Federal Reserve System

About: Federal Reserve System is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 2373 authors who have published 10301 publications receiving 511979 citations.

Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals, and Misperceptions

Abstract: How does one tell when rapid growth in house prices is caused by fundamental factors of supply and demand and when it is an unsustainable bubble? In this paper, we explain how to assess the state of house prices—both whether there is a bubble and what underlying factors support housing demand—in a way that is grounded in economic theory. In doing so, we correct four common fallacies about the costliness of the housing market. For a number of reasons, conventional metrics for assessing pricing in the housing market such as price-to-rent ratios or price-to-income ratios generally fail to reflect accurately the state of housing costs. To the eyes of analysts employing such measures, housing markets can appear "exuberant" even when houses are in fact reasonably priced. We construct a measure for evaluating the cost of home owning that is standard for economists—the imputed annual rental cost of owning a home, a variant of the user cost of housing—and apply it to 25 years of history across a wide variety of housing markets. This calculation enables us to estimate the time pattern of housing costs within a market. As of the end of 2004, our analysis reveals little evidence of a housing bubble.

The Role of Capital in Financial Institutions

Abstract: This paper examines the role of capital in financial institutions. As the introductory article to a conference on the role of capital management in banking and insurance, it describes the authors' views of why capital is important, how market-generated capital requirements' differ from regulatory requirements and the form that regulatory requirements should take. It also examines the historical trends in bank capital, problems in measuring capital and some possible unintended consequences of capital requirements. According to the authors, the point of departure for all modern research on capital structure is the Modigliani-Miller (MM it is difficult to measure, and its measured value may be subject to manipulation by gains trading . The risk exposure in the denominator is also difficult to measure, corresponds only weakly to actual risk and may be subject to significant manipulation. These imprecisions worsen the social tradeoff between the externalities from bank failures and the quantity of bank intermediation. To keep bank risk to a tolerable level, capital standards must be higher on average than they otherwise would be if the capital ratios could be set more precisely, raising bank costs and reducing the amount of intermediation in the economy in the long run. Since actual capital standards are, at best, an approximation to the ideal, the authors argue that it should not be surprising that they may have had some unintended effects. They examine two unintended effects on bank portfolio risk or credit allocative inefficiencies. These two are the explosive growth of securitization and the so-called credit crunch by U.S. banks in the early 1990s. The authors show that capital requirements may give incentives for some banks to increase their risks of failure. Inaccuracies in setting capital requirements distort relative prices and may create allocative inefficiencies that divert financial resources from their most productive uses. During the 1980s, capital requirements may have created artificial incentives for banks to take off-balance sheet risk, and changes in capital requirements in the 1990s may have contributed to a credit crunch.

Estimating the Price of Default Risk

Abstract: The risk of default affects virtually every financial contract. Therefore the pricing of default risk has received much attention; both from traders, who have a strong interest in pricing transactions accurately, and from financial economists, who have much to learn from the way such risks are priced in markets. The standard theoretical paradigm for modeling credit risks is the contingent claims approach pioneered by Black and Scholes. Much of the literature follows Merton (1974) by explicitly linking the risk of a firm’s default to the variability in the firm’s asset value. Although this line of research has proven very useful in addressing the qualitatively important aspects of