Stress Tests, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation

This paper shows that post-crisis stress tests have negative effects on entrepreneurship and innovation at young firms. Exploiting unique data on business-related home equity loans in HMDA, I show that stress tested banks strongly cut small business loans secured by home equity, an important source of financing for entrepreneurs. Lower credit supply leads to a relative decline in entrepreneurship in counties with higher exposure to stress tested banks. The decline is stronger in sectors with a higher share of young firms using home equity financing, i.e., in which the reduction in credit hits hardest. More-exposed counties also see a decline in young firms' patent applications as well as labor productivity, reflecting young firms' disproportionate contribution to growth.

Feature Selection to Optimize Credit Banking Risk Evaluation Decisions for the Example of Home Equity Loans

Measuring credit risk is essential for financial institutions because there is a high risk level associated with incorrect credit decisions. The Basel II agreement recommended the use of advanced credit scoring methods in order to improve the efficiency of capital allocation. The latest Basel agreement (Basel III) states that the requirements for reserves based on risk have increased. Financial institutions currently have exhaustive datasets regarding their operations; this is a problem that can be addressed by applying a good feature selection method combined with big data techniques for data management. A comparative study of selection techniques is conducted in this work to find the selector that reduces the mean square error and requires the least execution time.

Does Collateral Value Affect Asset Prices? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Texas

Does the ability to pledge an asset as collateral, after purchase, affect its price? This paper identifies the impact of collateral service flows on house prices, exploiting a plausibly exogenous constitutional amendment in Texas that legalized home equity loans in 1998. The law change increased Texas house prices 4%; this is price-based evidence that households are credit-constrained and value home equity loans to facilitate consumption smoothing. Prices rose more in locations with inelastic supply, higher prelaw house prices, higher income, and lower unemployment. These estimates reveal that richer households value the option to pledge their home as collateral more strongly.