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The European Central Bank (ECB) has finalized its comprehensive assessment of the solvency of the largest banks in the euro area and on October 26 disclosed the results of this assessment. In the present paper, Acharya and Steffen compare the outcomes of the ECB's assessment to their own benchmark stress tests conducted for 39 publically listed financial institutions that are also included in the ECB's regulatory review. The authors identify a negative correlation between their benchmark estimates for capital shortfalls and the regulatory capital shortfall, but a positive correlation between their benchmark estimates for losses under stress both in the banking book and in the trading book. They conclude that the regulatory stress test outcomes are potentially heavily affected by discretion of national regulators in measuring what is capital, and especially the use of risk-weighted assets in calculating the prudential capital requirement.
This paper investigates the risk channel of monetary policy on the asset side of banks’ balance sheets. We use a factoraugmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model to show that aggregate lending standards of U.S. banks, such as their collateral requirements for firms, are significantly loosened in response to an unexpected decrease in the Federal Funds rate. Based on this evidence, we reformulate the costly state verification (CSV) contract to allow for an active financial intermediary, embed it in a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, and show that – consistent with our empirical findings – an expansionary monetary policy shock implies a temporary increase in bank lending relative to borrower collateral. In the model, this is accompanied by a higher default rate of borrowers.
In many cases, the dire situation of public finances calls into question the very soundness of sovereigns and prompts corrective actions with far-reaching consequences. In this context, European authorities responded with several measures on different fronts, for instance by passing the "Fiscal Compact", which entered into force on January 1, 2013. Of critical importance in this framework is the assessment of a country’s situation by way of statistical measures, in order to take corrective actions when called for according to the letter of the law. If these statistics are not correct, there is a risk of imposing draconian measures on countries that do not really need it.
The implications of delegating fiscal decision making power to sub-national governments has become an area of significant interest over the past two decades, in the expectation that these reforms will lead to better and more efficient provision of public goods and services. The move towards decentralization has, however, not been homogeneously implemented on the revenue and expenditure side: decentralization has materialized more substantially on the latter than on the former, creating "vertical fiscal imbalances". These imbalances measure the extent to which sub-national governments’ expenditures are financed through their own revenues. This mismatch between own revenues and expenditures may have negative consequences for public finances performance, for example by softening the budget constraint of sub-national governments. Using a large sample of countries covering a long time period from the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook, this paper is the first to examine the effects of vertical fiscal imbalances on fiscal performance through the accumulation of government debt. Our findings suggest that vertical fiscal imbalances are indeed relevant in explaining government debt accumulation, and call for a degree of caution when promoting fiscal decentralization.
We show that the correct experiment to evaluate the effects of a fiscal adjustment is the simulation of a multi year fiscal plan rather than of individual fiscal shocks. Simulation of fiscal plans adopted by 16 OECD countries over a 30-year period supports the hypothesis that the effects of consolidations depend on their design. Fiscal adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly, in terms of output losses, than tax-based ones and have especially low output costs when they consist of permanent rather than stop and go changes in taxes and spending. The difference between tax-based and spending-based adjustments appears not to be explained by accompanying policies, including monetary policy. It is mainly due to the different response of business confidence and private investment.
We develop a methodology to identify and rank “systemically important financial institutions” (SIFIs). Our approach is consistent with that followed by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) but, unlike the latter, it is free of judgment and it is based entirely on publicly available data, thus filling the gap between the official views of the regulator and those that market participants can form with their own information set. We apply the methodology to annual data on three samples of banks (global, EU and euro area) for the years 2007-2012. We examine the evolution of the SIFIs over time and document the shifs in the relative weights of the major geographic areas. We also discuss the implication of the 2013 update of the identification methodology proposed by the FSB.
Exit strategies
(2014)
We study alternative scenarios for exiting the post-crisis fiscal and monetary accommodation using a macromodel where banks choose their capital structure and are subject to runs. Under a Taylor rule, the post-crisis interest rate hits the zero lower bound (ZLB) and remains there for several years. In that condition, pre-announced and fast fiscal consolidations dominate - based on output and inflation performance and bank stability - alternative strategies incorporating various degrees of gradualism and surprise. We also examine an alternative monetary strategy in which the interest rate does not reach the ZLB; the benefits from fiscal consolidation persist, but are more nuanced.
We examine the impact of so-called "Crisis Contracts" on bank managers' risk-taking incentives and on the probability of banking crises. Under a Crisis Contract, managers are required to contribute a pre-specified share of their past earnings to finance public rescue funds when a crisis occurs. This can be viewed as a retroactive tax that is levied only when a crisis occurs and that leads to a form of collective liability for bank managers. We develop a game-theoretic model of a banking sector whose shareholders have limited liability, so that society at large will suffer losses if a crisis occurs. Without Crisis Contracts, the managers' and shareholders' interests are aligned, and managers take more than the socially optimal level of risk. We investigate how the introduction of Crisis Contracts changes the equilibrium level of risk-taking and the remuneration of bank managers. We establish conditions under which the introduction of Crisis Contracts will reduce the probability of a banking crisis and improve social welfare. We explore how Crisis Contracts and capital requirements can supplement each other and we show that the efficacy of Crisis Contracts is not undermined by attempts to hedge.
We study self- and cross-excitation of shocks in the Eurozone sovereign CDS market. We adopt a multivariate setting with credit default intensities driven by mutually exciting jump processes, to capture the salient features observed in the data, in particular, the clustering of high default probabilities both in time (over days) and in space (across countries). The feedback between jump events and the intensity of these jumps is the key element of the model. We derive closed-form formulae for CDS prices, and estimate the model by matching theoretical prices to their empirical counterparts. We find evidence of self-excitation and asymmetric cross-excitation. Using impulse-response analysis, we assess the impact of shocks and a potential policy intervention not just on a single country under scrutiny but also, through the effect on cross-excitation risk which generates systemic sovereign risk, on other interconnected countries.
Previous research has documented strong peer effects in risk taking, but little is known about how such social influences affect market outcomes. The consequences of social interactions are hard to isolate in financial data, and theoretically it is not clear whether peer effects should increase or decrease risk sharing. We design an experimental asset market with multiple risky assets and study how exogenous variation in real-time information about the portfolios of peer group members affects aggregate and individual risk taking. We find that peer information ameliorates under-diversification that occurs in a market without such information. One reason is that peer information increases risk aversion and induces a concern for relative income position that may reduce or amplify risk taking, depending on whether the context highlights the most or least successful trader. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, we show that social interactions may help to reduce earnings volatility in financial markets, and we discuss implications for institutional design.
We investigate the relationship between anchoring and the emergence of bubbles in experimental asset markets. We show that setting a visual anchor at the fundamental value (FV) in the first period only is sufficient to eliminate or to significantly reduce bubbles in laboratory asset markets. If no FV-anchor is set, bubble-crash patterns emerge. Our results indicate that bubbles in laboratory environments are primarily sparked in the first period. If prices are initiated around the FV, they stay close to the FV over the entire trading horizon. Our insights can be related to initial public offerings and the interaction between prices set on pre-opening markets and subsequent intra-day price dynamics.
This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard, private information and risk-averse agents. Two vertically differentiated firrms compete for agents by offering contracts with fixed and variable payments. Vertical differentiation between firms leads to endogenous, type-dependent exit options for agents. In contrast to screening models with perfect competition, we find that existence of equilibria does not depend on whether the least-cost separating allocation is interim efficient. Rather, vertical differentiation allows the inferior firm to offer (cross-)subsidizing fixed payments even above the interim efficient level. We further show that the efficiency of variable pay depends on the degree of competition for agents: For small degrees of competition, low-ability agents are under-incentivized and exert too little effort. For large degrees of competition, high-ability agents are over-incentivized and bear too much risk. For intermediate degrees of competition, however, contracts are second-best despite private information.
This paper studies the use of performance pricing (PP) provisions in debt contracts and compares accounting-based with rating-based pricing designs. We find that rating-based provisions are used by volatile-growth borrowers and allow for stronger spread increases over the credit period. Accounting-based provisions are employed by opaque-growth borrowers and stipulate stronger spread reductions. Further, a higher spread-increase potential in rating-based contracts lowers the spread at the loan’s inception and improves the borrower’s performance later on. In contrast, a higher spread-decrease potential in accounting-based contracts lowers the initial spread and raises the borrower’s leverage afterwards. The evidence indicates that rating-based contracts are indeed employed for different reasons than accounting-based contracts: the former to signal a borrower’s quality, the latter to mitigate investment inefficiencies.
Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about market expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because the presence of a time-varying risk premium often renders the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset. Even though the expectation in principle may be recovered by adjusting the futures price by the estimated risk premium, a common problem in applied work is that there are as many measures of market expectations as there are estimates of the risk premium. We propose a general solution to this problem that allows us to uniquely pin down the best possible estimate of the market expectation for any set of risk premium estimates. We illustrate this approach by solving the long-standing problem of how to recover the market expectation of the price of crude oil. We provide a new measure of oil price expectations that is considerably more accurate than the alternatives and more economically plausible. We discuss implications of our analysis for the estimation of economic models of energy-intensive durables, for the debate on speculation in oil markets, and for oil price forecasting.
In this paper, we investigate how the introduction of complex, model-based capital regulation affected credit risk of financial institutions. Model-based regulation was meant to enhance the stability of the financial sector by making capital charges more sensitive to risk. Exploiting the staggered introduction of the model-based approach in Germany and the richness of our loan-level data set, we show that (1) internal risk estimates employed for regulatory purposes systematically underpredict actual default rates by 0.5 to 1 percentage points; (2) both default rates and loss rates are higher for loans that were originated under the model-based approach, while corresponding risk-weights are significantly lower; and (3) interest rates are higher for loans originated under the model-based approach, suggesting that banks were aware of the higher risk associated with these loans and priced them accordingly. Further, we document that large banks benefited from the reform as they experienced a reduction in capital charges and consequently expanded their lending at the expense of smaller banks that did not introduce the model-based approach. Counter to the stated objectives, the introduction of complex regulation adversely affected the credit risk of financial institutions. Overall, our results highlight the pitfalls of complex regulation and suggest that simpler rules may increase the efficacy of financial regulation.
In this paper, we investigate how the introduction of complex, model-based capital regulation affected credit risk of financial institutions. Model-based regulation was meant to enhance the stability of the financial sector by making capital charges more sensitive to risk. Exploiting the staggered introduction of the model-based approach in Germany and the richness of our loan-level data set, we show that (1) internal risk estimates employed for regulatory purposes systematically underpredict actual default rates by 0.5 to 1 percentage points; (2) both default rates and loss rates are higher for loans that were originated under the model-based approach, while corresponding risk-weights are significantly lower; and (3) interest rates are higher for loans originated under the model-based approach, suggesting that banks were aware of the higher risk associated with these loans and priced them accordingly. Further, we document that large banks benefited from the reform as they experienced a reduction in capital charges and consequently expanded their lending at the expense of smaller banks that did not introduce the model-based approach. Counter to the stated objectives, the introduction of complex regulation adversely affected the credit risk of financial institutions. Overall, our results highlight the pitfalls of complex regulation and suggest that simpler rules may increase the efficacy of financial regulation.
In this paper we investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance versus a fixed wage unrelated to performance. We study detailed transaction information for more than 45,000 loans issued by 240 loan officers of a large commercial bank in Europe. We examine the three main activities that loan officers perform: monitoring, originating, and screening. We find that when the performance of their portfolio deteriorates, loan officers increase their effort to monitor existing borrowers, reduce loan origination, and approve a higher fraction of loan applications. These loans, however, are of above-average quality. Consistent with the theoretical literature on multitasking in incomplete contracts, we show that loan officers neglect activities that are not directly rewarded under the contract, but are in the interest of the bank. In addition, while the response by loan officers constitutes a rational response to a time allocation problem, their reaction to incentives appears myopic in other dimensions.
Low interest rates are becoming a threat to the stability of the life insurance industry, especially in countries such as Germany, where products with relatively high guaranteed returns sold in the past still represent a prominent share of the total portfolio. This contribution aims to assess and quantify the effects of the current low interest rate phase on the balance sheet of a representative German life insurer, given the current asset allocation and the outstanding liabilities. To do so, we generate a stochastic term structure of interest rates as well as stock market returns to simulate investment returns of a stylized life insurance business portfolio in a multi-period setting. Based on empirically calibrated parameters, we can observe the evolution of the life insurers' balance sheet over time with a special focus on their solvency situation. To account for different scenarios and in order to check the robustness of our findings, we calibrate different capital market settings and different initial situations of capital endowment. Our results suggest that a prolonged period of low interest rates would markedly affect the solvency situation of life insurers, leading to relatively high cumulative probability of default for less capitalized companies.
This paper investigates the determinants of value and growth investing in a large administrative panel of Swedish residents over the 1999-2007 period. We document strong relationships between a household’s portfolio tilt and the household’s financial and demographic characteristics. Value investors have higher financial and real estate wealth, lower leverage, lower income risk, lower human capital, and are more likely to be female than the average growth investor. Households actively migrate to value stocks over the life-cycle and, at higher frequencies, dynamically offset the passive variations in the value tilt induced by market movements. We verify that these results are not driven by cohort effects, financial sophistication, biases toward popular or professionally close stocks, or unobserved heterogeneity in preferences. We relate these household-level results to some of the leading explanations of the value premium.
We propose a framework for estimating network-driven time-varying systemic risk contributions that is applicable to a high-dimensional financial system. Tail risk dependencies and contributions are estimated based on a penalized two-stage fixed-effects quantile approach, which explicitly links bank interconnectedness to systemic risk contributions. The framework is applied to a system of 51 large European banks and 17 sovereigns through the period 2006 to 2013, utilizing both equity and CDS prices. We provide new evidence on how banking sector fragmentation and sovereign-bank linkages evolved over the European sovereign debt crisis and how it is reflected in network statistics and systemic risk measures. Illustrating the usefulness of the framework as a monitoring tool, we provide indication for the fragmentation of the European financial system having peaked and that recovery has started.
We propose a new estimator for the spot covariance matrix of a multi-dimensional continuous semi-martingale log asset price process which is subject to noise and non-synchronous observations. The estimator is constructed based on a local average of block-wise parametric spectral covariance estimates. The latter originate from a local method of moments (LMM) which recently has been introduced by Bibinger et al. (2014). We extend the LMM estimator to allow for autocorrelated noise and propose a method to adaptively infer the autocorrelations from the data. We prove the consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed spot covariance estimator. Based on extensive simulations we provide empirical guidance on the optimal implementation of the estimator and apply it to high-frequency data of a cross-section of NASDAQ blue chip stocks. Employing the estimator to estimate spot covariances, correlations and betas in normal but also extreme-event periods yields novel insights into intraday covariance and correlation dynamics. We show that intraday (co-)variations (i) follow underlying periodicity patterns, (ii) reveal substantial intraday variability associated with (co-)variation risk, (iii) are strongly serially correlated, and (iv) can increase strongly and nearly instantaneously if new information arrives.
Money is more than memory
(2014)
Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society. One key institution for impersonal exchange is money, which economic theory considers just a primitive arrangement for monitoring past conduct in society. If so, then a public record of past actions — or memory — supersedes the function performed by money. This intriguing theoretical postulate remains untested. In an experiment, we show that the suggested functional equality between money and memory does not translate into an empirical equivalence. Monetary systems perform a richer set of functions than just revealing past behaviors, which proves to be crucial in promoting large-scale cooperation.
We examine the relationship between household wealth and self-control. Although self-control has been linked to consumption and financial behavior, its measurement remains an open issue. We employ a definition of self-control failure that follows literature in psychology, suggesting that three factors can render self-control defective: lack of planning, lack of monitoring, and lack of commitment to pre-set plans. Our measure combines those three ingredients and can be computed using a standard representative survey. We find that self-control failure is strongly associated with different household net wealth measures and with self-assessed financial distress.
Panel Sample Selection ModelsThe empirical evidence currently available in the literature regarding the effects of a country's IMF program participation on its output growth is rather inconclusive. In this paper we propose and estimate a panel data sample selection model featuring state dependence. As in this model the output growth effects of program participation can be conditional on the realization of a state variable (conditional pooling), our framework may reconcile previous empirical evidence based on models without state-dependent effects. We find that the effects of IMF program participation on output growth vary systematically with an index reflecting a country's institutional record, and that output growth effects of program participation are significantly positive only if the program participation is coupled with sufficient improvement of the institutional record.
