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Rising temperatures, falling ratings: the effect of climate change on sovereign creditworthiness
(2021)
How will a changing climate impact the creditworthiness of governments over the very long term? Financial markets need credible, digestible information on how climate change translates into material risks. To bridge the gap between climate science and real-world financial indicators, the authors simulate the effect of climate change on sovereign credit ratings for 108 countries, creating the world’s first climate-adjusted sovereign credit rating. The study offers a first methodological approach to extend the long-term rating to an ultra-long-term reality, aiming at long-term investors, but also regulators and rating agencies.
Central banks normally accept debt of their own governments as collateral in liquidity operations without reservations. This gives rise to a valuable liquidity premium that reduces the cost of government finance. The ECB is an interesting exception in this respect. It relies on external assessments of the creditworthiness of its member states, such as credit ratings, to determine eligibility and the haircut it imposes on such debt. The authors show how such features in a central bank’s collateral framework can give rise to cliff effects and multiple equilibria in bond yields and increase the vulnerability of governments to external shocks. This can potentially induce sovereign debt crises and defaults that would not otherwise arise.
We raise some critical points against a naïve interpretation of “green finance” products and strategies. These critical insights are the background against which we take a closer look at instruments and policies that might allow green finance to become more impactful. In particular, we focus on the role of a taxonomy and investor activism. We also describe the interaction of government policies with green finance practice – an aspect, which has been mostly neglected in policy debates but needs to be taken into account. Finally, the special case of green government bonds is discussed.
We show that financial advisors recommend more costly products to female clients, based on minutes from about 27,000 real-world advisory meetings and client portfolio data. Funds recommended to women have higher expense ratios controlling for risk, and women less often receive rebates on upfront fees for any given fund. We develop a model relating these findings to client stereotyping, and empirically verify an additional prediction: Women (but not men) with higher financial aptitude reject recommendations more frequently. Women state a preference for delegating financial decisions, but appear unaware of associated higher costs. Evidence of stereotyping is stronger for male advisors.
The pricing of an ambiguous asset, whose cash flow stream is uncertain, may be affected by three factors: the belief regarding the realization likelihood of cash flows, the subjective attitude towards risk, and the attitude towards ambiguity. While previous literature looks at the total price discount under ambiguity, this paper investigates with laboratory experiments how much effect each factor can induce. We apply both non-parametric and parametric methods to cleanly separate the belief effects, the risk premiums, and the ambiguity premiums from each other. Both methods lead to similar results: Overall, subjects have substantial ambiguity aversion, and ambiguity premiums account for the largest price deviation component when the degree of ambiguity is high. As information accumulates, ambiguity premiums decrease. We also find that beliefs do influence prices under ambiguity. This is not because beliefs are biased towards either good or bad scenarios per se, but because subjects display sticky belief updating as new information becomes available. The clear separation performed in this paper between belief and attitude also enables a more accurate estimation of the parameter of ambiguity aversion compared to previous studies, since the effect of beliefs is partialled out. Overall, we find empirically that both factors, belief and attitude towards ambiguity, are important factors in pricing under ambiguity.
The salience of ESG ratings for stock pricing: evidence from (potentially) confused investors
(2021)
We exploit the a modification to Sustainanlytics’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating methodology, which is subsequently adopted by Morningstar, to study whether ESG ratings are salient for stock pricing. We show that the inversion of the rating scale but not new information leads some investors to make incorrect assessments about the meaning of the change in ESG ratings. They buy (sell) stocks they misconceive as ESG upgraded (downgraded) even when the opposite is true. This trading behavior exerts transitory price pressure on affected stocks. Our paper highlights the importance of ESG ratings for investors and consequently for asset prices.
We conducted a large-scale household survey in November 2020 to study how altering the time frame of a message (temporal framing) regarding an imminent positive income shock affects consumption plans. The income shock derives from the abolishment of the German solidarity surcharge on personal income taxes, effective in January 2021. We randomize across survey participants whether their extra disposable income is presented in Euros per month, Euros per year, or Euros per ten year-period. Our main findings are as follows: In General, we find our respondents’ intended Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) is 28.2%. Across all three treatments, the MPC is a positive function of age and being female while it is a negative function of the income increase’s size, self- control, and being unemployed. Temporal framing effects are statistically and economically highly significant as we find the monthly treatment groups’ average MPC 5.6 and 8.7 percentage points higher compared to the yearly and 10-yearly treatment groups. We will be able to analyze the real consumption behavior of households throughout 2021 based on re-surveying the participants as well as by using transaction-based bank data.
Nach der Bundestagswahl am 26. September 2021 wird sich die künftige Bundesregierung mit einer Reihe drängender Herausforderungen befassen müssen. Aus Sicht des Leibniz-Instituts für Finanzmarktforschung SAFE haben die folgenden, miteinander verbundenen Einzelpunkte dabei Priorität:
1. Schaffung eines ordnungspolitischen Pakets zur Sicherung globaler Gemeinschaftsgüter, wie etwa des Klimas
2. Initiative zum Aufbau notwendiger Datensätze und Standards für eine zielgenaue Nachhaltigkeitsgestaltung an den Finanzmärkten
3. regulatorischer Fahrplan zur Erfassung, Ermöglichung und Einhegung einer digitalen Transformation des Finanzsystems
4. Vollendung der Bankenunion, insbesondere durch einen „europäischen Schlussstein“: der Schaffung einer einheitlichen Aufsicht und Letztabsicherung
5. Durchbrechung des „Doom-Loop“ zwischen Staaten und Banken in Europa, insbesondere durch Begrenzung des Umfangs, in dem eigene Staatsanleihen im Portfolio von Banken liegen dürfen
6. ernsthafter Versuch zur Schaffung eines einheitlichen und integren europäischen Kapitalmarkts mit einer Aufsicht nach US-Vorbild
7. Banken- und Kapitalmarktunion als wesentliche Bausteine für eine grundlegende Reform der Altersversorgung mit mehr Teilhabe aller Bürger:innen an der Leistungsentwicklung der Volkswirtschaft
This policy white paper shows, using data on European Commission (EC) lobby meetings, that financial institutions and finance trade associations have substantial access to EC policymakers. While lobbying could transfer policy-relevant information and expertise to policymakers, it could also result in the capture of policymakers by the industry, which could harm consumers and taxpayers. How could policymakers prevent regulatory capture, but retain the benefits of the sector expertise in policy decisions? Awareness of regulatory capture by policymakers is one of the most important remedies. This paper provides an overview of the origins of the regulatory capture theory and recent academic evidence. The paper shows that regulatory capture could emerge in a variety of institutions and policy areas but is not ubiquitous and depends on the incentives of policymakers and the policy environment. Subsequently, the paper discusses various measures to prevent regulatory capture, such as more transparency, diverse expert groups, and cooling-off periods.
