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Institute
- Center for Financial Studies (CFS) (77) (remove)
This policy letter provides an overview of the strengths, weaknesses, risks and opportunities of the upcoming comprehensive risk assessment, a euro area-wide evaluation of bank balance sheets and business models. If carried out properly, the 2014 comprehensive assessment will lead the euro area into a new era of banking supervision. Policy makers in euro area countries are now under severe pressure to define a credible backstop framework for banks. This framework, as the author argues, needs to be a broad, quasi-European system of mutually reinforcing backstops.
Are product spreads useful for forecasting? An empirical evaluation of the Verleger hypothesis
(2013)
Notwithstanding a resurgence in research on out-of-sample forecasts of the price of oil in recent years, there is one important approach to forecasting the real price of oil which has not been studied systematically to date. This approach is based on the premise that demand for crude oil derives from the demand for refined products such as gasoline or heating oil. Oil industry analysts such as Philip Verleger and financial analysts widely believe that there is predictive power in the product spread, defined as the difference between suitably weighted refined product market prices and the price of crude oil. Our objective is to evaluate this proposition. We derive from first principles a number of alternative forecasting model specifications involving product spreads and compare these models to the no-change forecast of the real price of oil. We show that not all product spread models are useful for out-of-sample forecasting, but some models are, even at horizons between one and two years. The most accurate model is a time-varying parameter model of gasoline and heating oil spot spreads that allows the marginal product market to change over time. We document MSPE reductions as high as 20% and directional accuracy as high as 63% at the two-year horizon, making product spread models a good complement to forecasting models based on economic fundamentals, which work best at short horizons.
We analyze the equilibrium in a two-tree (sector) economy with two regimes. The output of each tree is driven by a jump-diffusion process, and a downward jump in one sector of the economy can (but need not) trigger a shift to a regime where the likelihood of future jumps is generally higher. Furthermore, the true regime is unobservable, so that the representative Epstein-Zin investor has to extract the probability of being in a certain regime from the data. These two channels help us to match the stylized facts of countercyclical and excessive return volatilities and correlations between sectors. Moreover, the model reproduces the predictability of stock returns in the data without generating consumption growth predictability. The uncertainty about the state also reduces the slope of the term structure of equity. We document that heterogeneity between the two sectors with respect to shock propagation risk can lead to highly persistent aggregate price-dividend ratios. Finally, the possibility of jumps in one sector triggering higher overall jump probabilities boosts jump risk premia while uncertainty about the regime is the reason for sizeable diffusive risk premia.
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 incentive problems and liquidity risk (in the form of liquidity based banks’ runs) which provides a link between endogenous bank capital and macro and policy risk. Our banks also invest in risky government bonds used as capital buffer to self-insure 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.
Basel III and CEO compensation in banks: pay structures as a regulatory signal : [March 6, 2013]
(2013)
This paper proposes a new regulatory approach that implements capital requirements contingent on managerial compensation. We argue that excessive risk taking in the financial sector originates from the shareholder moral hazard created by government guarantees rather than from corporate governance failures within banks. The idea of the proposed regulation is to utilize the compensation scheme to drive a wedge between the interests of top management and shareholders to counteract shareholder risk-shifting incentives. The decisive advantage of this approach compared to existing regulation is that the regulator does not need to be able to properly measure the bank investment risk, which has been shown to be a difficult task during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
The IMFS Interdisciplinary Study 2/2013 contains speeches of Michael Burda (Humboldt University ), Benoît Coeuré (European Central Bank), Stefan Gerlach (Bank of Ireland and former IMFS Professor), Patrick Honohan (Bank of Ireland), Sabine Lautenschläger (Deutsche Bundesbank), Athanasios Orphanides (MIT) and Helmut Siekmann as well as Volker Wieland.
