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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Venture capital-backed firms, unavoidable value-destroying trade sales, and fair value protections
(2020)
This paper investigates the implications of the fair value protections contemplated by the standard corporate contract (i.e., the standard contract form for which corporate law provides) for the entrepreneur–venture capitalist relationship, focusing, in particular, on unavoidable value-destroying trade sales. First, it demonstrates that the typical entrepreneur–venture capitalist contract does institutionalize the venture capitalist’s liquidity needs, allowing, under some circumstances, for counterintuitive instances of contractually-compliant value destruction. Unavoidable value-destroying
trade sales are the most tangible example. Next, it argues that fair value protections can prevent the entrepreneur and venture capitalist from allocating the value that these transactions generate as they would want. Then, it shows that the reality of venture capital-backed firms calls for a process of adaptation of the standard corporate contract that has one major step in the deactivation or re-shaping of fair value protections. Finally, it argues that a standard corporate contract aiming to promote social welfare through venture capital should feature flexible fair value protections
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.
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.
This paper examines the advantages and drawbacks of alternative methods of estimating oil supply and oil demand elasticities and of incorporating this information into structural VAR models. I not only summarize the state of the literature, but also draw attention to a number of econometric problems that have been overlooked in this literature. Once these problems are recognized, seemingly conflicting conclusions in the recent literature can be resolved. My analysis reaffirms the conclusion that the one-month oil supply elasticity is close to zero, which implies that oil demand shocks are the dominant driver of the real price of oil. The focus of this paper is not only on correcting some misunderstandings in the recent literature, but on the substantive and methodological insights generated by this exchange, which are of broader interest to applied researchers.
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.
The Wirecard scandal is a wake-up call alerting German politics to the importance of securities market integrity. The role of market supervision is to ensure the smooth functioning of capital markets and their integrity, creating trust among and acceptance by investors locally and globally. The existing patchwork of national supervisory practice in Europe is under discussion today, in the wake of Brexit that will end the role of London as a de-facto lead supervisor in stock and bond markets. A fundamental overhaul of a fragmented securities markets supervisory regime in Europe would offer the potential to lead to the establishment of an independent European Single Market Supervisor (ESMS). Endowed with strong enforcement powers, and supported by the existing national agencies, the ESMS would be entrusted with ensuring a uniform market standard as to transparency and other issues of market integrity across Europe. This would not rule out maintaining a variety of market organization structures at the national level. The ESMS would need executive powers in the world of markets (i.e. securities and trading), much like the SSM in the world of banking. To fill this new role, ESMS would have to be established as a new, independent institution, including an enormously scaled up staff if compared, e.g., to ESMA.
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.
We use data from a German online brokerage and a survey to show that retail investors sharply reduce risk-taking in response to nearby firm bankruptcies, which are not pre- dictive of returns. The effects on trading are spatially highly concentrated, immediate and not persistent. They seem to operate through more pessimistic expected returns and increased risk aversion and do not reflect wealth effects or changes in background risks. Investors learn about bankruptcies through immediate coverage in local newspapers. Our findings suggest that non-informative local experiences that make downside risks of stock investment more salient contribute to idiosyncratic short-term fluctuations in trading.
Using experimental data from a comprehensive field study, we explore the causal effects of algorithmic discrimination on economic efficiency and social welfare. We harness economic, game-theoretic, and state-of-the-art machine learning concepts allowing us to overcome the central challenge of missing counterfactuals, which generally impedes assessing economic downstream consequences of algorithmic discrimination. This way, we are able to precisely quantify downstream efficiency and welfare ramifications, which provides us a unique opportunity to assess whether the introduction of an AI system is actually desirable. Our results highlight that AI systems’ capabilities in enhancing welfare critically depends on the degree of inherent algorithmic biases. While an unbiased system in our setting outperforms humans and creates substantial welfare gains, the positive impact steadily decreases and ultimately reverses the more biased an AI system becomes. We show that this relation is particularly concerning in selective-labels environments, i.e., settings where outcomes are only observed if decision-makers take a particular action so that the data is selectively labeled, because commonly used technical performance metrics like the precision measure are prone to be deceptive. Finally, our results depict that continued learning, by creating feedback loops, can remedy algorithmic discrimination and associated negative effects over time.