This paper makes a conceptual contribution to the effect of monetary policy on financial stability. We develop a microfounded network model with endogenous network formation to analyze the impact of central banks' monetary policy interventions on systemic risk. Banks choose their portfolio, including their borrowing and lending decisions on the interbank market, to maximize profit subject to regulatory constraints in an asset-liability framework. Systemic risk arises in the form of multiple bank defaults driven by common shock exposure on asset markets, direct contagion via the interbank market, and firesale spirals. The central bank injects or withdraws liquidity on the interbank markets to achieve its desired interest rate target. A tension arises between the beneficial effects of stabilized interest rates and increased loan volume and the detrimental effects of higher risk taking incentives. We find that central bank supply of liquidity quite generally increases systemic risk.
This paper makes a conceptual contribution to the effect of monetary policy on financial stability. We develop a microfounded network model with endogenous network formation to analyze the impact of central banks' monetary policy interventions on systemic risk. Banks choose their portfolio, including their borrowing and lending decisions on the interbank market, to maximize profit subject to regulatory constraints in an asset-liability framework. Systemic risk arises in the form of multiple bank defaults driven by common shock exposure on asset markets, direct contagion via the interbank market, and firesale spirals. The central bank injects or withdraws liquidity on the interbank markets to achieve its desired interest rate target. A tension arises between the beneficial effects of stabilized interest rates and increased loan volume and the detrimental effects of higher risk taking incentives. We find that central bank supply of liquidity quite generally increases systemic risk.
Does austerity pay off?
(2014)
Policy makers often implement austerity measures when the sustainability of public finances is in doubt and, hence, sovereign yield spreads are high. Is austerity successful in bringing about a reduction in yield spreads? We employ a new panel data set which contains sovereign yield spreads for 31 emerging and advanced economies and estimate the effects of cuts of government consumption on yield spreads and economic activity. The conditions under which austerity takes place are crucial. During times of fiscal stress, spreads rise in response to the spending cuts, at least in the short-run. In contrast, austerity pays off, if conditions are more benign.
Emotions-at-risk: an experimental investigation into emotions, option prices and risk perception
(2014)
This paper experimentally investigates how emotions are associated with option prices and risk perception. Using a binary lottery, we find evidence that the emotion ‘surprise’ plays a significant role in the negative correlation between lottery returns and estimates of the price of a put option. Our findings shed new light on various existing theories on emotions and affect. We find gratitude, admiration, and joy to be positively associated with risk perception, although the affect heuristic predicts a negative association. In contrast with the predictions of the appraisal tendency framework (ATF), we document a negative correlation between option price and surprise for lottery winners. Finally, the results show that the option price is not associated with risk perception as commonly used in psychology.
We analyze the implications of the structure of a network for asset prices in a general equilibrium model. Networks are represented via self- and mutually exciting jump processes, and the representative agent has Epstein-Zin preferences. Our approach provides a exible and tractable unifying foundation for asset pricing in networks. The model endogenously generates results in accordance with, e.g., the robust-yetfragile feature of financial networks shown in Acemoglu, Ozdaglar, and Tahbaz-Salehi (2014) and the positive centrality premium documented in Ahern (2013). We also show that models with simpler preference assumptions cannot generate all these findings simultaneously.
There has been a considerable debate about whether disaster models can rationalize the equity premium puzzle. This is because empirically disasters are not single extreme events, but long-lasting periods in which moderate negative consumption growth realizations cluster. Our paper proposes a novel way to explain this stylized fact. By allowing for consumption drops that can spark an economic crisis, we introduce a new economic channel that combines long-run and short-run risk. First, we document that our model can match consumption data of several countries. Second, it generates a large equity risk premium even if consumption drops are of moderate size.
Trust in policy makers fluctuates signi
cantly over the cycle and affects the transmission mechanism. Despite this it is absent from the literature. We build a monetary model embedding trust cycles; the latter emerge as an equilibrium phenomenon of a game-theoretic interaction between atomistic agents and the monetary authority. Trust affects agents' stochastic discount factors, namely the price of future risk, and through this it interacts with the monetary transmission mechanism. Using data from the Eurobarometer surveys, we analyze the link between trust and the transmission mechanism of macro and monetary shocks: Empirical results are in line with theoretical ones.
In this paper, we study the effect of proportional transaction costs on consumption-portfolio decisions and asset prices in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with a financial market that has a single-period bond and two risky stocks, one of which incurs the transaction cost. Our model has multiple investors with stochastic labor income, heterogeneous beliefs, and heterogeneous Epstein-Zin-Weil utility functions. The transaction cost gives rise to endogenous variations in liquidity. We show how equilibrium in this incomplete-markets economy can be characterized and solved for in a recursive fashion. We have three main findings. One, costs for trading a stock lead to a substantial reduction in the trading volume of that stock, but have only a small effect on the trading volume of the other stock and the bond. Two, even in the presence of stochastic labor income and heterogeneous beliefs, transaction costs have only a small effect on the consumption decisions of investors, and hence, on equity risk premia and the liquidity premium. Three, the effects of transaction costs on quantities such as the liquidity premium are overestimated in partial equilibrium relative to general equilibrium.
9.01 This chapter outlines the development of Contingent Convertible Securities (CoCos) for financial institutions from their theoretical origins to their current form under the European Union’s Fourth Capital Requirements Directive framework and its Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive and examines the effect the framework and the directive have had on their design and ability to fulfill the ends for which they were initially conceived. It examines this from two viewpoints: the policy goals CoCos are meant to achieve and the corporate law issues raised by the requirements of CRD IV. On the policy side we conclude that CRD IV and the RRD have significantly limited the amount of CoCos a financial institution is likely to issue, but expanded their possible forms by including write-down as well as convertible structures and narrowed the differences between them and pure regulatory bail-in structures, thus calling into question whether they are truly ‘going concern’ rather than ‘gone concern’ capital. On the company law side we conclude that a number of issues, in particular the limits on an authorization of management to issue CoCos and shares, the scope of the shareholders’ right of pre-emption, the concept of dilution and the distinction between contributions in cash and in kind merit closer attention than they appear to have received in the current discussion on CoCos.
We study the behavioral underpinnings of adopting cash versus electronic payments in retail transactions. A novel theoretical and experimental framework is developed to primarily assess the impact of sellers’ service fees and buyers’ rewards from using electronic payments. Buyers and sellers face a coordination problem, independently choosing a payment method before trading. In the experiment, sellers readily adopt electronic payments but buyers do not. Eliminating service fees or introducing rewards significantly boosts the adoption of electronic payments. Hence, buyers’ incentives play a pivotal role in the diffusion of electronic payments but monetary incentives cannot fully explain their adoption choices. Findings from this experiment complement empirical findings based on surveys and field data.
This paper solves a dynamic model of households' mortgage decisions incorporating labor income, house price, inflation, and interest rate risk. It uses a zero-profit condition for mortgage lenders to solve for equilibrium mortgage rates given borrower characteristics and optimal decisions. The model quantifies the effects of adjustable vs. fixed mortgage rates, loan-to-value ratios, and mortgage affordability measures on mortgage premia and default. Heterogeneity in borrowers' labor income risk is important for explaining the higher default rates on adjustable-rate mortgages during the recent US housing downturn, and the variation in mortgage premia with the level of interest rates.
The Great Recession confirmed a bedrock principle of modern consumption theory: It is impossible to explain aggregate spending behavior without knowledge of the underlying microeconomic distribution of circumstances and choices across households. National accounting frameworks therefore need to be augmented by “bottom up” measures that both (a) capture the microeconomic heterogeneity (in expenditures, income, assets, debt, and beliefs) in the population and (b) sum up to statistics that have a recognizable relationship to the aggregate totals that are already reasonably well measured.
This paper explains why the collection of panel (reinterview) data on a comprehensive measure of household expenditures is of great value both for measuring budget shares (the core mission of a Consumer Expenditure survey) and for the most important research and public policy uses to which CE data can be applied, including construction of spending-based measures of poverty and inequality and estimating the effects of fiscal policy.