The European Commission recently put forward a proposal for a regulation to amend and strengthen the 2009 version of the EU's rules on the regulation of credit rating agencies ("CRA3"). Among other things, Art. 35a of the draft proposal introduces strict liability for rating agencies. This liability proposal is at odds with the aim to strengthen competition in the rating sector and could have a chilling effect on capital markets. The paper analyses existing rules on civil liability of rating agencies under different legal systems. Subsequently, the provision under Art. 35a of the Draft Proposal is examinded more closely. Suggestions on possible improvemts of the proposal are made.
Advances in technology and several regulatory initiatives have led to the emergence of a competitive but fragmented equity trading landscape in the US and Europe. While these changes have brought about several benefits like reduced transaction costs, regulators and market participants have also raised concerns about the potential adverse effects associated with increased execution complexity and the impact on market quality of new types of venues like dark pools. In this article we review the theoretical and empirical literature examining the economic arguments and motivations underlying market fragmentation, as well as the resulting implications for investors' welfare. We start with the literature that views exchanges as natural monopolies due to presence of network externalities, and then examine studies which challenge this view by focusing on trader heterogeneity and other aspects of the microstructure of equity markets.
We show that the optimal consumption of an individual over the life cycle can have the hump shape (inverted U-shape) observed empirically if the preferences of the individual exhibit internal habit formation. In the absence of habit formation, an impatient individual would prefer a decreasing consumption path over life. However, because of habit formation, a high initial consumption would lead to high required consumption in the future. To cover the future required consumption, wealth is set aside, but the necessary amount decreases with age which allows consumption to increase in the early part of life. At some age, the impatience outweighs the habit concerns so that consumption starts to decrease. We derive the optimal consumption strategy in closed form, deduce sufficient conditions for the presence of a consumption hump, and characterize the age at which the hump occurs. Numerical examples illustrate our findings. We show that our model calibrates well to U.S. consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
We introduce a copula-based dynamic model for multivariate processes of (non-negative) high-frequency trading variables revealing time-varying conditional variances and correlations. Modeling the variables’ conditional mean processes using a multiplicative error model we map the resulting residuals into a Gaussian domain using a Gaussian copula. Based on high-frequency volatility, cumulative trading volumes, trade counts and market depth of various stocks traded at the NYSE, we show that the proposed copula-based transformation is supported by the data and allows capturing (multivariate) dynamics in higher order moments. The latter are modeled using a DCC-GARCH specification. We suggest estimating the model by composite maximum likelihood which is sufficiently flexible to be applicable in high dimensions. Strong empirical evidence for time-varying conditional (co-)variances in trading processes supports the usefulness of the approach. Taking these higher-order dynamics explicitly into account significantly improves the goodness-of-fit of the multiplicative error model and allows capturing time-varying liquidity risks.
In this note, a new concept for a European deposit guarantee scheme is proposed, which takes account of the strong political reservations against a mutualization of the liability for bank deposits. The three-stage model for deposit insurance outlined in the text builds on existing national deposit guarantee schemes, offering loss compensation on a European level and at the same time preventing excessive risk and moral hazard taking by individual banks.
This note proposes a new set-up for the fund backing the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM). The proposed fund is a Multi-Tier Resolution Fund (MTRF), restricting the joint and several supranational liability to a limited range of losses, bounded by national liability at the upper and the lower end. The layers are, in ascending order: a national fund (first losses), a European fund (second losses), the national budget (third losses), the ESM (fourth losses, as a backup for sovereigns). The system works like a reinsurance scheme, providing clear limits to European-level joint liability, and therefore confining moral hazard. At the same time, it allows for some degree of risk sharing, which is important for financial stability if shocks to the financial system are exogenous (e.g., of a supranational macroeconomic nature). The text has four parts. Section A describes the operation of the Multi-Tier Resolution Fund, assuming the fund capital to be fully paid-in (“Steady State“). Section B deals with the build-up phase of the fund capital (“Build up“). Section C discusses how the proposal deals with the apparent incentive conflicts. The final Section D summarizes open questions which need further thought (“Open Questions“).
