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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.
Recent advances in natural language processing have contributed to the development of market sentiment measures through text content analysis in news providers and social media. The effectiveness of these sentiment variables depends on the imple- mented techniques and the type of source on which they are based. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the release of public financial news on the S&P 500. Using automatic labeling techniques based on either stock index returns or dictionaries, we apply a classification problem based on long short-term memory neural networks to extract alternative proxies of investor sentiment. Our findings provide evidence that there exists an impact of those sentiments in the market on a 20-minute time frame. We find that dictionary-based sentiment provides meaningful results with respect to those based on stock index returns, which partly fails in the mapping process between news and financial returns.
The “European Green Deal” stipulates that the EU will become climate-neutral by 2050. This transformation requires enormous investments in all major sectors including energy, mobility, industrial manufacturing, real estate and farming. Although the EU Commission has announced that a total of EUR 1 trillion will be invested into the green transformation of the European economy over the next ten years, the majority of the investments must be financed by the private sector. Alongside many factors affecting a successful implementation of the Green Deal, a regulatory framework for the financial industry has to be established to facilitate the financing of sustainable investments. To that end, the European Sustainable Finance Strategy lays the foundation for a complex set of different measures that have been launched in recent years. This article provides a comprehensive overview of key regulatory initiatives such as the taxonomy regulation, the disclosure frameworks for both corporates and financial institutions and other aspects of financial market regulation that have already significantly improved the regulatory framework for sustainable finance. Nevertheless, some additional instruments could be considered, such as a reform of top management remuneration or the provision of tax incentives for green investments in the real economy, and these are briefly discussed.
We present new statistical indicators of the structure and performance of US banks from 1990 to today, geographically disaggregated at the level of individual counties. The constructed data set (20 indicators for some 3150 counties over 31 years, for a total of about 2 million data points) conveys a detailed picture of how the geography of US banking has evolved in the last three decades. We consider the data as a stepping stone to understand the role banks and banking policies may have played in mitigating, or exacerbating, the rise of poverty and inequality in certain US regions.
Macroeconomic stabilisation and monetary policy effectiveness in a low-interest-rate environment
(2021)
The secular decline in the equilibrium real interest rate observed over the past decades has materially limited the room for policy-rate reductions in recessions, and has led to a marked increase in the incidence of episodes where policy rates are likely to be at, or near, the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates. Using the ECB's New Area-Wide Model, we show that, if unaddressed, the effective lower bound can cause substantial costs in terms of worsened macroeconomic performance, as rejected in negative biases in inflation and economic activity, as well as heightened macroeconomic volatility. These costs can be mitigated by the use of nonstandard instruments, notably the joint use of interest-rate forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases. When considering alternatives to inflation targeting, we find that make-up strategies such as price-level targeting and average-inflation targeting can, if they are well-understood by the private sector, largely undo the negative biases and heightened volatility induced by the effective lower bound.
Using loan-level data from Germany, we investigate how the introduction of model-based capital regulation affected banks’ ability to absorb shocks. The objective of this regulation was to enhance financial stability by making capital requirements responsive to asset risk. Our evidence suggests that banks ‘optimized’ model-based regulation to lower their capital requirements. Banks systematically underreported risk, with under reporting being more pronounced for banks with higher gains from it. Moreover, large banks benefitted from the regulation at the expense of smaller banks. Overall, our results suggest that sophisticated rules may have undesired effects if strategic misbehavior is difficult to detect.
In this study, we analyze the trading behavior of banks with lending relationships. We combine detailed German data on banks’ proprietary trading and market making with lending information from the credit register and then examine how banks trade stocks of their borrowers around important corporate events. We find that banks trade more frequently and also profitably ahead of events when they are the main lender (or relationship bank) for the borrower. Specifically, we show that relationship banks are more likely to build up positive (negative) trading positions in the two weeks before positive (negative) news events, and also that they unwind these positions shortly after the event. This trading pattern is more pronounced for unscheduled earnings events, M&A transactions, and after borrower obtain new bank loans. Our results suggest that lending relationships endow banks with important information, highlighting the potential for conflicts of interest in banking, which has been a prominent concern in the regulatory debate.
Increasing the diversity of policy committees has taken center stage worldwide, but whether and why diverse committees are more effective is still unclear. In a randomized control trial that varies the salience of female and minority representation on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy committee, the FOMC, we test whether diversity affects how Fed information influences consumers’ subjective beliefs. Women and Black respondents form unemployment expectations more in line with FOMC forecasts and trust the Fed more after this intervention. Women are also more likely to acquire Fed-related information when associated with a female official. White men, who are overrepresented on the FOMC, do not react negatively. Heterogeneous taste for diversity can explain these patterns better than homophily. Our results suggest more diverse policy committees are better able to reach underrepresented groups without inducing negative reactions by others, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of policy communication and public trust in the institution.
We identify strong cross-border institutions as a driver for the globalization of in-novation. Using 67 million patents from over 100 patent offices, we introduce novel measures of innovation diffusion and collaboration. Exploiting staggered bilateral in-vestment treaties as shocks to cross-border property rights and contract enforcement, we show that signatory countries increase technology adoption and sourcing from each other. They also increase R&D collaborations. These interactions result in techno-logical convergence. The effects are particularly strong for process innovation, and for countries that are technological laggards or have weak domestic institutions. Increased inter-firm rather than intra-firm foreign investment is the key channel.
Using hand-collected data on CEO appointments during shareholder activism campaigns, this study examines whether shareholder involvement in CEO recruiting affects frictions in CEO hiring decisions. The results indicate that appointments of CEOs who are recruited with shareholder activist influence are followed by more favorable stock market reactions and stronger profitability improvements than CEO appointments that also occur during activism campaigns but without the influence of activists. I find little evidence that shareholder activists increase hiring frictions by facilitating the recruiting of CEOs who will implement myopic corporate policies. Analyses of recruiting process characteristics reveal that activist influence is associated with more resources being dedicated to the CEO search process and with a higher propensity to recruit CEOs from outside the firm. These findings contribute to the CEO labor market literature, which tends to focus on the decision to remove incumbent CEOs but provides limited insights into CEO recruiting.