Banks can deal with their liquidity risk by holding liquid assets (self-insurance), by participating in interbank markets (coinsurance), or by using flexible financing instruments, such as bank capital (risk-sharing). We use a simple model to show that undiversifiable liquidity risk, i.e. the liquidity risk that banks are unable to coinsure on interbank markets, represents an important risk factor affecting their capital structures. Banks facing higher undiversifiable liquidity risk hold more capital. We posit that empirically banks that are more exposed to undiversifiable liquidity risk are less active on interbank markets. Therefore, we test for the existence of a negative relationship between bank capital and interbank market activity and find support in a large sample of U.S. commercial banks.
We develop a model of an order-driven exchange competing for order flow with off-exchange trading mechanisms. Liquidity suppliers face a trade-off between benefits and costs of order exposure. If they display trading intentions, they attract additional trade demand. We show, in equilibrium, hiding trade intentions can induce mis-coordination between liquidity supply and demand, generate excess price fluctuations and harm price efficiency. Econometric high-frequency analysis based on unique data on hidden orders from NASDAQ reveals strong empirical support for these predictions: We find abnormal reactions in prices and order flow after periods of high excess-supply of hidden liquidity.
We study the dispersion of debt maturities across time, which we call "granularity of corporate debt,'' using a model in which a firm's inability to roll over expiring debt causes inefficiencies, such as costly asset sales or underinvestment. Since multiple small asset sales are less costly than a single large one, firms diversify debt rollovers across maturity dates. We construct granularity measures using data on corporate bond issuers for the 1991-2012 period and establish a number of novel findings. First, there is substantial variation in granularity in that we observe both very concentrated and highly dispersed maturity structures. Second, observed variation in granularity supports the model's predictions, i.e. maturities are more dispersed for larger and more mature firms, for firms with better investment oppo
We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counterfactual techniques to decompose observed differences across the Atlantic, within the US, and within Europe into those arising from differences in population characteristics and differences in economic environments. We then correlate the latter differences to country-level indicators. Ownership across the range of the assets considered tends to be more widespread among US households. We document that shortly prior to the current crisis, US households tended to invest larger amounts in stocks and smaller ones in homes, and to have larger mortgages in older age, even controlling for characteristics. This is consistent with the high prevalence of negative equity associated with the current crisis. More generally, we find that differences in household characteristics often play a small role, while differences in economic environments tend to explain most of the observed differences in ownership rates and in amounts held. The latter differences are much more pronounced among European countries than among US regions, suggesting further potential for harmonization of policies and institutions.
We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the Great Recession in the US. We find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios, and that a non-trivial fraction of respondents have lost their job. As a consequence of these shocks, many households reduced substantially their expenditures. We estimate that the marginal propensities to consume with respect to housing and financial wealth are 1 and 3.3 percentage points, respectively. In addition, those who became unemployed reduced spending by 10 percent. We also distinguish the effect of perceived transitory and permanent wealth shocks, splitting the sample between households who think that the stock market is likely to recover in a year’s time, and those who do not. In line with the predictions of standard models of intertemporal choice, we find that the latter group adjusted much more than the former its spending in response to financial wealth shocks.
Using data from the US Health and Retirement Study, we study the causal effect of increased health insurance coverage through Medicare and the associated reduction in health-related background risk on financial risk-taking. Given the onset of Medicare at age 65, we identify our effect of interest using a regression discontinuity approach. We find that getting Medicare coverage induces stockholding for those with at least some college education, but not for their less-educated counterparts. Hence, our results indicate that a reduction in background risk induces financial risk-taking in individuals for whom informational and pecuniary stock market participation costs are relatively low.
We develop a model of managerial compensation structure and asset risk choice. The model provides predictions about how inside debt features affect the relation between credit spreads and compensation components. First, inside debt reduces credit spreads only if it is unsecured. Second, inside debt exerts important indirect effects on the role of equity incentives: When inside debt is large and unsecured, equity incentives increase credit spreads; When inside debt is small or secured, this effect is weakened or reversed. We test our model on a sample of U.S. public firms with traded CDS contracts, finding evidence supportive of our predictions. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we also show that our results are robust to using an instrumental variable approach.
This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the relationship between austerity measures and economic growth. We propose a general equilibrium model where (i) agents have recursive preferences; (ii) economic growth is endogenously driven by investments in R&D; (iii) the government is committed to a zero-deficit policy and finances public expenditures by means of a combination of labor taxes and R&D taxes. We find that austerity measures that rely on reducing resources available to the R&D sector depress economic growth both in the short- and long-run. High debt EU members are currently implementing austerity measures based on higher taxes and/or lower investments in the R&D sector. This casts some doubts on the real ability of these countries to grow over the next years.
Banks' financial distress, lending supply and consumption expenditure : [version december 2013]
(2014)
The paper employs a unique identification strategy that links survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank level data in order to estimate the effects of bank financial distress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures. Specifically, we show that households whose banks were more exposed to funding shocks report significantly lower levels of non-mortgage liabilities compared to a matched sample of households. The reduced access to credit, however, does not result in lower levels of consumption. Instead, we show that households compensate by drawing down liquid assets. Only households without the ability to draw on liquid assets reduce consumption. The results are consistent with consumption smoothing in the face of a temporary adverse lending supply shock. The results contrast with recent evidence on the real effects of finance on firms' investment, where even temporary adverse credit supply shocks are associated with significant real effects.
Euro area data show a positive connection between sovereign and bank risk, which increases with banks’ and sovereign long run fragility. We build a macro model with banks subject to moral hazard and liquidity risk (sudden deposit withdrawals): banks invest in risky government bonds as a form of capital buffer against liquidity risk. The model can replicate the positive connection between sovereign and bank risk observed in the data. Central bank liquidity policy, through full allotment policy, is successful in stabilizing the spiraling feedback loops between bank and sovereign risk.
Austerity
(2014)
We shed light on the function, properties and optimal size of austerity using the standard sovereign model augmented to include incomplete information about credit risk. Austerity is defined as the shortfall of consumption from the level desired by a country and supported by its repayment capacity. We find that austerity serves as a tool for securing a more favorable loan package; that it is associated with over-investment even when investment does not create collateral; and that low risk borrowers may favor more to less severe austerity. These findings imply that the amount of fresh funds obtained by a sovereign is not a reliable measure of austerity suffered; and that austerity may actually be associated with higher growth. Our analysis accommodates costly signalling for gaining credibility and also assigns a novel role to spending multipliers in the determination of optimal austerity.
We study a model where some investors ("hedgers") are bad at information processing, while others ("speculators") have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from trading, hedgers do the same, depressing the asset price. Market transparency reinforces this mechanism, by making speculators' trades more visible to hedgers. As a consequence, issuers will oppose both the disclosure of fundamentals and trading transparency. Issuers may either under- or over-provide information compared to the socially efficient level if speculators have more bargaining power than hedgers, while they never under-provide it otherwise. When hedgers have low financial literacy, forbidding their access to the market may be socially efficient.
A greater firm-level transparency through enhanced disclosure provides more information regarding the risk situation of an insurer to its outside stakeholders such as stock investors and policyholders. The disclosure of the insurer's risktaking can result in negative influences on, for example, its stock performance and insurance demand when stock investors and policyholders are risk-averse. Insurers, which are concerned about the potential ex post adverse effects of risk-taking under greater transparency, are thus inclined to limit their risks ex ante. In other words, improved firm-level transparency can induce less risktaking incentive of insurers. This article investigates empirically the relationship between firm-level transparency and insurers' strategies on capitalization and risky investments. By exploring the disclosure levels and the risk behavior of 52 European stock insurance companies from 2005 to 2012, the results show that insurers tend to hold more equity capital under the anticipation of greater transparency, and this strategy on capital-holding is consistent for different types of insurance businesses. When considering the influence of improved transparency on the investment policy of insurers, the results are mixed for different types of insurers.