The substantial variation in the real price of oil since 2003 has renewed interest in the question of how to forecast monthly and quarterly oil prices. There also has been increased interest in the link between financial markets and oil markets, including the question of whether financial market information helps forecast the real price of oil in physical markets. An obvious advantage of financial data in forecasting oil prices is their availability in real time on a daily or weekly basis. We investigate whether mixed-frequency models may be used to take advantage of these rich data sets. We show that, among a range of alternative high-frequency predictors, especially changes in U.S. crude oil inventories produce substantial and statistically significant real-time improvements in forecast accuracy. The preferred MIDAS model reduces the MSPE by as much as 16 percent compared with the no-change forecast and has statistically significant directional accuracy as high as 82 percent. This MIDAS forecast also is more accurate than a mixed-frequency realtime VAR forecast, but not systematically more accurate than the corresponding forecast based on monthly inventories. We conclude that typically not much is lost by ignoring high-frequency financial data in forecasting the monthly real price of oil.
U.S. retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms, but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in U.S. biofuel policies in 2006. In contrast, increases in the real prices of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice received by U.S. farmers have been more substantial and can be linked in part to increases in the real price of oil. That link, however, appears largely driven by common macroeconomic determinants of the prices of oil and agricultural commodities rather than the pass-through from higher oil prices. We show that there is no evidence that corn ethanol mandates have created a tight link between oil and agricultural markets. Rather increases in food commodity prices not associated with changes in global real activity appear to reflect a wide range of idiosyncratic shocks ranging from changes in biofuel policies to poor harvests. Increases in agricultural commodity prices in turn contribute little to U.S. retail food price increases, because of the small cost share of agricultural products in food prices. There is no evidence that oil price shocks have caused more than a negligible increase in retail food prices in recent years. Nor is there evidence for the prevailing wisdom that oil-price driven increases in the cost of food processing, packaging, transportation and distribution are responsible for higher retail food prices. Finally, there is no evidence that oil-market specific events or for that matter U.S. biofuel policies help explain the evolution of the real price of rice, which is perhaps the single most important food commodity for many developing countries.
Does it pay to invest in art? A selection-corrected returns perspective : [draft october 15, 2013]
(2013)
This paper shows the importance of correcting for sample selection when investing in illiquid assets with endogenous trading. Using a large sample of 20,538 paintings that were sold repeatedly at auction between 1972 and 2010, we find that paintings with higher price appreciation are more likely to trade. This strongly biases estimates of returns. The selection-corrected average annual index return is 6.5 percent, down from 10 percent for traditional uncorrected repeat sales regressions, and Sharpe Ratios drop from 0.24 to 0.04. From a pure financial perspective, passive index investing in paintings is not a viable investment strategy once selection bias is accounted for. Our results have important implications for other illiquid asset classes that trade endogenously.
We use unique data from financial advisers’ professional exam scores and combine it with other variables to create an index of financial sophistication. Using this index to explain long-term stock return expectations, we find that more sophisticated financial advisers tend to have lower return expectations. A one standard deviation increase in the sophistication index reduces expected returns by 1.1 percentage points. The effect is stronger for emerging market stocks (2.3 percentage points). The sophistication effect contributes 60% to the model fit, while employer fixed effects combined contribute less than 30%. These results help understand the formation of potentially excessively optimistic expectations.
We develop a dynamic network model whose links are governed by banks' optmizing decisions and by an endogenous tâtonnement market adjustment. Banks in our model can default and engage in firesales: risk is transmitted through direct and cascading counterparty defaults as well as through indirect pecuniary externalities triggered by firesales. We use the model to assess the evolution of the network configuration under various prudential policy regimes, to measure banks' contribution to systemic risk (through Shapley values) in response to shocks and to analyze the effects of systemic risk charges. We complement the analysis by introducing the possibility of central bank liquidity provision.
