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The reaction of consumer spending and debt to tax rebates – evidence from consumer credit data
(2008)
We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumer responded to the 2001 Federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that, on average, consumers initially saved some of the rebate, by increasing their credit card payments and thereby paying down debt. But soon afterwards their spending increased, counter to the canonical Permanent-Income model. Spending rose most for consumers who were initially most likely to be liquidity constrained, whereas debt declined most (so saving rose most) for unconstrained consumers. More generally, the results suggest that there can be important dynamics in consumers’ response to “lumpy” increases in income like tax rebates, working in part through balance sheet (liquidity) mechanisms.
After the pioneering German “Aktiengesetz” of 1965 and the Brazilian “Lei das Sociedades Anónimas” of 1976, Portugal has become the third country in the world to enact a specific regulation on groups of companies. The Code of Commercial Companies (“Código das Sociedades Comerciais”, abbreviately hereinafter CSC), enacted in 1986, contains a unitary set of rules regulating the relationships between companies, in general, and the groups of companies, in particular (arts. 481° to 508°-E CSC). With this set of rules, the Portuguese legislator has dealt with one of the major topics of modern Company Law. While this branch of law is traditionally conceived as the law of the individual company, modern economic reality is characterized by the massive emergence of large-scale enterprise networks, where parts of a whole business are allocated and insulated in several legally independent companies submitted to an unified economic direction. As Tom HADDEN put it: “Company lawyers still write and talk as if the single independent company, with its shareholders, directors and employees, was the norm. In reality, the individual company ceased to be the most significant form of organization in the 1920s and 1930s. The commercial world is now dominated both nationally and internationally by complex groups of companies”. This trend, which is now observable in any of the largest economies in the world, holds also true for small markets such as Portugal. Although Portuguese economy is still dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises, the organizational structure of the group has always been extremely common. During the 70s, it was estimated that the seven largest groups of companies owned about 50% of the equity capital of all domestic enterprises and were alone responsible for 3/4 of the internal national product. Such a trend has continued and even highlighted in the next decades, surviving to different political and economic scenarios: during the 80s, due to the process of state nationalization of these groups, an enormous public group with more than one thousand controlled companies has been created (“IPE - Instituto de Participações do Estado”); and during the 90s until today, thanks to the reprivatisation movement and the opening of our national market, we assisted to the re-emergence of some large private groups, composed of several hundred subsidiaries each, some of which are listed in foreign stock exchange markets (e.g., in the banking sector, “BCP – Banco Comercial Português”, in the industrial area, “SONAE”, and in the media and communication area, “Portugal-Telecom”).
Ensuring financial stability : financial structure and the impact of monetary policy on asset prices
(2008)
This paper studies the responses of residential property and equity prices, inflation and economic activity to monetary policy shocks in 17 countries, using data spanning 1986-2006. We estimate VARs for individual economies and panel VARs in which we distinguish between groups of countries on the basis of the characteristics of their financial systems. The results suggest that using monetary policy to offset asset price movements in order to guard against financial instability may have large effects on economic activity. Furthermore, while financial structure influences the impact of policy on asset prices, its importance appears limited. Keywords: asset prices, monetary policy, panel VAR. JEL Number: C23, E52
We study the responses of residential property and equity prices, inflation and economic activity to monetary policy shocks in 17 countries, using data spanning 1986-2006, using single-country VARs and panel VARs in which we distinguish between groups of countries depending on their financial systems. The effect of monetary policy on property prices is about three times as large as its impact on GDP. Using monetary policy to guard against financial instability by offsetting asset-price movements thus has sizable effects on economic activity. While the financial structure influences the impact of policy on asset prices, its importance appears limited.