With the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, banks face a challenging environment. They will need to address disappointing results and adverse balance sheet restatements, the intensity of which depends on the evolution of the euro area economies. At the same time, vulnerable banks reinforce real economy deficiencies. The contribution of this paper is to provide a comparative assessment of the various policy responses to address a looming banking crisis. Such a crisis will fully materialize when non-performing assets drag down banks simultaneously, raising the specter of a full-blown systemic crisis. The policy responses available range from forbearance, recapitalization (with public or private resources), asset separation (bad banks, at national or EU level), to debt conversion schemes. We evaluate these responses according to a set of five criteria that define the efficacy of each. These responses are not mutually exclusive, in practice, as they have never been. They may also go hand in hand with other restructuring initiatives, including potential consolidation in the banking sector. Although we do not make a specific recommendation, we provide a framework for policymakers to guide them in their decision making.
We study risk taking in a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China - before, during the COVID-19 crisis, and after the country reopened. Subjects in our sample traveled for semester break in January, generating variation in exposure to the virus and quarantine in Wuhan. Higher exposure leads subjects to reduce planned risk taking, risky investments, and optimism. Our findings help unify existing studies by showing that aggregate shocks affect general preferences for risk and economic expectations, while heterogeneity in experience further affect risk taking through beliefs about individuals’ own outcomes such as luck and sense of control.
JEL Classification: G50, G51, G11, D14, G41
In this paper we put forward a legal argument in favour of granting more independence to BaFin, the German securities market supervisor. Following the Wirecard scandal, our reform proposal aims at strengthening the impartiality and credibility of the German supervisor and, as a consequence, at restoring capital market integrity. In order to achieve the necessary degree of democratic legitimacy for giving BaFin more independence and disassociating it from the Ministry of Finance, the paper sets out the necessary steps for a legal reform that creates accountability of BaFin vis-à-vis the Parliament, subjecting it to strict disclosure and reporting obligations.
Managed portfolios that exploit positive first-order autocorrelation in monthly excess returns of equity factor portfolios produce large alphas and gains in Sharpe ratios. We document this finding for factor portfolios formed on the broad market, size, value, momentum, investment, prof- itability, and volatility. The value-added induced by factor management via short-term momentum is a robust empirical phenomenon that survives transaction costs and carries over to multi-factor portfolios. The novel strategy established in this work compares favorably to well-known timing strategies that employ e.g. factor volatility or factor valuation. For the majority of factors, our strategies appear successful especially in recessions and times of crisis.
Climate change is one of the highest-ranking issues on the political and social agenda. Vulnerabilities of the world ecosystem laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential damage for the human and business life made the need for urgent action clear once again. Corporations are one of the main actors that will play a major role in the decarbonisation of the economy. They need to put forward a net zero strategy and targets, transitioning to net-zero by 2050. Yet, an important but rather overlooked stakeholder group in the sustainability debates can pose a significant stumbling block in this transition: employees. Although climate action has huge benefits by ameliorating adverse environmental events and is expected to have overall positive impact on employment, net zero transition in companies, especially in certain sectors and regions, will cause substantial adverse employment effects for the workforce. This has the potential to slow down or even derail the necessary climate action in companies. In this regard, just transition is a promising concept, which calls for a swift and decisive climate action in corporations while taking account of and mitigating adverse effects for their workforce. If well implemented, it can accelerate net zero transition in companies. This potential clash of environmental (E) and social (S) aspects of ESG agenda, materialised in the companies’ net zero transition, and its potential remedy, just transition, have important implications for corporate governance and finance, especially for directors’ duties & executive remuneration, sustainability disclosures, institutional investors’ engagement and green finance.
This paper examines how the transmission of government portfolio risk arising from maturity operations depends on the stance of monetary/fiscal policy. Accounting for risk premia in the fiscal theory allows the government portfolio to affect the expected inflation, even in a frictionless economy. The effects of maturity rebalancing on expected inflation in the fiscal theory directly depend on the conditional nominal term premium, giving rise to an optimal debt maturity policy that is state dependent. In a calibrated macro-finance model, we demonstrate that maturity operations have sizable effects on expected inflation and output through our novel risk transmission mechanism.
This paper sets up an experimental asset market in the laboratory to investigate the effects of ambiguity on price formation and trading behavior in financial markets. The obtained trading data is used to analyze the effect of ambiguity on various market outcomes (the price level, volatility, trading activity, market liquidity, and the degree of speculative trading) and to test the quality of popular empirical market-based measures for the degree of ambiguity. We find that ambiguity decreases market prices and trading activity; ambiguity leads to lower market liquidity through wider bid-ask spreads; and ambiguity leads to less speculative trading. We also find that popular market-based measures of ambiguity used in the empirical literature do not seem to correctly capture the true degree of ambiguity.