Is wider access to stockholding opportunities related to reduced wealth inequality, given that it creates challenges for small and less sophisticated investors? Counterfactual analysis is used to study the influence of changes in the US stockholder pool and economic environment, on the distribution of stock and net household wealth during a period of dramatic increase in stock market participation. We uncover substantial shifts in stockholder pool composition, favoring smaller holdings during the 1990s upswing but larger holdings around the burst of the Internet bubble. We find no evidence that widening access to stocks was associated with reduced net wealth inequality.
Using fiscal reaction functions for 3a panel of actual euro-area countries the paper investigates whether euro membership has reduced the responsiveness of countries to increases in the level of inherited debt compared to the period prior to succession to the euro. While we find some evidence for such a loss in prudence, the results are not robust to changes in the specification, as for example an exclusion of Greece from the panel. This suggests that the current debt problems may result to a large extent from pre-existing debt levels prior to entry or from a larger need for fiscal prudence in a common currency, while an adverse change in the fiscal reaction functions for most countries does not apply.
The paper uses fiscal reaction functions for a panel of euro-area countries to investigate whether euro membership has reduced the responsiveness of countries to shocks in the level of inherited debt compared to the period prior to succession to the euro. While we find some evidence for such a loss in prudence, the results are not robust to changes in the specification, such as an exclusion of Greece from the panel. This suggests that the current debt problems may result to a large extent from preexisting debt levels prior to entry or from a larger need for fiscal prudence in a common currency, while an adverse change in the fiscal reaction functions for most countries does not apply.
We examine the impact of stock exchange trading rules and surveillance on the frequency and severity of suspected insider trading cases in 22 stock exchanges around the world over the period January 2003 through June 2011. Using new indices for market manipulation, insider trading, and broker-agency conflict based on the specific provisions of the trading rules of each stock exchange, along with surveillance to detect non-compliance with such rules, we show that more detailed exchange trading rules and surveillance over time and across markets significantly reduce the number of cases, but increase the profits per case.
We propose the realized systemic risk beta as a measure for financial companies’ contribution to systemic risk given network interdependence between firms’ tail risk exposures. Conditional on statistically pre-identified network spillover effects and market as well as balance sheet information, we define the realized systemic risk beta as the total time-varying marginal effect of a firm’s Value-at-risk (VaR) on the system’s VaR. Statistical inference reveals a multitude of relevant risk spillover channels and determines companies’ systemic importance in the U.S. financial system. Our approach can be used to monitor companies’ systemic importance allowing for a transparent macroprudential supervision.
In this paper we provide new evidence that corporate financing decisions are associated with managerial incentives to report high equity earnings. Managers rely most heavily on debt to finance their asset growth when their future earnings prospects are poor, when they are under pressure due to past declines in earnings, negative past stock returns, and excessively optimistic analyst earnings forecasts, and when the earnings yield is high relative to bond yields so that from an accounting perspective equity is ‘expensive’. Managers of high debt issuing firms are more likely to be newly appointed and also more likely to be replaced in subsequent years. Abnormal returns on portfolios formed on the basis of asset growth and debt issuance are strongly positively associated with the contemporaneous changes in returns on assets and on equity as well as with earnings surprises. This may account for the finding that debt issuance forecasts negative abnormal returns, since debt issuance also forecasts negative changes in returns on assets and on equity and negative earnings surprises. Different mechanisms appear to be at work for firms that retire debt.
