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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of preferential regulatory treatment on banks' demand for government bonds. Using unique transaction-level data, our analysis suggests that preferential treatment in microprudential liquidity and capital regulation significantly increases banks' demand for government bonds. Liquidity and capital regulation also seem to incentivize banks to substitute other bonds with government bonds. We also find evidence that this 'regulatory effect' leads banks to reduce lending to the real economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature has examined factors leading to filing for personal bankruptcy, but little is known about household borrowing after bankruptcy. This paper augments the existing literature with a comprehensive analysis of postbankruptcy borrowing using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that filers generally have more limited access to unsecured credit, but borrow more secured debt after bankruptcy, than comparable households that have never filed for bankruptcy. Filers also pay higher interest rates on all types of debt. In addition, as more time passes after filing, credit access and borrowing costs improve. However, filers remain more prone than comparable nonfilers to experience financial distress, accumulate less wealth, and use expensive credit sources like payday loans, even more than 10 years after filing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper checks whether the coefficient estimates of a famous dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model are robust to macroeconomic data revisions. The effects of revisions are captured by rerunning the estimation on a real-time data set compiled using the latest time series available each quarter from 1997 through 2015. Results show that estimates of the structural parameters are generally robust to changes in the data that have occurred over the past 20 years. By comparison, standard error estimates are more sensitive to revisions. The latter implies that judgments about the statistical significance of certain parameters depend on which data vintage is used for estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does survey data contain useful information for estimating macroeconomic models? We address this question by using survey data of inflation expectations to estimate the New Keynesian model by Smets and Wouters () and compare its performance under rational expectations and adaptive learning. The survey information serves as an additional moment restriction and helps us to determine the learning agents' forecasting model for inflation. Adaptive learning fares similarly to rational expectations in fitting macro data, but clearly outperforms rational expectations in fitting macro and survey data simultaneously. In other words, survey data contain additional information that is not present in the macro data alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To study the presence of a risk-taking channel in the U.S., we build a comprehensive data set from the syndicated corporate loan market and measure monetary policy using different measures, most notably Taylor (1993) and Romer and Romer (2004) residuals. We identify a negative relation between monetary policy rates and bank risk-taking, especially in the run up to the 2007 financial crisis. However, this effect is purely supply-side driven only when using Taylor residuals and an ex ante measure of bank risk-taking. Our results highlight the sensitivity of the potency of the risk-taking channel to the measures of monetary policy innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using readily available indicators of the profitability, price, and availability of credit-the term spread, junk-bond spread, and banks' 'willingness to lend' as reported by the Federal Reserve-we show that it is possible to significantly improve on the real-time output and employment predictions of forecasting professionals at the medium-run horizons that are most relevant to policymakers and private decision makers. Key to this improvement is a flexible state-space model of data revisions. The willingness-to-lend variable is the best real-time predictor of GDP growth. For forecasting job growth, all three credit indicators prove helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the nexus between small and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs') use of venture capital and bank financing relationships using a unique data set with detailed information on SME finance in Italy, Germany, and the UK. The empirical regularities we uncover show that that entrepreneurial firms substitute venture capital for multiple banking relationships. This substitution effect is primarily driven by expertise substitution, and there is also some suggestive, yet inconclusive, indication in the data that SMEs turn to providers of venture capital to avoid rent-extracting behavior by the firm's main bank. Our results do not support the view that firms obtain venture capital in instances when bank financing is difficult to obtain. Instead, venture capital funds are used if bank funding is deemed not appropriate, and firms do seem to be aware of which type of financing is more appropriate for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses real-time data to show that inflation and either the output gap or unemployment, variables which normally enter central banks' Taylor rules, can provide evidence of out-of-sample predictability for the U.S. dollar/euro exchange rate from 1999 to 2007. The strongest evidence is found for specifications that constrain the coefficients on inflation and real economic activity to be the same for the United States and the Euro Area, do not incorporate interest rate smoothing, and do not include the real exchange rate in the forecasting regression. Evidence of predictability is found with both one-quarter-ahead and longer-horizon forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]