Analysing causality among oil prices and, in general, among financial and economic variables is of central relevance in applied economics studies. The recent contribution of Lu et al. (2014) proposes a novel test for causality— the DCC-MGARCH Hong test. We show that the critical values of the test statistic must be evaluated through simulations, thereby challenging the evidence in papers adopting the DCC-MGARCH Hong test. We also note that rolling Hong tests represent a more viable solution in the presence of short-lived causality periods.
We show that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a surge in the elasticity of non-financial corporate to sovereign credit default swaps in core EU countries, characterized by strong fiscal capacity. For peripheral countries with lower budgetary slackness, the pandemic had essentially no impact on such elasticity. This evidence is consistent with the disaster-induced repricing of government support, which we model through a rare-disaster asset pricing framework with bailout guarantees and defaultable public debt. The model implies that risk-adjusted guarantees in the core were 2.6 times those in the periphery, suggesting that fiscal capacity buffers provide relief to firms’ financing costs.
This paper studies the consumption response to an increase in the domestic value of foreign currency household debt during a large depreciation. We use detailed consumption survey data that follows households for four years around Hungary’s 2008 currency crisis. We find that, relative to similar local currency debtors, foreign currency debtors reduce consumption approximately one-for-one with increased debt service, suggesting a role for liquidity constraints. We document a variety of margins of adjustment to the shock. Foreign currency debtors reduce both the quantity and quality of expenditures, consistent with nonhomothetic preferences and “flight from quality.” We find no effect on overall household labor supply, consistent with a weak wealth effect on labor supply. However, a small subset of households adjusts labor supply toward foreign income streams. Affected households also boost home pro- duction, suggesting a shift in consumption from money-intensive to time-intensive goods.
We analyze the impact of decreases in available lending resources on quantitative and qualita- tive dimensions of firms’ patenting activities. We thereby make use of the European Banking Authority?s capital exercise to carve out the causal effect of bank lending on firm innovation. In order to do so we combine various datasets to derive information on firms’ financials, their patenting behaviors, as well as their relationships with their lenders. Building on this self- generated dataset, we provide support for the “less finance, less innovation” view. At the same time, we show that lower available financial resources for firms lead to improvement in the qualitative dimensions of their patents. Hence, we carve out a “less finance, less but better innovation” pattern.
We define a sentiment indicator that exploits two contrasting views of return predictability, and study its properties. The indicator, which is based on option prices, valuation ratios and interest rates, was unusually high during the late 1990s, reflecting dividend growth expectations that in our view were unreasonably optimistic. We interpret it as helping to reveal irrational beliefs about fundamentals. We show that our measure is a leading indicator of detrended volume, and of various other measures associated with financial fragility. We also make two methodological contributions. First, we derive a new valuation-ratio decomposition that is related to the Campbell and Shiller (1988) loglinearization, but which resembles the traditional Gordon growth model more closely and has certain other advantages for our purposes. Second, we introduce a volatility index that provides a lower bound on the market's expected log return.
This paper explores the interplay of feature-based explainable AI (XAI) tech- niques, information processing, and human beliefs. Using a novel experimental protocol, we study the impact of providing users with explanations about how an AI system weighs inputted information to produce individual predictions (LIME) on users’ weighting of information and beliefs about the task-relevance of information. On the one hand, we find that feature-based explanations cause users to alter their mental weighting of available information according to observed explanations. On the other hand, explanations lead to asymmetric belief adjustments that we inter- pret as a manifestation of the confirmation bias. Trust in the prediction accuracy plays an important moderating role for XAI-enabled belief adjustments. Our results show that feature-based XAI does not only superficially influence decisions but re- ally change internal cognitive processes, bearing the potential to manipulate human beliefs and reinforce stereotypes. Hence, the current regulatory efforts that aim at enhancing algorithmic transparency may benefit from going hand in hand with measures ensuring the exclusion of sensitive personal information in XAI systems. Overall, our findings put assertions that XAI is the silver bullet solving all of AI systems’ (black box) problems into perspective.
Many equity markets combine continuous trading and call auctions. Oftentimes designated market makers (DMMs) supply additional liquidity. Whereas prior research has focused on their role in continuous trading, we provide a detailed analysis of their activity in call auctions. Using data from Germany’s Xetra system, we find that DMMs are most active when they can provide the greatest benefits to the market, i.e., in relatively illiquid stocks and at times of elevated volatility. Their trades stabilize prices and they trade profitably.
Incentives, self-selection, and coordination of motivated agents for the production of social goods
(2021)
We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of a social good with positive effort complementarities (social effort). Agents differ in their motivation to exert social effort. Our model predicts that lowering incentives for selfish effort in one team increases social good production by selectively attracting and coordinating motivated agents. We test this prediction in a lab experiment allowing us to cleanly separate the selection effect from other effects of low incentives. Results show that social good production more than doubles in the low- incentive team, but only if self-selection is possible. Our analysis highlights the important role of incentives in the matching of motivated agents engaged in social good production.
We investigate the differential effect of the COVID-19 shock to the stock market shock on the share prices of firms with different levels of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) scores. Thereby, we analyse whether and to what extent better ESG ratings provided insurance for investors in the stocks of those firms during this shock. We focus our analysis on the European market in which ESG investment plays a particularly important role. Using a broad sample of listed firms we provide mixed evidence. On the one hand, we show that immediately after the start of the shock firms with a higher ESG score outperformed their peers. On the other hand, this effect faded less than six weeks later. Given the quick recovery of the market our finding supports the idea that ESG stocks provide limited insurance in severe crises.
Market risks account for an integral part of life insurers' risk profiles. This paper explores the market risk sensitivities of insurers in two large life insurance markets, namely the U.S. and Europe. Based on panel regression models and daily market data from 2012 to 2018, we analyze the reaction of insurers' stock returns to changes in interest rates and CDS spreads of sovereign counterparties. We find that the influence of interest rate movements on stock returns is more than 50% larger for U.S. than for European life insurers. Falling interest rates reduce stock returns in particular for less solvent firms, insurers with a high share of life insurance reserves and unit-linked insurers. Moreover, life insurers' sensitivity to interest rate changes is seven times larger than their sensitivity towards CDS spreads. Only European insurers significantly suffer from rising CDS spreads, whereas U.S. insurers are immunized against increasing sovereign default probabilities.