This paper summarizes key elements of the German Federal Constitutional Court’s decision on the European Central Bank’s Public Sector Asset Purchase Programme. It briefly explains how it is possible for the German Court to disagree with the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Finally, it makes suggestions concerning a practical way forward for the Governing Council of the ECB in light of these developments.
In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor- income risk can explain much of this risk-taking pattern. Uncontrollable labor-income risk stresses middle-income households more because labor income is a larger fraction of their total lifetime resources compared with the rich. In response, middle-income households re-duce (controllable) financial risk. Richer households, having less pressure, can afford more risk-taking. The poor take low risk because they avoid jeopardizing their subsistence consumption.
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.
Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the long-term 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 both the long-term earnings consequences on children from a Covid-19 induced loss of schooling, as well as the associated welfare losses. 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.
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.
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.
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.
We employ a representative sample of 80,972 Italian firms to forecast the drop in profits and the equity shortfall triggered by the COVID-19 lockdown. A 3-month lockdown generates an aggregate yearly drop in profits of about 10% of GDP, and 17% of sample firms, which employ 8.8% of the sample’s employees, become financially distressed. Distress is more frequent for small and medium-sized enterprises, for firms with high pre-COVID-19 leverage, and for firms belonging to the Manufacturing and Wholesale Trading sectors. Listed companies are less likely to enter distress, whereas the correlation between distress rates and family firm ownership is unclear.
(JEL G01, G32, G33)
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.
Supranational rules, national discretion: increasing versus inflating regulatory bank capital?
(2020)
We study how higher capital requirements introduced at the supranational level affect the regulatory capital of banks across countries. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that treated banks exploit discretion in the calculation of regulatory capital to inflate their capital ratios without a commensurate increase in their book equity and without a reduction in bank risk. Regulatory capital inflation is more pronounced in countries where credit supply is expected to tighten, suggesting that national authorities forbear their domestic banks to meet supranational requirements, with a focus on short-term economic considerations.
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.
This paper studies the impact of financial sector size and leverage on business cycles and risk-free rates dynamics. We model a general equilibrium productive economy where financial intermediaries provide costly risk mitigation to households by pooling the idiosyncratic risks of their investment activities. We find that leverage amplifies variations of intermediaries’ relative size, but may also mitigate the business cycle. Moreover, it makes risk-free rates pro-cyclical. Households benefit the most when the financial sector is neither too small, thus avoiding high consumption fluctuations and costly mitigation, nor too big, so that fewer resources are lost after intermediation costs.
Market fragmentation and technological advances increasing the speed of trading altered the functioning and stability of global equity limit order markets. Taking market resiliency as an indicator of market quality, we investigate how resilient are trading venues in a high-frequency environment with cross-venue fragmented order flow. Employing a Hawkes process methodology on high-frequency data for FTSE 100 stocks on LSE, a traditional exchange, and on Chi-X, an alternative venue, we find that when liquidity becomes scarce Chi-X is a less resilient venue than LSE with variations existing across stocks and time. In comparison with LSE, Chi-X has more, longer, and severer liquidity shocks. Whereas the vast majority of liquidity droughts on both venues disappear within less than one minute, the recovery is not lasting, as liquidity shocks spiral over the time dimension. Over half of the shocks on both venues are caused by spiralling. Liquidity shocks tend to spiral more on Chi-X than on LSE for large stocks suggesting that the liquidity supply on Chi-X is thinner than on LSE. Finally, a significant amount of liquidity shocks spill over cross-venue providing supporting evidence for the competition for order flow between LSE and Chi-X.
