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We investigate the impact of uneven transparency regulation across countries and industries on the location of economic activity. Using two distinct sources of regulatory variation—the varying extent of financial-reporting requirements and the staggered introduction of electronic business registers in Europe—, we consistently document that direct exposure to transparency regulation is negatively associated with the focal industry’s economic activity in terms of inputs (e.g., employment) and outputs (e.g., production). By contrast, we find that indirect exposure to supplier and customer industries’ transparency regulation is positively associated with the focal industry’s economic activity. Our evidence suggests uneven transparency regulation can reallocate economic activity from regulated toward unregulated countries and industries, distorting the location of economic activity.
Understanding the shift from micro to macro-prudential thinking: a discursive network analysis
(2016)
While some economists argued for macro-prudential regulation pre-crisis, the macro-prudential approach and its emphasis on endogenously created systemic risk have only gained prominence post-crisis. Employing discourse and network analysis on samples of the most cited scholarly works on banking regulation as well as on systemic risk (60 sources each) from 1985 to 2014, we analyze the shift from micro to macro-prudential thinking in the shift to the post crisis period. Our analysis demonstrates that the predominance of formalism, particularly, partial equilibrium analysis along with the exclusion of historical and practitioners’ styles of reasoning from banking regulatory studies impeded economists from engaging seriously with the endogenous sources of systemic risk prior to the crisis. Post-crisis, these topics became important in this discourse, but the epistemological failures of banking regulatory studies pre-crisis were not sufficiently recognized. Recent attempts to conceptualize and price systemic risk as a negative externality point to the persistence of formalism and equilibrium thinking, with its attending dangers of incremental innovation due to epistemological barriers constrains theoretical progress, by excluding observed phenomena, which cannot yet be accommodated in mathematical models.
Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such “socially responsible consumers” in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational consequentialist consumers. In violation of price taking, equilibrium feedback non-trivially dampens a consumer’s mitigation efforts, undermining responsible behavior. This leads to a new type of market failure, where even consumers who fully “internalize the externality” overconsume externality-generating goods. At the same time, socially responsible consumers change the relative effectiveness of taxes, caps, and other policies in lowering the externality. Second, since consumer beliefs about and preferences over dampening play a crucial role in our framework, we investigate them empirically via a tailored survey. Consistent with our model, consumers are predominantly consequentialist, and on average believe in dampening. Inconsistent with our model, however, many consumers fail to anticipate dampening. Third, therefore, we analyze how such “naive” consumers modify our theoretical conclusions. Naive consumers behave more responsibly than rational consumers in a single-good economy, but may behave less responsibly in a multi-good economy with cross-market spillovers. A mix of naive and rational consumers may yield the worst outcomes.
Effective market discipline incentivizes financial institutions to limit their risk-taking behavior, making it a key element for financial regulation. However, without adequate incentives to monitor and control the risk-taking behavior of financial institutions market discipline erodes. As a consequence, bailing out financial institutions, as happened unprecedentedly during the recent financial crisis, may impose indirect costs to financial stability if bailout expectations of investors change. Analyzing US data covering the period between 2004 and 2014, Hett und Schmidt (2017) find that market participants adjusted their bailout expectations in response to government interventions, undermining market discipline mechanisms. Given these findings, policymakers need to take into account the potential effects on market discipline when deciding about public support to troubled financial institutions in the future. Considering the parallelism of events and public responses during the financial crisis as well as the recent developments of Italian banks, these results not only concern the US, but also have important implications for European financial markets and policy makers.
We find that high macroeconomic uncertainty is associated with greater accumulation of physical capital, despite a reduction in investment and valuations. To reconcile this puzzling evidence, we show that uncertainty predicts lower depreciation and utilization of existing capital, which dominates the investment slowdown. Motivated by these dynamics, we develop a quantitative production-based model in which firms implement precautionary savings through reducing utilization rather than raising invest-ment. Through this novel intensive-margin mechanism, uncertainty shocks command a quarter of the equity premium in general equilibrium, while flexibility in utilization adjustments helps explain uncertainty risk exposures in the cross-section of industry returns.
We analyze the repercussions of different kinds of uncertainty on cash demand, including uncertainty of the digital infrastructures, confidence crises of the financial system, natural disasters, political uncertainties, and inflationary crises. Based on a comprehensive literature survey, theoretical considerations and complemented by case studies, we derive a classification scheme how cash holdings typically evolve in each of these types of uncertainty by separating between demand for domestic and international cash as well as between transaction and store of value balances. Hereby, we focus on the stabilizing macroeconomic properties of cash and recommend guidelines for cash supply by central banks and the banking system. Finally, we exemplify our analysis with five case studies from the developing world, namely Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
We assemble a data set of more than eight million German Twitter posts related to the war in Ukraine. Based on state-of-the-art methods of text analysis, we construct a daily index of uncertainty about the war as perceived by German Twitter. The approach also allows us to separate this index into uncertainty about sanctions against Russia, energy policy and other dimensions. We then estimate a VAR model with daily financial and macroeconomic data and identify an exogenous uncertainty shock. The increase in uncertainty has strong effects on financial markets and causes a significant decline in economic activity as well as an increase in expected inflation. We find the effects of uncertainty to be particularly strong in the first months of the war.
We present a thought-provoking study of two monetary models: the cash-in-advance and the Lagos and Wright (2005) models. We report that the different approach to modeling money — reduced-form vs. explicit role — neither induces theoretical nor quantitative differences in results. Given conformity of preferences, technologies and shocks, both models reduce to one difference equation. The equations do not coincide only if price distortions are differentially imposed across models. To illustrate, when cash prices are equally distorted in both models equally large welfare costs of inflation are obtained in each model. Our insight is that if results differ, then this is due to differential assumptions about the pricing mechanism that governs cash transactions, not the explicit microfoundation of money.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the ECB has experienced an unprecedented deterioration in the level of trust. This raises the question as to what factors determine trust in central banking. We use a unique cross-country dataset which includes a rich set of socio-economic characteristics and supplement it with variables meant to reflect a country’s macroeconomic condition. We find that besides individual socio-economic characteristics, macroeconomic conditions play a crucial role in the trust-building process. Our results suggest that agents are boundedly rational in the trust-building process and that current ECB market operations may even be beneficial for trust in the ECB in the long-run.
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.