We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium effects of private precautionary saving on factor prices and taxes capital unless the weight on future generations in the social welfare function is sufficiently high. For logarithmic utility a complete analytical solution of the Ramsey problem exhibits an optimal aggregate saving rate that is independent of income risk, whereas the optimal time-invariant tax on capital implementing this saving rate is increasing in income risk. The optimal saving rate is constant along the transition and its sign depends on the magnitude of risk and on the Pareto weight of future generations. If the Ramsey tax rate that maximizes steady state utility is positive, then implementing this tax rate permanently induces a Pareto-improving transition even if the initial equilibrium capital stock is below the golden rule.
This paper documents that the bond investments of insurance companies transmit shocks from insurance markets to the real economy. Liquidity windfalls from household insurance purchases increase insurers’ demand for corporate bonds. Exploiting the fact that insurers persistently invest in a small subset of firms for identification, I show that these increases in bond demand raise bond prices and lower firms’ funding costs. In response, firms issue more bonds, especially when their bond underwriters are well connected with investors. Firms use the proceeds to raise investment rather than equity payouts. The results emphasize the significant impact of investor demand on firms’ financing and investment activities.
Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental time and resource investments in the production of child human capital at different stages in the children’s development process. We quantitatively characterize the long-term consequences from a Covid-19 induced loss of schooling, and find average losses in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of the affected children of close to 1%, as well as welfare losses equivalent to about 0.6% of permanent consumption. Due to self-productivity in the human capital production function, skill attainment at a younger stage of the life cycle raises skill attainment at later stages, and thus younger children are hurt more by the school closures than older children. We find that parental reactions reduce the negative impact of the school closures, but do not fully offset it. The negative impact of the crisis on children’s welfare is especially severe for those with parents with low educational attainment and low assets. The school closures themselves are primarily responsible for the negative impact of the Covid-19 shock on the long-run welfare of the children, with the pandemic-induced income shock to parents playing a secondary role.
We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to cyclical shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis. We estimate our income process by GMM for US household data. We find countercyclical variance and procyclical skewness of persistent shocks. All shock distributions are highly leptokurtic. The tax and transfer system reduces dispersion and left-skewness. We then show that in a standard incomplete-markets life-cycle model, first, higherorder risk has sizable welfare implications, which depend on risk attitudes; second, it matters quantitatively for the welfare costs of cyclical idiosyncratic risk; third, it has non-trivial implications for self-insurance against shocks.
Historical evidence like the global financial crisis from 2007-09 highlights that sector concentration risk can play an important role for the solvency of insurers. However, current microprudential frameworks like the US RBC framework and Solvency II consider only name concentration risk explicitly in their solvency capital requirements for asset concentration risk and neglect sector concentration risk. We show by means of US insurers’ asset holdings from 2009 to 2018 that substantial sectoral asset concentrations exist in the financial, public and real estate sector, and find indicative evidence for a sectoral search for yield behavior. Based on a theoretical solvency capital allocation scheme, we demonstrate that the current regulatory approaches can lead to inappropriate and biased levels of solvency capital for asset concentration risk, and should be revised. Our findings have also important implications on the ongoing discussion of asset concentration risk in the context of macroprudential insurance regulation.
We consider an additively time-separable life-cycle model for the family of power period utility functions u such that u0(c) = c−θ for resistance to inter-temporal substitution of θ > 0. The utility maximization problem over life-time consumption is dynamically inconsistent for almost all specifications of effective discount factors. Pollak (1968) shows that the savings behavior of a sophisticated agent and her naive counterpart is always identical for a logarithmic utility function (i.e., for θ = 1). As an extension of Pollak’s result we show that the sophisticated agent saves a greater (smaller) fraction of her wealth in every period than her naive counterpart whenever θ > 1 (θ < 1) irrespective of the specification of discount factors. We further show that this finding extends to an environment with risky returns and dynamically inconsistent Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences.
Using a structural life-cycle model and data on school visits from Safegraph and school closures from Burbio, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. Our data suggests that secondary schools were closed for in-person learning for longer periods than elementary schools (implying that younger children experienced less school closures than older children), and that private schools experienced shorter closures than public schools, and schools in poorer U.S. counties experienced shorter school closures. We then extend the structural life cycle model of private and public schooling investments studied in Fuchs-Schündeln, Krueger, Ludwig, and Popova (2021) to include the choice of parents whether to send their children to private schools, empirically discipline it with data on parental investments from the PSID, and then feed into the model the school closure measures from our empirical analysis to quantify the long-run consequences of the Covid-19 school closures on the cohorts of children currently in school. Future earnings- and welfare losses are largest for children that started public secondary schools at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. Comparing children from the topto children from the bottom quartile of the income distribution, welfare losses are ca. 0.8 percentage points larger for the poorer children if school closures were unrelated to income. Accounting for the longer school closures in richer counties reduces this gap by about 1/3. A policy intervention that extends schools by 3 months (6 weeks in the next two summers) generates significant welfare gains for the children and raises future tax revenues approximately sufficient to pay for the cost of this schooling expansion.
Life insurance convexity
(2021)
Life insurers massively sell savings contracts with surrender options which allow policyholders to withdraw a guaranteed amount before maturity. These options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Using data on German life insurers, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in interest rates raises surrender rates by 17 basis points. We quantify the resulting liquidity risk in a calibrated model of surrender decisions and insurance cash flows. Simulations predict that surrender options can force insurers to sell up to 3% of their assets, depressing asset prices by 90 basis points. The effect is amplified by the duration of insurers' investments, and its impact on the term structure of interest rates depends on life insurers' investment strategy.