We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation. Exploiting thresholds in Europe’s regulation and a major enforcement reform in Germany, we find that forcing firms to publicly disclose their financial statements discourages innovative activities. Our evidence suggests that reporting regulation has significant real effects by imposing proprietary costs on innovative firms, which in turn diminish their incentives to innovate. At the industry level, positive information spillovers (e.g., to competitors, suppliers, and customers) appear insufficient to compensate the negative direct effect on the prevalence of innovative activity. The spillovers instead appear to concentrate innovation among a few large firms in a given industry. Thus, financial reporting regulation has important aggregate and distributional effects on corporate innovation.
This paper studies the link between bank recapitalization and welfare in a dynamic production economy. The model features financial frictions because banks benefit of a cost advantage at monitoring firms and face costly equity issuance. The competitive equilibrium outcome is inefficient because agents do not internalize the effects banks’ capitalization over the allocation of capital, its price and, in turn, firms investments. It follows, individual recapitalizations are sub-optimal and bailout policies may benefit social welfare in the long-run. Bailouts improve capital allocation in states where aggregate banks are poorly capitalized, therefore enhancing their market valuation, fostering investments, and stabilizing the economy recovery path.
The European Commission is trying to reboot the CMU project: The High-Level Forum on Capital Markets Union – a group of 28 selected experts from industry, academia and civil society – is expected to submit policy recommendations by the end of May 2020 which will feed into the Commission’s new CMU agenda. This contribution is largely based on a letter to the High-Level Forum that gives feedback on the Interim Report published in February. There, we introduce a comprehensive approach to distinguish, from a functional finance perspective, between the ‘game changers’ and what is nice to have. We highlight the importance of common and consistent supervisory practices across Member States and recommend building up a European Securities and Exchange Commission (E-SEC) according to the American model.
Predictability and the cross-section of expected returns: a challenge for asset pricing models
(2020)
Many modern macro finance models imply that excess returns on arbitrary assets are predictable via the price-dividend ratio and the variance risk premium of the aggregate stock market. We propose a simple empirical test for the ability of such a model to explain the cross-section of expected returns by sorting stocks based on the sensitivity of expected returns to these quantities. Models with only one uncertainty-related state variable, like the habit model or the long-run risks model, cannot pass this test. However, even extensions with more state variables mostly fail. We derive criteria models have to satisfy to produce expected return patterns in line with the data and discuss various examples.
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.
This Policy Letter outlines a pandemic insurance solution through a pandemic-related “Insurance Linked Bond”. It would be originated by governments, with a principal amount to cover significant costs resulting from a pandemic. These bonds, which would be traded on a secondary market, generate a risk-adequate return for private and institutional investors that is financed through the insurance premiums paid by the public domain. In case of a pre-defined pandemic trigger event, the principal of the bond becomes available for the originating governments to cover pandemic-related costs. Through this approach, governments can insure themselves against future pandemic-related risks, while funding comes primarily from private and institutional investors.
OTC discount
(2020)
We document a sizable OTC discount in the interdealer market for German sovereign bonds where exchange and over-the-counter trading coexist: the vastmajority of OTC prices are favorable with respect to exchange quotes. This is a challenge for theories of OTC markets centered around search frictions but consistent with models of hybrid markets based on information frictions. We show empiricallythat proxies for both frictions determine variation in the discount, which is largely passed on to customers. Dealers trade on the exchange for immediacy and via brokers for opacity and anonymity, highlighting the complementary roles played by the di↵erent protocols.
Incentivized experiments in which individuals receive monetary rewards according to the outcomes of their decisions are regarded as the gold standard for preference elicitation in experimental economics. These task-related real payments are considered necessary to reveal subjects' "true preferences". Using a systematic, large-sample approach with three subject pools of private investors, professional investors, and students, we test the effect of task-related monetary incentives on risk preferences elicited in four standard experimental tasks. We find no systematic differences in behavior between subjects in the incentivized and non-incentivized regimes. We discuss implications for academic research and for applications in the field.