We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. We find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average, and that there is substantial heterogeneity in the distribution. We find that households with low cash-on-hand exhibit a much higher MPC than affluent households, which is in agreement with models with precautionary savings where income risk plays an important role. The results have important implications for the evaluation of fiscal policy, and for predicting household responses to tax reforms and redistributive policies. In particular, we find that a debt-financed increase in transfers of 1 percent of national disposable income targeted to the bottom decile of the cash-on-hand distribution would increase aggregate consumption by 0.82 percent. Furthermore, we find that redistributing 1% of national disposable income from the top to the bottom decile of the income distribution would boost aggregate consumption by 0.33%.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) regularly publishes monthly and quarterly forecasts of the price of crude oil for horizons up to two years, which are widely used by practitioners. Traditionally, such out-of-sample forecasts have been largely judgmental, making them difficult to replicate and justify. An alternative is the use of real-time econometric oil price forecasting models. We investigate the merits of constructing combinations of six such models. Forecast combinations have received little attention in the oil price forecasting literature to date. We demonstrate that over the last 20 years suitably constructed real-time forecast combinations would have been systematically more accurate than the no-change forecast at horizons up to 6 quarters or 18 months. MSPE reduction may be as high as 12% and directional accuracy as high as 72%. The gains in accuracy are robust over time. In contrast, the EIA oil price forecasts not only tend to be less accurate than no-change forecasts, but are much less accurate than our preferred forecast combination. Moreover, including EIA forecasts in the forecast combination systematically lowers the accuracy of the combination forecast. We conclude that suitably constructed forecast combinations should replace traditional judgmental forecasts of the price of oil.
We study to what extent firms spread out their debt maturity dates across time, which we call "granularity of corporate debt." We consider the role of debt granularity using a simple 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 may diversify debt rollovers across maturity dates. We construct granularity measures using data on corporate bond issuers for the 1991-2011 period and establish a number of novel findings. First, there is substantial variation in granularity in that many firms have either very concentrated or highly dispersed maturity structures. Second, our model's predictions are consistent with observed variation in granularity. Corporate debt maturities are more dispersed for larger and more mature firms, for firms with better investment opportunities, with higher leverage ratios, and with lower levels of current cash flows. We also show that during the recent financial crisis especially firms with valuable investment opportunities implemented more dispersed maturity structures. Finally, granularity plays an important role for bond issuances, because we document that newly issued corporate bond maturities complement pre-existing bond maturity profiles.
This paper studies the relation between firm value and a firm's growth options. We find strong empirical evidence that (average) Tobin's Q increases with firm-level volatility. However, the significance mainly comes from R&D firms, which have more growth options than non-R&D firms. By decomposing firm-level volatility into its systematic and unsystematic part, we also document that only idiosyncratic volatility (ivol) has a significant effect on valuation. Second, we analyze the relation of stock returns to realized contemporaneous idiosyncratic volatility and R&D expenses. Single sorting according to the size of idiosyncratic volatility, we only find a significant ivol anomaly for non-R&D portfolios, whereas in a four-factor model the portfolio alphas of R&D portfolios are all positive. Double sorting on idiosyncratic volatility and R&D expenses also reveals these differences between R&D and non-R&D firms. To simultaneously control for several explanatory variables, we also run panel regressions of portfolio alphas which confirm the relative importance of idiosyncratic volatility that is amplified by R&D expenses.
This paper empirically examines the role of soft information in the competitive interaction between relationship and transaction banks. Soft information can be interpreted as a private signal about the quality of a firm that is observable to a relationship bank, but not to a transaction bank. We show that borrowers self-select to relationship banks depending on whether their privately observed soft information is positive or negative. Competition affects the investment in learning the private signal from firms by relationship banks and transaction banks asymmetrically. Relationship banks invest more; transaction banks invest less in soft information, exacerbating the selection effect. Finally, we show that firms where soft information was important in the lending decision were no more likely to default compared to firms where only financial information was used.
We consider an economy where individuals privately choose effort and trade competitively priced securities that pay off with effort-determined probability. We show that if insurance against a negative shock is sufficiently incomplete, then standard functional form restrictions ensure that individual objective functions are optimized by an effort and insurance combination that is unique and satisfies first- and second-order conditions. Modeling insurance incompleteness in terms of costly production of private insurance services, we characterize the constrained inefficiency arising in general equilibrium from competitive pricing of nonexclusive financial contracts.
