we find that an increase in the capital ratio has no statistically significant effect on net firm creation, but has an economically significant impact on average firm size, as measured in the number of employees. Our findings indicate a lack of substitutes for bank funding both in the short and long run. This lack of substitutes implies a notable adverse impact of balance sheet pressures on employment in industries dependent on external sources of funding. Our results highlight the potential effects that bank balance sheet pressures, for example, from tightening capital adequacy standards, such as Basel III, may have on nonfinancial firm dynamics.

Risk Taking and Interest Rates : Evidence from Decades in the Global Syndicated Loan Market

We study how low interest rates in the United States affect risk taking in the market for cross-border corporate loans. Because banks tend to originate these loans with intent to sell to nonbank investors, we examine risk taking by the broad financial system. To the extent that actions of the Federal Reserve affect U.S. interest rates, our analysis provides evidence of cross-border spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy and highlights the global lending and risk-taking channels. We find that movements in the U.S. interest rates have an important effect on ex-ante credit risk of cross-border corporate loans, though the channels are different in the pre- and post-crisis periods. Before the crisis, banks made ex-ante riskier loans to non-U.S. borrowers in response to a decline in U.S. short-term interest rates, and, after it, banks and nonbanks originated such loans in response to a decline in U.S. longer- term interest rates. Economic uncertainty, risk appetite, and the U.S. dollar exchange rate appear to play a limited role in explaining ex-ante credit risk. Our results highlight the potential policy challenges faced by central banks in affecting credit risk cycles in their own jurisdictions.

The Anatomy of Financial Vulnerabilities and Crises

We extend the framework used in Aikman, Kiley, Lee, Palumbo, and Warusawitharana (2015) that maps vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system to a broader set of advanced and emerging economies. Our extension tracks a broader set of vulnerabilities and, therefore, captures signs of different types of crises. The typical anatomy of the evolution of vulnerabilities before and after a financial crisis is as follows. Pressures in asset valuations materialize, and a build-up of imbalances in the external, financial, and nonfinancial sectors follows. A financial crisis is typically followed by a build-up of sovereign debt imbalances as the government tries to deal with the consequences of the crisis. Our early warnings indicators which aggregate these vulnerabilities predict banking crises better than the Credit-to-GDP gap at long horizons. Our indicators also predict the severity of banking crises and the duration of recessions, as they take into account possible spill-over and amplification channels of financial stress to from one to another sector in the economy. Our indicators are of relevance for macroprudential and crisis management, in part, because they perform better than the Credit-to-GDP gap and do not suffer from the gaps econometric flaws.