Tail-correlation matrices are an important tool for aggregating risk measurements across risk categories, asset classes and/or business segments. This paper demonstrates that traditional tail-correlation matrices—which are conventionally assumed to have ones on the diagonal—can lead to substantial biases of the aggregate risk measurement’s sensitivities with respect to risk exposures. Due to these biases, decision-makers receive an odd view of the effects of portfolio changes and may be unable to identify the optimal portfolio from a risk-return perspective. To overcome these issues, we introduce the “sensitivity-implied tail-correlation matrix”. The proposed tail-correlation matrix allows for a simple deterministic risk aggregation approach which reasonably approximates the true aggregate risk measurement according to the complete multivariate risk distribution. Numerical examples demonstrate that our approach is a better basis for portfolio optimization than the Value-at-Risk implied tail-correlation matrix, especially if the calibration portfolio (or current portfolio) deviates from the optimal portfolio.
I measure the effects of workers’ mobility across regions of different productivity through the lens of a search and matching model with heterogeneous workers and firms estimated with administrative data. In an application to Italy, I find that reallocation of workers to the most productive region boosts productivity at the country level but amplifies differentials across regions. Employment rates decline as migrants foster job competition, and inequality between workers doubles in less productive areas since displacement is particularly severe for low-skill workers. Migration does affect mismatch: mobility favors co-location of agents with similar productivity but within-region rank correlation declines in the most productive region. I show that worker-firm complementarities in production account for 33% of the productivity gains. Place-based programs directed to firms, like incentives for hiring unemployed or creating high productivity jobs, raise employment rates and reduce the gaps in productivity across regions. In contrast, subsidies to attract high-skill workers in the South have limited effects.
The meme stock phenomenon has yet to be explored. In this note, we provide evidence that these stocks display common stylized facts for the dynamics of price, trading volume, and social media activity. Using a regime-switching cointegration model, we identify the meme stock “mementum” which exhibits a different characterization compared to other stocks with high volumes of activity (persistent and not) on social media. Finally, we show that mementum is significant and positively related to the stock’s returns. Understanding these properties helps investors and market authorities in their decisions.
We study the role mutual funds play in the recovery from fast intraday crashes based on data from the National Stock Exchange of India for a single large stock. During normal times, trading activity and liquidity provision by mutual funds is negligible compared to other traders at around 4% of overall activity. Nevertheless, for the two intraday market-wide crashes in our sample, price recovery took place only after mutual funds moved in. Market stability may require the presence of well-capitalized standby liquidity providers for recovery from fast crashes.
Non-standard errors
(2021)
In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in sample estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence-generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty: non-standard errors. To study them, we let 164 teams test six hypotheses on the same sample. We find that non-standard errors are sizeable, on par with standard errors. Their size (i) co-varies only weakly with team merits, reproducibility, or peer rating, (ii) declines significantly after peer-feedback, and (iii) is underestimated by participants.
Accounting for financial stability: Bank disclosure and loss recognition in the financial crisis
(2020)
This paper examines banks’ disclosures and loss recognition in the financial crisis and identifies several core issues for the link between accounting and financial stability. Our analysis suggests that, going into the financial crisis, banks’ disclosures about relevant risk exposures were relatively sparse. Such disclosures came later after major concerns about banks’ exposures had arisen in markets. Similarly, the recognition of loan losses was relatively slow and delayed relative to prevailing market expectations. Among the possible explanations for this evidence, our analysis suggests that banks’ reporting incentives played a key role, which has important implications for bank supervision and the new expected loss model for loan accounting. We also provide evidence that shielding regulatory capital from accounting losses through prudential filters can dampen banks’ incentives for corrective actions. Overall, our analysis reveals several important challenges if accounting and financial reporting are to contribute to financial stability.
The paper discusses the policy implications of the Wirecard scandal. The study finds that all lines of defense against corporate fraud, including internal control systems, external audits, the oversight bodies for financial reporting and auditing and the market supervisor, contributed to the scandal and are in need of reform. To ensure market integrity and investor protection in the future, the authors make eight suggestions for the market and institutional oversight architecture in Germany and in Europe.
We present evidence on the way personal and institutional factors could together guide public company directors in decision-making concerning shareholders and stakeholders. In a sample comprising more than nine hundred directors originating from over fifty countries and serving in firms from twenty three countries, we confirm that directors around the world hold a principled, quasi-ideological stance towards shareholders and stakeholders, called shareholderism, on which they vary in line with their personal values. We theorize and find that in addition to personal values, directors’ shareholderism level associates with cultural norms that are conducive to entrepreneurship. Among legal factors, only creditor protection exhibits a negative correlation with shareholderism, while general legal origin and proxies for shareholder and employee protection are unrelated to it.
Did the Federal Reserves’ Quantitative Easing (QE) in the aftermath of the financial crisis have macroeconomic effects? To answer this question, the authors estimate a large-scale DSGE model over the sample from 1998 to 2020, including data of the Fed’s balance sheet. The authors allow for QE to affect the economy via multiple channels that arise from several financial frictions. Their nonlinear Bayesian likelihood approach fully accounts for the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. They find that between 2009 to 2015, QE increased output by about 1.2 percent. This reflects a net increase in investment of nearly 9 percent, that was accompanied by a 0.7 percent drop in aggregate consumption. Both, government bond and capital asset purchases were effective in improving financing conditions. Especially capital asset purchases significantly facilitated new investment and increased the production capacity. Against the backdrop of a fall in consumption, supply side effects dominated which led to a mild disinflationary effect of about 0.25 percent annually.