We show that the presence of high frequency trading (HFT) has significantly mitigated the frequency and severity of end-of-day price dislocation, counter to recent concerns expressed in the media. The effect of HFT is more pronounced on days when end of day price dislocation is more likely to be the result of market manipulation on days of option expiry dates and end of month. Moreover, the effect of HFT is more pronounced than the role of trading rules, surveillance, enforcement and legal conditions in curtailing the frequency and severity of end-of-day price dislocation. We show our findings are robust to different proxies of the start of HFT by trade size, cancellation of orders, and co-location.
Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We uncover an additional factor contributing to debt culture, namely social influences emanating from the perceived average income of peers. Using unique information from a representative household survey of the Dutch population that circumvents the need to define the social circle, we consider collateralized, consumer, and informal loans. We find robust social effects on borrowing – especially among those who consider themselves poorer than their peers – and on indebtedness, suggesting a link to financial distress. We check the robustness of our results using several approaches to rule out spurious associations and handle correlated effects.
This paper analyzes the equilibrium pricing implications of contagion risk in a Lucas-tree economy with recursive preferences and jumps. We introduce a new economic channel allowing for the possibility that endowment shocks simultaneously trigger a regime shift to a bad economic state. We document that these contagious jumps have far-reaching asset pricing implications. The risk premium for such shocks is superadditive, i.e. it is 2.5\% larger than the sum of the risk premia for pure endowment shocks and regime switches. Moreover, contagion risk reduces the risk-free rate by around 0.5\%. We also derive semiclosed-form solutions for the wealth-consumption ratio and the price-dividend ratios in an economy with two Lucas trees and analyze cross-sectional effects of contagion risk qualitatively. We find that heterogeneity among the assets with respect to contagion risk can increase risk premia disproportionately. In particular, big assets with a large exposure to contagious shocks carry significantly higher risk premia.
Household decisions are profoundly shaped by a complex set of financial options due to Social Security rules determining retirement, spousal, and survivor benefits, along with benefit adjustments that vary with the age at which these are claimed. These rules influence optimal household asset allocation, insurance, and work decisions, given life cycle demographic shocks such as marriage, divorce, and children. Our model generates a wealth profile and a low and stable equity fraction consistent with empirical evidence. We also 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.
The analyses of intersectoral linkages of Leontief (1941) and Hirschman (1958) provide a natural way to study the transmission of risk among interconnected banks and to measure their systemic importance. In this paper we show how classic input-output analysis can be applied to banking and how to derive six indicators that capture different aspects of systemic importance, using a simple numerical example for illustration. We also discuss the relationship with other approaches, most notably network centrality measures, both formally and by means of a simulated network.
We are able to shed light on the black box of restructuring tools private equity investors use to improve the operational performance of their portfolio companies. By building on previous work considering performance evaluation of PE backed companies, we analyze whether private equity improves operating efficiency and which of the typical restructuring tools are the main performance drivers. Using a set of over 300 international leveraged buyout transactions of the last thirty years, we find that while there is vast improvement in operational efficiency, these gains vary considerably. Our top performing transactions are subject to strong equity incentives, frequent asset restructuring and tight control by the investor. Furthermore, investors’ experience has a positive influence while financial leverage has no influence on operational performance.
This paper presents a theory that explains why it is beneficial for banks to engage in circular lending activities on the interbank market. Using a simple network structure, it shows that if there is a non-zero bailout probability, banks can significantly increase the expected repayment of uninsured creditors by entering into cyclical liabilities on the interbank market before investing in loan portfolios. Therefore, banks are better able to attract funds from uninsured creditors. Our results show that implicit government guarantees incentivize banks to have large interbank exposures, to be highly interconnected, and to invest in highly correlated, risky portfolios. This can serve as an explanation for the observed high interconnectedness between banks and their investment behavior in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis.