Recently, the Bank of Japan outlined a “two perspectives” approach to the conduct of monetary policy that focuses on risks to price stability over different time horizons. Interpreting this as pertaining to different frequency bands, we use band spectrum regression to study the determination of inflation in Japan. We find that inflation is related to money growth and real output growth at low frequencies and the output gap at higher frequencies. Moreover, this relationship reflects Granger causality from money growth and the output gap to inflation in the relevant frequency bands. Keywords: spectral regression, frequency domain, Phillips curve, quantity theory. JEL Numbers: C22, E3, E5
On 27 and 28 September 2007, a commission formed on the initiative of the authors held its first meeting in Aarhus, Denmark to deliberate on its goal of drafting a "European Model Company Law Act" (EMCLA). This project, outlined in the following pages, aims neither to force a mandatory harmonization of national company law nor to create a further, European corporate form. The goal is rather to draft model rules for a corporation that national legislatures would be free to adopt in whole or in part. Thus, the project is thought as an alternative and supplement to the existing EU instruments for the convergence of company law. The present EU instruments, their prerequisites and limits will be discussed in more detail in Part II, below. Part III will examine the US experience with such "model acts" in the area of company law. Part IV will then conclude by discussing several topics concerning the content of an EMCLA, introducing the members of the EMCLA Working Group, and explaining the Group's preliminary working plan.
Research with Keynesian-style models has emphasized the importance of the output gap for policies aimed at controlling inflation while declaring monetary aggregates largely irrelevant. Critics, however, have argued that these models need to be modified to account for observed money growth and inflation trends, and that monetary trends may serve as a useful cross-check for monetary policy. We identify an important source of monetary trends in form of persistent central bank misperceptions regarding potential output. Simulations with historical output gap estimates indicate that such misperceptions may induce persistent errors in monetary policy and sustained trends in money growth and inflation. If interest rate prescriptions derived from Keynesian-style models are augmented with a cross-check against money-based estimates of trend inflation, inflation control is improved substantially.
Previous evidence suggests that less liquid stocks entail higher average returns. Using NYSE data, we present evidence that both the sensitivity of returns to liquidity and liquidity premia have significantly declined over the past four decades to levels that we cannot statistically distinguish from zero. Furthermore, the profitability of trading strategies based on buying illiquid stocks and selling illiquid stocks has declined over the past four decades, rendering such strategies virtually unprofitable. Our results are robust to several conventional liquidity measures related to volume. When using liquidity measure that is not related to volume, we find just weak evidence of a liquidity premium even in the early periods of our sample. The gradual introduction and proliferation of index funds and exchange traded funds is a possible explanation for these results.
We document significant and robust empirical relationships in cross-country panel data between government size or social expenditure on the one hand, and trade and financial development indicators on the other. Across countries, deeper economic integration is associated with more intense government redistribution, but more developed financial markets weaken that relationship. Over time, controlling for country-specific effects, public social expenditure appears to be eroded by globalization trends where financial market development can more easily substitute for it.
In this paper, we investigate how bank mergers affect bank revenues and present empirical evidence that mergers among banks have a substantial and persistent negative impact on merging banks’ revenues. We refer to merger related negative effects on banks’ revenues as dissynergies and suggest that they are a result of organizational diseconomies, the loss of customers and the temporary distraction of management from day-to-day operations by effecting the merger. For our analyses we draw on a proprietary data set with detailed financials of all 457 regional savings banks in Germany, which have been involved in 212 mergers between 1994 and 2006. We find that the negative impact of a merger on net operating revenues amounts to 3% of pro-forma consolidated banks’ operating profits and persists not only for the year of the merger but for up to four years post-merger. Only thereafter mergers exhibit a significantly superior performance compared to their respective pre-merger performance or the performance of their non-merging peers. The magnitude and persistence of merger related revenue dissynergies highlight their economic relevance. Previous research on post-merger performance mainly focuses on the effects from mergers on banks’ (cost) efficiency and profitability but fails to provide clear and consistent results. We are the first, to our knowledge, to examine the post-merger performance of banks’ net operating revenues and to empirically verify significant negative implications of mergers for banks’ net operating revenues. We propose that our finding of negative merger related effects on banks’ operating revenues is the reason why previous research fails to show merger related gains.