Using a nonlinear Bayesian likelihood approach that fully accounts for the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates, the authors analyze US post-crisis business cycle dynamics and provide reference parameter estimates. They find that neither the inclusion of financial frictions nor that of household heterogeneity improve the empirical fit of the standard model, or its ability to provide a joint explanation for the post-2007 dynamics. Associated financial shocks mis-predict an increase in consumption. The common practice of omitting the ZLB period in the estimation severely distorts the analysis of the more recent economic dynamics.
An important question in banking is how strict supervision affects bank lending and in turn local business activity. Supervisors forcing banks to recognize losses could choke off lending and amplify local economic woes. But stricter supervision could also change how banks assess and manage loans. Estimating such effects is challenging. We exploit the extinction of the thrift regulator (OTS) to analyze economic links between strict supervision, bank lending and business activity. We first show that the OTS replacement indeed resulted in stricter supervision of former OTS banks. Next, we analyze the ensuing lending effects. We show that former OTS banks increase small business lending by roughly 10 percent. This increase is concentrated in well-capitalized banks, those more affected by the new regime, and cannot be fully explained by a reallocation from mortgage to small business lending after the crisis. These findings suggest that stricter supervision operates not only through capital but can also correct deficiencies in bank management and lending practices, leading to more lending and a reallocation of loans.
This paper documents that resource reallocation across firms is an important mechanism through which creditor rights affect real outcomes. I exploit the staggered adoption of an international convention that provides globally consistent strong creditor protection for aircraft finance. After this reform, country-level productivity in the aviation sector increases by 12%, driven mostly by across-firm reallocation. Productive airlines borrow more, expand, and adopt new technology at the expense of unproductive ones. Such reallocation is facilitated by (i) easier and quicker asset redeployment; and (ii) the influx of foreign financiers offering innovative financial products to improve credit allocative efficiency. I further document an increase in competition and an improvement in the breadth and the quality of products available to consumers.
We show strong overall and heterogeneous economic incidence effects, as well as distortionary effects, of only shifting statutory incidence (i.e., the agent on which taxes are levied), without any tax rate change. For identification, we exploit a tax change and administrative data from the credit market: (i) a policy change in 2018 in Spain shifting an existing mortgage tax from being levied on borrowers to being levied on banks; (ii) some areas, for historical reasons, were exempt from paying this tax (or have different tax rates); and (iii) an exhaustive matched credit register. We find the following robust results: First, after the policy change, the average mortgage rate increases consistently with a strong – but not complete – tax pass-through. Second, there is a large heterogeneity in such pass-through: larger for borrowers with lower income, a smaller number of lending relationships, not working for the lender, or facing less banks in their zip-code, thereby suggesting a bargaining power mechanism at work. Third, despite no variation in the tax rate, and consistent with the non-full tax pass-through, the tax shift increases banks’ risk-taking. More affected banks reduce costly mortgage insurance in case of loan default (especially so if banks have weaker ex-ante balance sheets) and expand into non-affected but (much) ex-ante riskier consumer lending, experiencing even higher ex-post defaults within consumer loans.
This paper contributes to the debate on the adequate regulatory treatment of non-bank financial intermediation (NBFI). It proposes an avenue for regulators to keep regulatory arbitrage under control and preserve sufficient space for efficient financial innovation at the same time. We argue for a normative approach to supervision that can overcome the proverbial race between hare and hedgehog in financial regulation and demonstrate how such an approach can be implemented in practice. We first show that regulators should primarily analyse the allocation of tail risk inherent in NBFI. Our paper proposes to apply regulatory burdens equivalent to prudential banking regulation if the respective transactional structures become only viable through indirect or direct access to (ad hoc) public backstops. Second, we use insights from the scholarship on regulatory networks as communities of interpretation to demonstrate how regulators can retrieve the information on transactional innovations and their risk-allocating characteristics that they need to make the pivotal determination. We suggest in particular how supervisors should structure their relationships with semi-public gatekeepers such as lawyers, auditors and consultants to keep abreast of the risk-allocating features of evolving transactional structures. Finally, this paper uses the example of credit funds as non-bank entities economically engaged in credit intermediation to illustrate the merits of the proposed normative framework and to highlight that multipolar regulatory dialogues are needed to shed light on the specific risk-allocating characteristics of recent contractual innovations.
n today’s world, the transfer of laws and regulations between different legal systems is commonplace. The global spread of stewardship codes in recent years presents a promising, but yet untested, terrain to explore the diffusion of such norms. This paper aims to fill this gap. Employing the method of content analysis and using information from 41 stewardship codes enacted between 1991 and 2019, we systematically examine the formal diffusion of these stewardship codes. While we find support for the diffusion story of the UK as a stewardship norm exporter, especially in former British colonies in Asia, we also find evidence of diffusion from transnational initiatives, such as the EFAMA and ICGN codes, as well as regional clusters. We also show that the UK Stewardship Code of 2020 now deviates from these current models; thus, it remains to be seen how far a second round of exportation of the revised UK model into the transnational arena will follow.
We present novel evidence on the value of cross-border political access. We analyze data on meetings of US multinational enterprises (MNEs) with European Commission (EC) policymakers. Meetings with Commissioners are associated with positive abnormal equity returns. We study channels of value creation through political access in the areas of regulation and taxation. US enterprises with EC meetings are more likely to receive favorable outcomes in their European merger decisions and have lower effective tax rates on foreign income than their peers without meetings. Our results suggest that access to foreign policymakers is of substantial value for MNEs.
In times of crisis, governments have strong incentives to influence banks’ credit allocation because the survival of the economy depends on it. How do governments make banks “play along”? This paper focuses on the state-guaranteed credit programs (SGCPs) that have been implemented in Europe to help firms survive the COVID 19 crisis. Governments’ capacity to save the economy depends on banks’ capacity to grant credit to struggling firms (which they would not be inclined to do spontaneously in the context of a global pandemic). All governments thus face the same challenge: How do they make sure that state guaranteed loans reach their desired target and on what terms? Based on a comparative analysis of the elaboration and implementation of SGCPs in France and Germany, this paper shows that historically-rooted institutionalized modes of coordination between state and bank actors have largely shaped the terms of the SGCPs in these two countries.