Investment in financial literacy, social security and portfolio choice : [version may 21, 2013]
(2013)
We present an intertemporal portfolio choice model where individuals invest in financial literacy, save, allocate their wealth between a safe and a risky asset, and receive a pension when they retire. Financial literacy affects the excess return and the cost of stock market participation. Since literacy depreciates over time and has a cost related to current consumption, investors simultaneously choose how much to save, the portfolio allocation, and the optimal investment in literacy. This last depends on households' resources, its preference parameters and on how much financial literacy affects the returns on risky assets and the stock market participation cost, and the returns on social security wealth. The model implies one should observe a positive correlation between stock market participation (and risky asset share, conditional on participation) and financial literacy, and a negative correlation between the generosity of the social security system and financial literacy. The model also implies that the stock of financial literacy accumulated early in life is positively correlated with the individual's wealth and portfolio allocations later in life. Using microeconomic cross-country data, we find support for these predictions.
Model case procedures have some fundamentals in common with collective redress in civil law countries. This is particularly true in the field of investor protection which is highly regulated and marked by resulting enforcement failures, which led the German legislator to the enactment of the KapMuG and its recent amendment which highlight exemplary elements of model case procedure. A survey of the ongoing activities of the European Union in the area of collective redress and of its repercussions on the member state level therefore forms a suitable basis for the following analysis of the 2012 amendment of the KapMuG. It clearly brings into focus a shift from sector-specific regulation with an emphasis on the cross-border aspect of protecting consumers towards a “coherent approach” strengthening the enforcement of EU law. As a result, regulatory policy and collective redress are two sides of the same coin today. With respect to the KapMuG such a development brings about some tension between its aim to aggregate small individual claims as efficiently as possible and the dominant role of individual procedural rights in German civil procedure. This conflict can be illustrated by some specific rules of the KapMuG: its scope of application, the three-tier procedure of a model case procedure, the newly introduced notification of claims and the new opt-out settlement under the amended §§ 17-19.
The German corporate governance code includes a recommendation as to diversity on corporate boards. Two draft bills on gender quotas are currently under way in legislative proceedings. However, the ruling coalition rejects those, advocating a “flexible quota”. The present study provides an overview on legislative proposals currently presented and on academic scholarship on the issue. Legal obstacles to the introduction of a “fix” quota under German law are discussed and the “soft” version of “flexible” quotas is advocated.
Prior research suggests that those who rely on intuition rather than effortful reasoning when making decisions are less averse to risk and ambiguity. The evidence is largely correlational, however, leaving open the question of the direction of causality. In this paper, we present experimental evidence of causation running from reliance on intuition to risk and ambiguity preferences. We directly manipulate participants’ predilection to rely on intuition and find that enhancing reliance on intuition lowers the probability of being ambiguity averse by 30 percentage points and increases risk tolerance by about 30 percent in the experimental sub-population where we would a priori expect the manipulation to be successful(males).
This paper takes a novel approach to estimating bankruptcy costs by inference from market prices of equity and put options using a dynamic structural model of capital structure. This approach avoids the selection bias of looking at firms in or near default and therefore permits theories of ex ante capital structure determination to be tested. We identify significant cross sectional variation in bankruptcy costs across industries and relate these to specific firm characteristics. We find that asset volatility and growth options have significant positive impacts, while tangibility and size have negative impacts. Our bankruptcy cost variable estimate significantly negatively impacts leverage ratios. This negative impact is in addition to that of other firm characteristics such as asset intangibility and asset volatility. The results provide strong support for the tradeoff theory of capital structure.
Mindfully Resisting the Bandwagon – IT Implementation and Its Consequences in the Financial Crisis
(2013)
Although the ”financial meltdown” between 2007 and 2009 can be substantially attributed to herding behaviour in the subprime market for credit default swaps, a “mindless” IT implementation of participating financial services providers played a major role in the facilitation of the underlying bandwagon. The problem was a discrepancy between two core complementary capabilities: (1.) the (economic-rationalistic) ability to execute financial transactions (to comply with the herd) in milliseconds and (2.) the required contextualized mindfulness capabilities to comprehend the implications of the transactions being executed and the associated IT innovation decisions that enabled these transactions.
