This paper provides evidence that the 2007–2009 housing bust in the United States precipitated a “credit crunch” for small businesses. To remove demand‐driven correlations, we rely on within‐city comparisons. We ask whether banks whose mortgage portfolios were more heavily weighted in harder‐hit cities cut back lending to a greater extent in all cities where they make small business loans, relative to other banks in those cities. The evidence is consistent with a credit crunch. Large banks reacted with heavier cuts, but consistent evidence is also found among smaller banks. Quantitatively, the detected contribution to the overall decline in lending from the crunch appears modest.

What market features of Credit Defaults Swaps (CDS) exacerbate counterparty risk? To answer this, we formulate a model which elucidates key differences between these and traditional insurance contracts. First, we allow for insurer insolvency with asymmetric information as to its probability.We find that stable insurers become less stable because they are forced to compete on price. When insurer type is known, increased competition among insurers can create instability for the same reason. Second, we allow the insured party to have heterogeneous motivations for purchasing CDS. For example, some may own the underlying asset and purchase CDS for risk management, while others buy these contracts purely for trading purposes. We show that traders will choose to contract with less stable insurers, resulting in higher counterparty risk in this market relative to that of traditional insurance; however, a regulatory policy that removes traders can, perversely, cause market counterparty risk to increase. Finally, we introduce a Central Counterparty (CCP) and show that requiring CDS contracts to be negotiated through CCPs can push stable insurers out of the market, mitigating the benefit of risk pooling.

In traditional economic models of insurance, sellers typically employ a non-linear pricing scheme to elicit type information from buyers. In financial insurance contracts, such a policy is not possible since contracts are non-exclusive. In addition, counterparty risk in financial contracts can be particularly problematic relative to traditional insurance. Accordingly, we relax the standard assumption of contract exclusivity and allow the insured to contract with many sellers, some of which may be unstable. In contrast to the traditional insurance model, we show that separation of risk types among insured parties can be achieved with linear pricing when there is aggregate counterparty risk. This result is shown to collapse when contracts are cleared through a central counterparty, suggesting that such an arrangement can create opacity.

This paper provides evidence that the recent housing bust in the United States precipitated a "credit crunch" for small businesses. Using detailed records of individual bank's lending history, we develop a measure of their exposure to the housing bust. This measure is then used to estimate the impact of a drop in house prices on the supply of loans. Specifically, we compare the lending behavior of banks in the same metropolitan areas, and find that those that originated more of their mortgage loans in depressed housing markets elsewhere reduced local small business lending more substantially. We find the effect to be greater for banks with more than $10bn in assets. Overall, our estimates suggest that the fall in house prices accounted for one third of the decline in small business loans originated by major banks from 2007 to 2009.

What market features of Credit Defaults Swaps (CDS) exacerbate counterparty risk? To answer this, we formulate a model which elucidates key differences between these and traditional insurance contracts. First, we allow for insurer insolvency with asymmetric information as to its probability. We find that stable insurers become less stable because they are forced to compete on price. When insurer type is known, increased competition among insurers can create instability for the same reason. Second, we allow the insured party to have heterogeneous motivations for purchasing CDS. For example, some may own the underlying asset and purchase CDS for risk management, while others buy these contracts purely for trading purposes. We show that traders will choose to contract with less stable insurers, resulting in higher counterparty risk in this market relative to that of traditional insurance; however, a regulatory policy that removes traders can, perversely, cause market counterparty risk to increase. Finally, we introduce a Central Counterparty (CCP) and show that requiring CDS contracts to be negotiated through CCPs can push stable insurers out of the market, mitigating the benefit of risk pooling.