This paper studies a household’s optimal demand for a reverse mortgage. These contracts allow homeowners to tap their home equity to finance consumption needs. In stylized frameworks, we show that the decision to enter a reverse mortgage is mainly driven by the dierential between the aggregate appreciation of the house price and principal limiting factor on the one hand and the funding costs of a household on the other hand. We also study a rich life-cycle model that can explain the low demand for reverse mortgages as observed in US data. In this model, we analyze the optimal response of a household that is confronted with a health shock or financial disaster. If an agent suers from an unexpected health shock, she reduces the risky portfolio share and is more likely to enter a reverse mortgage. On the other hand, if there is a large drop in the stock market, she keeps the risky portfolio share almost constant by buying additional shares of stock. Besides, the probability to take out a reverse mortgage is hardly aected.
Zur Reform der Einlagensicherung: Elemente einer anreizkompatiblen Europäischen Rückversicherung
(2020)
Bankeinlagen bis 100.000 Euro sind de jure überall im Euroraum gleichermaßen vor Verlusten geschützt. De facto hängt der Wert dieser gesetzlichen Haftungszusage unter anderem von der Ausstattung des nationalen Sicherungsfonds und der relativen Größe des Bankensektors in einer Volkswirtschaft ab. Um die Homogenität des Einlagenschutzes zu gewährleisten und die Bankenunion zu vollenden, bedarf es einer einheitlichen europäischen Einlagensicherung. Die bestehende implizite Risikoteilung im Euroraum ist ordnungspolitisch nicht wünschenswert. Ferner kann eine explizite und glaubwürdige Zweitsicherung Fehlanreize zur Übernahme exzessiver Risiken verhindern, bevor es zum Schadensfall kommt. Daher plädiert dieser Beitrag für ein zweistufiges, streng subsidiär organisiertes Rückversicherungsmodell: Nationale Erstversicherungen würden einen festgeschriebenen Teil, die europäische Rückversicherung nachrangig den Rest der Deckungssumme besichern. Die Rückversicherung gewährt diese Liquiditätshilfen in Form von Kassenkrediten. Weil die Haftung auf nationaler Ebene verbleibt, werden Risiken geteilt aber nicht vergemeinschaftet. Marktgerechte Prämien müssen nicht nur das individuelle Risikogewicht einer Bank sondern auch länderspezifische Risikofaktoren berücksichtigen. Zuletzt braucht der Rückversicherer umfangreiche Aufsichtsrechte, um die Zahlungsfähigkeit der Erstversicherer mit Hinblick auf die nationalen Haftungspflichten jederzeit sicherzustellen.
This article provides a proposal to use IMF Article VIII, Section 2 (b) to establish a binding mechanism on private creditors for a sovereign debt standstill. The proposal builds on the original idea by Whitney Deveboise (1984). Using arguments brought forward by confidential IMF staff papers (1988, 1996) and the IMF General Counsel (1988), this paper shows how an authoritative interpretation of Article VIII, Section 2 (b) can provide protection from litigation to countries at risk of debt distress.
The envisaged mechanism presents several advantages over recent proposals for a binding standstill mechanism, such as the International Developing Country Debt Authority (IDCDA) by UNCTAD and a Central Credit Facility (CFF) by the Bolton Committee. First, this approach would not require the creation of new intergovernmental mechanisms or facilities. Second, the activation of the standstill mechanism can be set in motion by any IMF member country and does not require a modification of its Articles of Agreement. Third, debtor countries acting in good faith under an IMF program would be protected from aggressive litigation strategies from holdout creditors in numerous jurisdictions, including the US and the UK. Fourth, courts in key jurisdictions would avoid becoming overburdened by a cascade of sovereign debt litigation covering creditors and debtors across the globe. Fifth, private creditors would receive uniform treatment and ensure intercreditor equality. Sixth and last, the mechanism would provide additional safeguards to protect emergency multilateral financing provided to tackle Covid-19.
We study whether and how time preferences change over the life cycle, exploiting representative long-term panel data. We estimate the age patterns of discount rates from age 25 to 80. In order to identify age effects, we have to disentangle them from cohort and period factors. We address this identification problem by estimating individual fixed effects models, where we substitute period effects with determinants of time preferences that depend on calendar years. We find that discount rates decrease with age and the decline is remarkably linear over the life cycle.
We survey a representative sample of US households to study how exposure to the COVID-19 stock market crash a↵ects expectations and planned behavior. Wealth shocks are associated with upward adjustments of expectations about retirement age, desired working hours, and household debt, but have only small e↵ects on expected spending. We provide correlational and experimental evidence that beliefs about the duration of the stock market recovery shape households’ expectations about their own wealth and their planned investment decisions and labor market activity. Our findings shed light on the implications of household exposure to stock market crashes for expectation formation.
This paper shows that judicial enforcement has substantial effects on firms’ decisions with regard to their employment policies. To establish causality, I exploit a reorganization of the court districts in Italy involving judicial district mergers as a shock to court productivity. I find that an improvement in enforcement, as measured by a reduction in average trial length, has a large, positive effect on firm employment. These effects are stronger in firms with high leverage, or that belong to industries more dependent on external finance and characterized by higher complementarity between labor and capital, consistent with a financing channel driving the results. Moreover, in presence of stronger enforcement, firms can raise more debt to dampen the impact of negative shocks and, in this way, reduce employment fluctuations.