This article explores life insurance consumption in 31 European countries from 2003 to 2012 and aims to investigate the extent to which market transparency can affect life insurance demand. The cross-country evidence for the entire sample period shows that greater market transparency, which resolves asymmetric information, can generate a higher demand for life insurance. However, when considering the financial crisis period (2008-2012) separately, the results suggest a negative impact of enhanced market transparency on life insurance consumption. The mixed findings imply a trade-off between the reduction in adverse selection under greater market transparency and the possible negative effects on life insurance consumption during the crisis period due to more effective market discipline. Furthermore, this article studies the extent to which transparency can influence the reaction of life insurance demand to bad market outcomes: i.e., low solvency ratios or low profitability. The results indicate that the markets with bad outcomes generate higher life insurance demand under greater transparency compared to the markets that also experience bad outcomes but are less transparent.
In the United States, on April 1, 2014, the set of rules commonly known as the "Volcker Rule", prohibiting proprietary trading activities in banks, became effective. The implementation of this rule took more than three years, as “proprietary trading” is an inherently vague concept, overlapping strongly with genuinely economically useful activities such as market-making. As a result, the final Rule is a complex and lengthy combination of prohibitions and exemptions.
In January 2014, the European Commission put forward its proposal on banking structural reform. The proposal includes a Volcker-like provision, prohibiting large, systemically relevant financial institutions from engaging in proprietary trading or hedge fund-related business. This paper offers lessons to be learned from the implementation process for the Volcker rule in the US for the European regulatory process.
Two alternative hypotheses – referred to as opportunity- and stigma-based behavior – suggest that the magnitude of the link between unemployment and crime also depends on preexisting local crime levels. In order to analyze conjectured nonlinearities between both variables, we use quantile regressions applied to German district panel data. While both conventional OLS and quantile regressions confirm the positive link between unemployment and crime for property crimes, results for assault differ with respect to the method of estimation. Whereas conventional mean regressions do not show any significant effect (which would confirm the usual result found for violent crimes in the literature), quantile regression reveals that size and importance of the relationship are conditional on the crime rate. The partial effect is significantly positive for moderately low and median quantiles of local assault rates.
The recent financial crisis highlighted the limits of the "originate to distribute" model of banking, but its nexus with the macroeconomy remains unexplored. I build a business cycle model with banks engaging in credit risk transfer (CRT) under informational externalities. Markets for CRT provide liquidity insurance to banks, but the emergence of a pooling equilibrium can also impair the banks’ monitoring incentives. In normal times and in face of standard macro shocks the insurance benefits of CRT prevail and the business cycle is stabilized. In face of financial/liquidity shocks the extent of informational asymmetries is larger and the business cycle is amplified. The macro model with CRT can also reproduce well a number of macro and banking statistics over the period of rapid growth of this banks’ business model.
Financial innovation is, as usual, faster than regulation. New forms of speculation and intermediation are rapidly emerging. Largely as a result of the evaporation of trust in financial intermediation, an exponentially increasing role is being played by the so-called peer to peer intermediation. The most prominent example at the moment is Bitcoin.
If one expects that shocks in these markets could destabilize also traditional financial markets, then it will be necessary to extend regulatory measures also to these innovations.
This article discusses the recent proposal for debt restructuring in the euro zone by Pierre Paris and Charles Wyplosz. It argues that the plan cannot realize the promised debt relief without producing moral hazard. Ester Faia revisits the Redemption Fund proposed in November 2011 by the German Council of Economic Experts and argues that this plan, up to date, still remains the most promising path towards succesful debt restructuring in Europe.
Social impact bonds are a special type of bond whose purpose is to provide long term funds to projects with a social impact. Especially in the UK and in the US these bonds are increasingly being used to raise funds to finance government projects. Their return depends on the social improvements achieved. Especially in times of crisis, governments lack funds to prevent the social consequences of recessions. Faia argues that the European Union should develop an equivalent to the British Social Finance Ltd. to finance projects for social improvement.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, in which the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck,” money market funds (MMFs) have been the subject of ongoing policy debate. Many commentators view MMFs as a key contributor to the crisis because widespread redemption demands during the days following the Lehman bankruptcy contributed to a freeze in the credit markets. In response, MMFs were deemed a component of the nefarious shadow banking industry and targeted for regulatory reform. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) misguided 2014 reforms responded by potentially exacerbating MMF fragility while potentially crippling large segments of the MMF industry.
Determining the appropriate approach to MMF reform has been difficult. Banks regulators supported requiring MMFs to trade at a floating net asset value (NAV) rather than a stable $1 share price. By definition, a floating NAV prevents MMFs from breaking the buck but is unlikely to eliminate the risk of large redemptions in a time of crisis. Other reform proposals have similar shortcomings. More fundamentally, the SEC’s reforms may substantially reduce the utility of MMFs for many investors, which could, in turn, affect the availability of short term credit.
The shape of MMF reform has been influenced by a turf war among regulators as the SEC has battled with bank regulators both about the need for additional reforms and about the structure and timing of those reforms. Bank regulators have been influential in shaping the terms of the debate by using banking rhetoric to frame the narrative of MMF fragility. This rhetoric masks a critical difference between banks and MMFs – asset segregation. Unlike banks, MMF sponsors have assets and operations that are separate from the assets of the MMF itself. This difference has caused the SEC to mistake sponsor support as a weakness rather than a key stability-enhancing feature. As a result, the SEC mistakenly adopted reforms that burden sponsor support instead of encouraging it.
As this article explains, required sponsor support offers a novel and simple regulatory solution to MMF fragility. Accordingly this article proposes that the SEC require MMF sponsors explicitly to guarantee the $1 share price. Taking sponsor support out of the shadows embraces rather than ignores the advantage that MMFs offer over banks through asset partitioning. At the same time, sponsor support harnesses market discipline as a constraint against MMF risk-taking and moral hazard.
The Solvency II standard formula employs an approximate Value-at-Risk approach to define risk-based capital requirements. This paper investigates how the standard formula’s stock risk calibration influences the equity position and investment strategy of a shareholder-value-maximizing insurer with limited liability. The capital requirement for stock risks is determined by multiplying a regulation-defined stock risk parameter by the value of the insurer’s stock portfolio. Intuitively, a higher stock risk parameter should reduce risky investments as well as insolvency risk. However, we find that the default probability does not necessarily decrease when reducing the investment risk (by increasing the stock investment risk parameter). We also find that depending on the precise interaction between assets and liabilities, some insurers will invest conservatively, whereas others will prefer a very risky investment strategy, and a slight change of the stock risk parameter may lead from a conservative to a high risk asset allocation.
This essay reviews a cornerstone of the European Banking Union project, the resolution of systemically important banks. The focus is on the inherent conflict between a possible intervention by resolution authorities, conditional on a crisis situation, and effective prevention prior to a crisis. Moreover, the paper discusses the rules for bail-in debt and conversion rules for different layers of debt. Finally, some organizational requirements to achieve effective resolution results will be analyzed.
We use a unique data set from the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE) to study liquidity effects in the US structured product market. Our main contribution is the analysis of the relation between the accuracy in measuring liquidity and the potential degree of disclosure. Having access to all relevant trading information, we provide evidence that transaction cost measures that use dealer specific information such as trader identity and trade direction can be efficiently proxied by measures that use less detailed information. This finding is important for all market participants in the context of OTC markets, as it fosters our understanding of the information contained in transaction data. Thus, our results provide guidance for improving transparency while maintaining trader confidentiality. In addition, we analyze liquidity in the structured product market in general and show that securities that are mainly institutionally traded, guaranteed by a federal authority, or have low credit risk, tend to be more liquid.
Regulation of investor access to financial products is often based on product familiarity indicated by previous use. The underlying premise that lack of familiarity with a product class causes unwarranted participation is difficult to test. This paper uses household-level data from the ‘experiment’ of German reunification that (exogenously) offered to East Germans access to capitalist products (exogenously) unfamiliar to them. We compare the evolution of post-unification participation of former East and West Germans in financial products, controlling for relevant household characteristics. We vary familiarity differentials by considering (i) both unfamiliar ‘capitalist’ products (stocks, bonds, and consumer credit) and ones available in the East (savings accounts and life insurance); and (ii) cohorts with different exposure to capitalism. We find that East Germans participated immediately in unfamiliar risky securities, at rates comparable to West Germans of similar characteristics. They phased out disproportionate participation in previously familiar assets as familiarity with capitalist products grew. They were more likely to use consumer debt, partly to catch up with richer new peers. We find no signs of abrupt participation drops that could suggest mistakes or regret related to lack of familiarity.