We assess the effects of monetary policy on bank risk to verify the existence of a risk-taking channel - monetary expansions inducing banks to assume more risk. We first present VAR evidence confirming that this channel exists and tends to concentrate on the bank funding side. Then, to rationalize this evidence we build a macro model where banks subject to runs endogenously choose their funding structure (deposits vs. capital) and risk level. A monetary expansion increases bank leverage and risk. In turn, higher bank risk in steady state increases asset price volatility and reduces equilibrium output.
We propose a new classification of consumption goods into nondurable goods, durable goods and a new class which we call “memorable” goods. A good is memorable if a consumer can draw current utility from its past consumption experience through memory. We construct a novel consumption-savings model in which a consumer has a well-defined preference ordering over both nondurable goods and memorable goods. Memorable goods consumption differs from nondurable goods consumption in that current memorable goods consumption may also impact future utility through the accumulation process of the stock of memory. In our model, households optimally choose a lumpy profile of memorable goods consumption even in a frictionless world. Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data, we then document levels and volatilities of different groups of consumption goods expenditures, as well as their expenditure patterns, and show that the expenditure patterns on memorable goods indeed differ significantly from those on nondurable and durable goods. Finally, we empirically evaluate our model’s predictions with respect to the welfare cost of consumption fluctuations and conduct an excess-sensitivity test of the consumption response to predictable income changes. We find that (i) the welfare cost of household-level consumption fluctuations may be overstated by 1.7 percentage points (11.9% points as opposed to 13.6% points of permanent consumption) if memorable goods are not appropriately accounted for; (ii) the finding of excess sensitivity of consumption documented in important papers of the literature might be entirely due to the presence of memorable goods.
We study whether prices of traded options contain information about future extreme market events. Our option-implied conditional expectation of market loss due to tail events, or tail loss measure, predicts future market returns, magnitude, and probability of the market crashes, beyond and above other option-implied variables. Stock-specific tail loss measure predicts individual expected returns and magnitude of realized stock-specific crashes in the cross-section of stocks. An investor that cares about the left tail of her wealth distribution benefits from using the tail loss measure as an information variable to construct managed portfolios of a risk-free asset and market index.
Pursuant to art. 45 of the Solvency II Framework Directive, all insurance undertakings will be obliged to conduct an “Own Risk and Solvency Assessment” (ORSA). ORSA’s relevance is not limited only to the second pillar of Solvency II, where mainly qualitative requirements are to be found. ORSA rather exhibits strong interlinks with the first pillar and its quantitative requirements and may also serve as a trigger for transparency duties which form Solvency II’s third pillar. ORSA may thus be described in some respects as the glue that binds together all three pillars of Solvency II. ORSA is one of the most obvious examples of the supervisory shift from a rules-based to a principles-based approach. As such, ORSA has hitherto been only very roughly defined. Since it is for the undertaking to determine its own specific risk profile and to evaluate whether this risk profile deviates significantly from the assumptions underlying the standard formula, it seems only natural that the supervisor must specify in greater detail what these underlying assumptions are. The most practicable way to do so would be for EIOPA to establish a “standard insurer”, which implies a translation of the assumptions concerning the underlying probability distributions into directly observable characteristics. The creation of the standard insurer would be an important step towards relaxing the insurers’ fear of what ORSA might bring about.
This study investigates the transition from being a listed company with a dispersed ownership structure to being a privately held company with a concentrated ownership structure. We consider a sample of private equity backed portfolio companies to evaluate the consequences of the corporate governance changes on operational performance. Our analysis shows significant positive abnormal growth in several performance ratios for the private period of our sample companies relative to comparable public companies. These performance differences come from the increase in ownership concentration after the leveraged buyout transaction.