This paper presents causal evidence of the effects of boardroom networks on firm value. We exploit exogenous variation in network centrality arising from a ban on interlocking directorates of Italian financial and insurance companies. We leverage this shock to show that firms that become more central in the network as a result of the shock experience positive abnormal returns around the announcement date. We find that information dissemination plays a central role: results are driven by firms that have higher idiosyncratic volatility, low analyst coverage, and more uncertainty surrounding their earnings forecasts. We also find that firms benefit more from boardroom centrality when they are more central in the input-output network, as this reinforces information complementarities, or when they are less central in the cross-ownership network, as well as when they suffer from low profitability and low growth opportunities. Network centrality also results in higher compensation for board directors.
This Policy White Paper assesses several main elements of ECB’s upcoming review of its monetary policy strategy, announced in January 2020. Four aspects of the review are discussed in detail: i) ECB’s definition of price stability and the arguments for and against inflation targeting; ii) the scope of ECB’s objectives, considering financial stability, employment and the sustainability of the environment; iii) an update of ECB’s economic and monetary analyses to assess the risks to price stability; iv) the ECB’s communication practice. Furthermore, an overview of the ECB’s monetary policy strategy and its last evaluation in 2003 is given.
Banks are not immune from COVID-19. The economic downturn may drive some banks to the point of non-viability (PONV). If so, is the resolution regime in the Euro-area ready to respond? No, for banks may not have the right amount of the right kind of liabilities to make bail-in work. That could lead to a banking crisis. The Euro area can avoid this risk, by arranging now for a recap later. This would plug the gap between what the failing bank has and what it would need to make bail-in work. To do so, banks would pay – possibly via the contributions they make to the Single Resolution Fund – a commitment fee to a European backstop authority for a mandatory, system-wide note issuance facility. This would compel each bank, as it approached or reached the PONV, to issue to the backstop, and the backstop to purchase from the bank, the obligations the failing bank needs in order to make bail-in work. Such obligations would take the form of “senior-most” non-preferred debt, and bail-in would stop with such debt. That would allow the SRB to use the bail-in tool to resolve the failed bank, reopen it and run it under a solvent wind-down strategy. That protects counterparties and customers and ensures the continuity of critical economic functions. It also keeps investors at risk and promotes market discipline. Above all, it preserves financial stability.
Geiz war gestern
(2020)
We show that FED policy announcements lead to a significant increase in international comovements in the cross-section of equity and in particular sovereign CDS markets. The relaxation of unconventionary monetary policies is felt strongly by emerging markets, and by countries that are open to the trading of goods and flows, even in the presence of floating exchange rates. It also impacts closed economies whose currencies are pegged to the dollar. This evidence is consistent with recent theories of a global financial cycle and the pricing of a FED’s put. In contrast, ECB announcements hardly affect comovements, even in the Eurozone.
The possibility to investigate the impact of news on stock prices has observed a strong evolution thanks to the recent use of natural language processing (NLP) in finance and economics. In this paper, we investigate COVID-19 news, elaborated with the ”Natural Language Toolkit” that uses machine learning models to extract the news’ sentiment. We consider the period from January till June 2020 and analyze 203,886 online articles that deal with the pandemic and that were published on three platforms: MarketWatch.com, Reuters.com and NYtimes.com. Our findings show that there is a significant and positive relationship between sentiment score and market returns. This result indicates that an increase (decrease) in the sentiment score implies a rise in positive (negative) news and corresponds to positive (negative) market returns. We also find that the variance of the sentiments and the volume of the news sources for Reuters and MarketWatch, respectively, are negatively associated to market returns indicating that an increase of the uncertainty of the sentiment and an increase in the arrival of news have an adverse impact on the stock market.
When parties present divergent econometric evidence, the court may view such evidence as contradictory and thus ignore it completely, without conducting closer analysis. We develop a simple method for distinguishing between actual and merely apparent contradiction based on the statistical concept of the “severity” of the furnished evidence. Again using “severity”, we also propose a method for reconciling divergent findings in instances of mere seeming contradiction. Our chosen application is that of damage estimation in follow-on cases.
Christine Lagarde verband die Ankündigung ihres ersten, moderaten Rettungspakets mit der Aufforderung an die Mitgliedstaaten, fiskalische Hilfen bereitzustellen. Die Märkte scheinen sich das Vertrauen in die Fiskalpolitik indessen abgewöhnt zu haben. Da starke geldpolitische Signale zunächst ausblieben, ging die Talfahrt weiter, bis Lagarde im zweiten Versuch in die Fußstapfen ihres Vorgängers trat und die Schleusen öffnete.
Cryptocurrencies have received growing attention from individuals, the media, and regulators. However, little is known about the investors whom these financial instruments attract. Using administrative data, we describe the investment behavior of individuals who invest in cryptocurrencies with structured retail products. We find that cryptocurrency investors are active traders, prone to investment biases, and hold risky portfolios. In line with attention effects and anticipatory utility, we find that the average cryptocurrency investor substantially increases log-in and trading activity after his or her first cryptocurrency purchase. Our results document which investors are more likely to adopt new financial products and help inform regulators about investors' vulnerability to cryptocurrency investments.
We report the results of a longitudinal intervention with students across five universities in China designed to reduce online consumer debt. Our research design allocates individuals to either a financial literacy treatment, a self-control training program, or a zero-touch control group. Financial education interventions improve test scores on general financial literacy but only marginally affect future online borrowing. Our self-control treatment features detailed tracking of spending and borrowing activity with a third-party app and introspection about individuals' consumption with a counselor. These sessions reduce future online borrowing, delinquency charges, and borrowing for entertainment reasons - and are driven by the male subjects in the sample. Our results suggest that self-regulation can affect financial behavior in e-commerce platforms.
Using an original dataset on professional networks of directors sitting on the boards of large US corporations, we examine how personal relationships are used by firms to improve job match quality in the high-skill segment of the labor market. Analyzing explicit social connection data between new hires and recruiters, we are able to test predictions of well established job referral models. We find that referred executive directors have a fifteen percent longer tenure than their non-referred counterparts. Referred executive directors also tend to be similar to their referrers on multiple dimensions, giving support to network homophily hypotheses.