In this study prepared for the ECON Committee of the European Parliament, Gellings, Jungbluth and Langenbucher present a graphic overview on core legislation in the area of economic and financial services in Europe. The mapping overview can serve as background for further deliberations. The study covers legislation in force, proposals and other relevant provisions in fourteen policy areas, i.e. banking, securities markets and investment firms, market infrastructure, insurance and occupational pensions, payment services, consumer protection in financial services, the European System of Financial Supervision, European Monetary Union, Euro bills and Coins and statistics, competition, taxation, commerce and company law, accounting and auditing.
We examine trust and trustworthiness of individuals with varying professional preferences and experiences. Our subjects study business and economics in Frankfurt, the financial center of Germany and continental Europe. In the trust game, subjects with a high interest in working in the financial industry return 25 percent less than subjects with a low interest. We find no evidence that the extent of professional experience in the financial industry has a negative impact on trustworthiness. We also do not find any evidence that the financial industry screens out less trustworthy individuals in the hiring process. In a prediction game that is strategically equivalent to the trust game, the amount sent by first-movers was significantly smaller when the second-mover indicated a high interest in working in finance. These results suggest that the financial industry attracts less trustworthy individuals, which may contribute to the current lack of trust in its employees.
This paper uses laboratory experiments to provide a systematic analysis of how di↵erent presentation formats a↵ect individuals’ investment decisions. The results indicate that the type of presentation as well as personal characteristics influence both, the consistency of decisions and the riskiness of investment choices. However, while personal characteristics have a larger impact on consistency, the chosen risk level is determined more by framing e↵ects. On the level of personal characteristics, participants’ decisions show that better financial literacy and a better understanding of the presentation format enhance consistency and thus decision quality. Moreover, female participants on average make less consistent decisions and tend to prefer less risky alternatives. On the level of framing dimensions, subjects choose riskier investments when possible outcomes are shown in absolute values rather than rates of return and when the loss potential is less obvious. In particular, reducing the emphasis on downside risk and upside potential simultaneously leads to a substantial increase in risk taking.
Securities transaction tax in France: impact on market quality and inter-market price coordination
(2014)
The general concept of a Securities Transaction Tax is controversial among academics and politicians. While theoretical research is quite advanced, the empirical guidance in a fragmented market context is still scarce. Possible negative effects for market liquidity and market efficiency are theoretically predicted, but have not been empirically tested yet. In light of the agreement of eleven European member states to implement an STT, this study aims to give a comprehensive overview of the effects of the STT, introduced in France in 2012, on liquidity demand, liquidity supply, volatility and inter-market information transmission. The results show that the STT has led to a decline in liquidity demand, has had a detrimental effect on liquidity supply and negatively influences the inter-market information transmission efficiency. However, no effect on volatility can be observed.
The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a promising approach to resolve prominent asset pricing puzzles. The simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, but caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a two-step estimation strategy that combines GMM and SMM, and for which we elicit informative macroeconomic and financial moment matches from the LRR model structure. In particular, we exploit the persistent serial correlation of consumption and dividend growth and the equilibrium conditions for market return and risk-free rate, as well as the model-implied predictability of the risk-free rate. We match analytical moments when possible and simulated moments when necessary and determine the crucial factors required for both identification and reasonable estimation precision. A simulation study – the first in the context of long-run risk modeling – delineates the pitfalls associated with SMM estimation of a non-linear dynamic asset pricing model. Our study provides a blueprint for successful estimation of the LRR model.
Consumption-based asset pricing with rare disaster risk : a simulated method of moments approach
(2014)
The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster explanation are scarce. We estimate a disaster-including consumption-based asset pricing model (CBM) using a combination of the simulated method of moments and bootstrapping. We consider several methodological alternatives that differ in the moment matches and the way to account for disasters in the simulated consumption growth and return series. Whichever specification is used, the estimated preference parameters are of an economically plausible size, and the estimation precision is much higher than in previous studies that use the canonical CBM. Our results thus provide empirical support for the rare disaster hypothesis, and help reconcile the nexus between real economy and financial markets implied by the consumption-based asset pricing paradigm.
On average, "young" people underestimate whereas "old" people overestimate their chances to survive into the future. We adopt a Bayesian learning model of ambiguous survival beliefs which replicates these patterns. The model is embedded within a non-expected utility model of life-cycle consumption and saving. Our analysis shows that agents with ambiguous survival beliefs (i) save less than originally planned, (ii) exhibit undersaving at younger ages, and (iii) hold larger amounts of assets in old age than their rational expectations counterparts who correctly assess their survival probabilities. Our ambiguity-driven model therefore simultaneously accounts for three important empirical findings on household saving behavior.
Before the 2007–09 crisis, standard risk measurement methods substantially underestimated the threat to the financial system. One reason was that these methods didn’t account for how closely commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies were linked. As financial conditions worsened in one type of institution, the effects spread to others. A new method that more accurately accounts for these spillover effects suggests that hedge funds may have been central in generating systemic risk during the crisis.
We explore the sources of household balance sheet adjustment following the collapse of the housing market in 2006. First, we use microdata from the Federal Reserve Board’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey to document that banks cumulatively tightened consumer lending standards more in counties that experienced a house price boom in the mid-2000s than in non-boom counties. We then use the idea that renters, unlike homeowners, did not experience an adverse wealth shock when the housing market collapsed to examine the relative importance of two explanations for the observed deleveraging and the sluggish pickup in consumption after 2008. First, households may have optimally adjusted to lower wealth by reducing their demand for debt and implicitly, their demand for consumption. Alternatively, banks may have been more reluctant to lend in areas with pronounced real estate declines. Our evidence is consistent with the second explanation. Renters with low risk scores, compared to homeowners in the same markets, reduced their levels of nonmortgage debt and credit card debt more in counties where house prices fell more. The contrast suggests that the observed reductions in aggregate borrowing were more driven by cutbacks in the provision of credit than by a demand-based response to lower housing wealth.
One of the leading methods of estimating the structural parameters of DSGE models is the VAR-based impulse response matching estimator. The existing asympotic theory for this estimator does not cover situations in which the number of impulse response parameters exceeds the number of VAR model parameters. Situations in which this order condition is violated arise routinely in applied work. We establish the consistency of the impulse response matching estimator in this situation, we derive its asymptotic distribution, and we show how this distribution can be approximated by bootstrap methods. Our methods of inference remain asymptotically valid when the order condition is satisfied, regardless of whether the usual rank condition for the application of the delta method holds. Our analysis sheds new light on the choice of the weighting matrix and covers both weakly and strongly identified DSGE model parameters. We also show that under our assumptions special care is needed to ensure the asymptotic validity of Bayesian methods of inference. A simulation study suggests that the frequentist and Bayesian point and interval estimators we propose are reasonably accurate in finite samples. We also show that using these methods may affect the substantive conclusions in empirical work.
We study the effects of the recent economic crisis on firms׳ bidding behavior and markups in sealed bid auctions. Using data from Austrian construction procurements, we estimate bidders׳ construction costs within a private value auction model. We find that markups of all bids submitted decrease by 1.5 percentage points in the recent economic crisis, markups of winning bids decrease by 3.3 percentage points. We also find that without the government stimulus package this decrease would have been larger. These two pieces of evidence point to pro-cyclical markups.
This is a chapter for a forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press 2014) (eds. Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne). It provides an overview of EU financial regulation from the first banking directive up until its most recent developments in the aftermath of the financial crisis, focusing on the multiple layers of multi-level governance and their characteristic conceptual difficulties. Therefore the paper discusses the need to accommodate cross-border capital flows following from the EU internal market and the resulting regulatory strategies. This includes a brief overview of the principle of home country control and the ensuing Financial Services Action Plan. Dealing with the accommodation of cross-border capital flows and their regulation necessarily require an orchestration of the underlying supervisory structures, which is therefore also discussed. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-09 an additional aspect of necessary orchestration has emerged, that is the need to control systemic risk. Specific attention is paid to microprudential supervision by the newly established European Supervisory Authorities and macroprudential supervision in the European Banking Union, the latter’s underlying drivers and the accompanying Single Supervisory Mechanism, including the SSM’s institutional framework as well as the consideration of its rationales and the Single Resolution Mechanism closely linked to it.
We study the effect of weakening creditor rights on distress risk premia via a bankruptcy reform that shifts bargaining power in financial distress toward shareholders. We find that the reform reduces risk factor loadings and returns of distressed stocks. The effect is stronger for firms with lower firm-level shareholder bargaining power. An increase in credit spreads of riskier relative to safer firms, in particular for firms with lower firm-level shareholder bargaining power, confirms a shift in bargaining power from bondholders to shareholders. Out-of-sample tests reveal that a reversal of the reform's effects leads to a reversal of factor loadings and returns.
We study the effect of weakening creditor rights on distress risk premia via a bankruptcy reform that shifts bargaining power in financial distress toward shareholders. We find that the reform reduces risk factor loadings and returns of distressed stocks. The effect is stronger for firms with lower firm-level shareholder bargaining power. An increase in credit spreads of riskier relative to safer firms, in particular for firms with lower firm-level shareholder bargaining power, confirms a shift in bargaining power from bondholders to shareholders. Out-of-sample tests reveal that a reversal of the reform's effects leads to a reversal of factor loadings and returns.
Neither Northerners are willing to invest in a South they perceive as unwilling to undertake necessary structural reforms, nor are Southerners willing to invest in their countries in a climate of austerity and policy uncertainty imposed, in their view, by the North. This results in a vicious cycle of mistrust. However, as the author argues, big steps in the direction of reforms may provide just enough thrust to break out of this vicious cycle, propel southern countries – and especially Greece – to a much happier future, and promote the chances for more balanced economic performance in North and South.
The Eurozone fiscal crisis has created pressure for institutional harmonization, but skeptics argue that cultural predispositions can prevent convergence in behavior. Our paper derives a robust cultural classification of European countries and utilizes unique data on natives and immigrants to Sweden. Classification based on genetic distance or on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions fails to identify a single ‘southern’ culture but points to a ‘northern’ culture. Significant differences in financial behavior are found across cultural groups, controlling for household characteristics. Financial behavior tends to converge with longer exposure to common institutions, but is slowed down by longer exposure to original institutions.
We develop a model of managerial compensation structure and asset risk choice. The model provides predictions about how inside debt features affect the relation between credit spreads and compensation components. First, inside debt reduces credit spreads only if it is unsecured. Second, inside debt exerts important indirect effects on the role of equity incentives: When inside debt is large and unsecured, equity incentives increase credit spreads; When inside debt is small or secured, this effect is weakened or reversed. We test our model on a sample of U.S. public firms with traded CDS contracts, finding evidence supportive of our predictions. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we also show that our results are robust to using an instrumental variable approach.
When markets are incomplete, social security can partially insure against idiosyncratic and aggregate risks. We incorporate both risks into an analytically tractable model with two overlapping generations and demonstrate that they interact over the life-cycle. The interactions appear even though the two risks are orthogonal and they amplify the welfare consequences of introducing social security. On the one hand, the interactions increase the welfare benefits from insurance. On the other hand, they can in- or decrease the welfare costs from crowding out of capital formation. This ambiguous effect on crowding out means that the net effect of these two channels is positive, hence the interactions of risks increase the total welfare benefits of social security.
Research results confirm the existence of various forms of international tax planning by multinational firms. Prominent examples for firms employing tax avoidance strategies are Amazon, Google and Starbucks. Increasing availability of administrative data for Europe has enabled researchers to study behavioural responses of European multinationals to taxation. The present paper summarizes what we can learn from these recent studies in general and about German multinationals in particular.
Does the rotten child spoil his companion? : spatial peer effects among children in rural India
(2014)
This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh, India. Our peer group definition takes the form of networks, whose structure allows us to identify endogenous peer effects and contextual effects separately. We exploit variation over time to avoid confounding correlated with social effects. Our results suggest that spatial peer and neighborhood effects are strongly positively associated with a child's cognitive skill formation. Further, we explore the effect of peer groups in helping to provide insurance against the negative impact of idiosyncratic shocks to child learning. We find that the data reject full risk-sharing, but cannot rule out the existence of partial risk-sharing on behalf of peers. We show that peer effects are robust to different specifications of peer interactions and investigate the sensitivity of our estimates to potential misspecification of the network structure using Monte Carlo experiments.
This paper studies the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. We develop a quantitative model of college choice with uncertain graduation. Departing from much of the literature, we model in detail how students progress through college. This allows us to parameterize the model using transcript data. College transcripts reveal substantial and persistent heterogeneity in students’ credit accumulation rates that are strongly related to graduation outcomes. From this data, the model infers a large ability gap between college graduates and high school graduates that accounts for 54% of the college lifetime earnings premium.
This paper analyzes how on-the-job search (OJS) by an agent impacts the moral hazard problem in a repeated principal-agent relationship. OJS is found to constitute a source of agency costs because efficient search incentives require that the agent receives all gains from trade. Further, the optimal incentive contract with OJS matches the design of empirically observed compensation contracts more accurately than models that ignore OJS. In particular, the optimal contract entails excessive performance pay plus efficiency wages. Efficiency wages reduce the opportunity costs of work effort and hence serve as a complement to bonuses. Thus, the model offers a novel explanation for the use of efficiency wages. When allowing for renegotiation, the model generates wage and turnover dynamics that are consistent with empirical evidence. I argue that the model contributes to explaining the concomitant rise in the use of performance pay and in competition for high-skill workers during the last three decades.
How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing labor income taxes? In this paper we provide a quantitative answer to this question, and study the importance of the progressivity of the tax schedule for the ability of the government to generate tax revenues. We develop a rich overlapping generations model featuring an explicit family structure, extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, endogenous accumulation of labor market experience as well as standard intertemporal consumption-savings choices in the presence of uninsurable idiosyncratic labor productivity risk. We calibrate the model to US macro, micro and tax data and characterize the labor income tax Laffer curve under the current choice of the progressivity of the labor income tax code as well as when varying progressivity. We find that more progressive labor income taxes significantly reduce tax revenues. For the US, converting to a flat tax code raises the peak of the Laffer curve by 6%, whereas converting to a tax system with progressivity similar to Denmark would lower the peak by 7%. We also show that, relative to a representative agent economy tax revenues are less sensitive to the progressivity of the tax code in our economy. This finding is due to the fact that labor supply of two earner households is less elastic (along the intensive margin) and the endogenous accumulation of labor market experience makes labor supply of females less elastic (around the extensive margin) to changes in tax progressivity.
US data and new stockholding data from fifteen European countries and China exhibit a common pattern: stockholding shares increase in household income and wealth. Yet, there is a multitude of numbers to match through models. Using a single utility function across households (parsimony), we suggest a strategy for fitting stockholding numbers, while replicating that saving rates increase in wealth, too. The key is introducing subsistence consumption to an Epstein-Zin-Weil utility function, creating endogenous risk-aversion differences across rich and poor. A closed-form solution for the model with insurable labor-income risk serves as calibration guide for numerical simulations with uninsurable labor-income risk.
Social Security rules that determine retirement, spousal, and survivor benefits, along with benefit adjustments according to the age at which these are claimed, open up a complex set of financial options for household decisions. These rules influence optimal household asset allocation, insurance, and work decisions, subject to life cycle demographic shocks, such as marriage, divorce, and children. Our model-based research generates a wealth profile and a low and stable equity fraction consistent with empirical evidence. We confirm predictions that wives will claim retirement benefits earlier than husbands, while life insurance is mainly purchased by younger men. Our policy simulations imply that eliminating survivor benefits would sharply reduce claiming differences by sex while dramatically increasing men’s life insurance purchases.
Can a tightening of the bank resolution regime lead to more prudent bank behavior? This policy paper reviews arguments for why this could be the case and presents evidence linking changes in bank resolution regimes with bank risk-taking. The authors find that the tightening of bank resolution in the U.S. (i.e., the introduction of the Orderly Liquidation Authority) significantly decreased overall risk-taking of the most affected banks. This effect, however, does not hold for the largest and most systemically important banks – too-big-to-fail seems to be unresolved. Building on the insights from the U.S. experience, the authors derive principles for effective resolution regimes and evaluate the emerging resolution regime for Europe.
n a contribution prepared for the Athens Symposium on “Banking Union, Monetary Policy and Economic Growth”, Otmar Issing describes forward guidance by central banks as the culmination of the idea of guiding expectations by pure communication. In practice, he argues, forward guidance has proved a misguided idea. What is presented as state of the art monetary policy is an example of pretence of knowledge. Forward guidance tries to give the impression of a kind of rule-based monetary policy. De facto, however, it is an overambitious discretionary approach which, to be successful, would need much more (or rather better) information than is currently available. In Issing's view, communication must be clear and honest about the limits of monetary policy in a world of uncertainty.
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis that started in 2007, policymakers were forced to respond quickly and forcefully to a recession caused not by short-term factors, but rather by an over-accumulation of debt by sovereigns, banks, and households: a so-called “balance sheet recession.” Though the nature of the crisis was understood relatively early on, policy prescriptions for how to deal with its consequences have continued to diverge. This paper gives a short overview of the prescriptions, the remaining challenges and key lessons for monetary policy.
On November 8, 2013, several members of the British House of Lords’ Subcommittee A conducted a hearing at the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany, on “Genuine Economic and Monetary Union and its Implications for the UK”. Professors Otmar Issing and Jan Pieter Krahnen were called as expert witnesses.
The testimony began with a general discussion on the elements considered necessary for a functioning internal market. Do economic union and monetary union require a fiscal union or even a political union, beyond the elements of the banking union currently being prepared? In this context, also the critique of the German current account surplus and the international expectations that Germany stimulate internal demand to support growth in crisis countries, were discussed.
With regard to the monetary union, the members of the subcommittee asked for an assessment of how European nations and the banking industry would have fared in the banking crisis that followed the Lehman collapse, had there not been a common currency. Given the important role that the ECB has played in the course of the crisis management, the members further asked for an evaluation of the OMT-program of the ECB and also if the monetary union is in need of common debt instruments, in order to provide the ECB with the possibility of buying EU liabilities, comparable to the Fed buying US Treasury bonds. Finally, the dual role of the ECB for monetary policy and banking supervision was an issue touched on by several questions.
After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified and state-contingent framework. We achieve identification of causal effects with new propensity-score based methods for time series data. Using this novel approach, we show that austerity is always a drag on growth, and especially so in depressed economies: a one percent of GDP fiscal consolidation translates into 4 percent lower real GDP after five years when implemented in the slump rather than the boom. We illustrate our findings with a counterfactual evaluation of the impact of the U.K. government’s shift to austerity policies in 2010 on subsequent growth.
This paper empirically tests the role of bank lending tightening on non-financial corporate (NFC) bond issuance in the eurozone. By utilizing a unique data set provided by the ECB Bank Lending Survey, we capture the "pure" credit supply effect on corporate external financing. We find that tightened credit standards positively affect the NFC bond issuance: A 1pp increase in banks reporting considerable tightening on loans leads to around a 7% increase in firms' bond issuance in the eurozone. Focusing on a spectrum of aspects contributing to bank credit tightening, we document that banks' balance sheet constraints, as well as the perception of risk lead to significantly higher NFC bond issuance. In addition, we show that stricter lending conditions, such as wider margins, higher collateral requirements and covenants significantly increase NFC bond issuance volumes too. Furthermore, the impact of bank credit tightening on firms' bond issuance is particularly observable in core eurozone countries and not in peripheral countries. This is partially due to the underdeveloped of debt capital markets in the peripheral countries.
This article examines how the shale oil revolution has shaped the evolution of U.S. crude oil and gasoline prices. It puts the evolution of shale oil production into historical perspective, highlights uncertainties about future shale oil production, and cautions against the view that the U.S. may become the next Saudi Arabia. It then reviews the role of the ban on U.S. crude oil exports, of capacity constraints in refining and transporting crude oil, of differences in the quality of conventional and unconventional crude oil, and of the recent regional fragmentation of the global market for crude oil for the determination of U.S. oil and gasoline prices. It discusses the reasons for the persistent wedge between U.S. crude oil prices and global crude oil prices in recent years and for the fact that domestic oil prices below global levels need not translate to lower U.S. gasoline prices. It explains why the shale oil revolution unlike the shale gas revolution is unlikely to stimulate a boom in oil-intensive manufacturing industries. It also explores the implications of shale oil production for the transmission of oil price shocks to the U.S. economy.
Although oil price shocks have long been viewed as one of the leading candidates for explaining U.S. recessions, surprisingly little is known about the extent to which oil price shocks explain recessions. We provide the first formal analysis of this question with special attention to the possible role of net oil price increases in amplifying the transmission of oil price shocks. We quantify the conditional recessionary effect of oil price shocks in the net oil price increase model for all episodes of net oil price increases since the mid-1970s. Compared to the linear model, the cumulative effect of oil price shocks over course of the next two years is much larger in the net oil price increase model. For example, oil price shocks explain a 3% cumulative reduction in U.S. real GDP in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a 5% cumulative reduction during the financial crisis. An obvious concern is that some of these estimates are an artifact of net oil price increases being correlated with other variables that explain recessions. We show that the explanatory power of oil price shocks largely persists even after augmenting the nonlinear model with a measure of credit supply conditions, of the monetary policy stance and of consumer confidence. There is evidence, however, that the conditional fit of the net oil price increase model is worse on average than the fit of the corresponding linear model, suggesting much smaller cumulative effects of oil price shocks for these episodes of at most 1%.
In this paper we argue that very high marginal labor income tax rates are an effective tool for social insurance even when households have preferences with high labor supply elasticity, make dynamic savings decisions, and policies have general equilibrium effects. To make this point we construct a large scale Overlapping Generations Model with uninsurable labor productivity risk, show that it has a wealth distribution that matches the data well, and then use it to characterize fiscal policies that achieve a desired degree of redistribution in society. We find that marginal tax rates on the top 1% of the earnings distribution of close to 90% are optimal. We document that this result is robust to plausible variation in the labor supply elasticity and holds regardless of whether social welfare is measured at the steady state only or includes transitional generations.
We characterize optimal redistribution in a dynastic family model with human capital. We show how a government can improve the trade-off between equality and incentives by changing the amount of observable human capital. We provide an intuitive decomposition for the wedge between human-capital investment in the laissez faire and the social optimum. This wedge differs from the wedge for bequests because human capital carries risk: its returns depend on the non-diversi
able risk of children's ability. Thus, human capital investment is encouraged more than bequests in the social optimum if human capital is a bad hedge for consumption risk.
This paper explores consequences of consumer education on prices and welfare in retail financial markets when some consumers are naive about shrouded add-on prices and firms try to exploit it. Allowing for different information and pricing strategies we show that education is unlikely to push firms to disclose prices towards all consumers, which would be socially efficient. Instead, price discrimination emerges as a new equilibrium. Further, due to a feedback on prices, education that is good for consumers who become sophisticated may be bad for consumers who stay naive and even for the group of all consumers as a whole
Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate deep economy-wide preference parameters, which are useful for policy evaluation. The underlying demand-aggregation properties that this approach requires, should be easy to empirically disprove: since household-consumption choices differ for households with more members, aggregation can be rejected if appropriate data violate an affine equation regarding how much individuals benefit from within-household sharing of goods. We develop a survey method that tests the validity of this equation, without utility-estimation restrictions via models. Surprisingly, in six countries, this equation is not rejected, lending support to using consumer-demand aggregates.
Advertising arbitrage
(2014)
Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. We show that in order to minimize the risk and the cost of arbitrage an investor who identifies several mispriced assets optimally advertises only one of them, and overweights it in his portfolio; a risk-neutral arbitrageur invests only in this asset. The choice of the asset to be advertised depends not only on mispricing but also on its "advertisability" and accuracy of future news about it. When several arbitrageurs identify the same arbitrage opportunities, their decisions are strategic complements: they invest in the same asset and advertise it. Then, multiple equilibria may arise, some of which inefficient: arbitrageurs may correct small mispricings while failing to eliminate large ones. Finally, prices react more strongly to the ads of arbitrageurs with a successful track record, and reputation-building induces high-skill arbitrageurs to advertise more than others.