The conventional wisdom that inflation expectations respond to the level of the price of oil (or the price of gasoline) is based on testing the null hypothesis of a zero slope coefficient in a static single-equation regression model fit to aggregate data. Given that the regressor in this model is not stationary, the null distribution of the t-test statistic is nonstandard, invalidating the use of the normal approximation. Once the critical values are adjusted, these regressions provide no support for the conventional wisdom. Using a new structural vector regression model, however, we demonstrate that gasoline price shocks may indeed drive one-year household inflation expectations. The model shows that there have been several such episodes since 1990. In particular, the rise in household inflation expectations between 2009 and 2013 is almost entirely explained by a large increase in gasoline prices. However, on average, gasoline price shocks account for only 39% of the variation in household inflation expectations since 1981.
There has been much interest in the relationship between the price of crude oil, the value of the U.S. dollar, and the U.S. interest rate since the 1980s. For example, the sustained surge in the real price of oil in the 2000s is often attributed to the declining real value of the U.S. dollar as well as low U.S. real interest rates, along with a surge in global real economic activity. Quantifying these effects one at a time is difficult not only because of the close relationship between the interest rate and the exchange rate, but also because demand and supply shocks in the oil market in turn may affect the real value of the dollar and real interest rates. We propose a novel identification strategy for disentangling the causal effects of traditional oil demand and oil supply shocks from the effects of exogenous variation in the U.S. real interest rate and in the real value of the U.S. dollar. Our approach exploits a combination of sign and zero restrictions and narrative restrictions motivated by economic theory and extraneous evidence. We empirically evaluate popular views about the role of exogenous real exchange rate shocks in driving the real price of oil, and we examine the extent to which shocks in the global oil market drive the U.S real exchange rate and U.S. real interest rates. Our evidence for the first time provides direct empirical support for theoretical models of the link between these variables.
Central banks unexpectedly tightening policy rates often observe the exchange value of their currency depreciate, rather than appreciate as predicted by standard models. We document this for Fed and ECB policy days using event studies and ask whether an information effect, where the public attributes the policy surprise to an unobserved state of the economy that the central bank is signaling by its policy may explain the abnormality. It turns out that many informational assumptions make a standard two- country New Keynesian model match this behavior. To identify the particular mechanism, we condition on multiple asset prices in the event study and model implications for these. We find that there is heterogeneity in this dimension in the event study and no model with a single regime can match the evidence. Further, even after conditioning on possible information effects driving longer term interest rates, there appear to be other drivers of exchange rates. Our results show that existing models have a long way to go in reconciling event study analysis with model-based mechanisms of asset pricing.
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.
Libra — a global virtual currency project initiated by Facebook — has been the subject of many controversial discussions since its announcement in June 2019. This paper provides a differentiated view on Libra, recognising that different development scenarios of Libra are conceivable. Libra could serve purely as an alternative payment system in combination with a dedicated payment token, the Libra coin. Alternatively, the Libra project could develop into a broader financial infrastructure for advanced financial services such as savings and loan products operating on the Libra Blockchain. Based on a comparison of the Libra architecture with other cryptocurrencies, the opportunities and challenges for the development of the respective Libra ecosystems are investigated from a commercial, regulatory and monetary policy perspective.
We derive the Bayes estimator of vectors of structural VAR impulse responses under a range of alternative loss functions. We also derive joint credible regions for vectors of impulse responses as the lowest posterior risk region under the same loss functions. We show that conventional impulse response estimators such as the posterior median response function or the posterior mean response function are not in general the Bayes estimator of the impulse response vector obtained by stacking the impulse responses of interest. We show that such pointwise estimators may imply response function shapes that are incompatible with any possible parameterization of the underlying model. Moreover, conventional pointwise quantile error bands are not a valid measure of the estimation uncertainty about the impulse response vector because they ignore the mutual dependence of the responses. In practice, they tend to understate substantially the estimation uncertainty about the impulse response vector.
We analyze the ESG rating criteria used by prominent agencies and show that there is a lack of a commonality in the definition of ESG (i) characteristics, (ii) attributes and (iii) standards in defining E, S and G components. We provide evidence that heterogeneity in rating criteria can lead agencies to have opposite opinions on the same evaluated companies and that agreement across those providers is substantially low. Those alternative definitions of ESG also a↵ect sustainable investments leading to the identification of di↵erent investment universes and consequently to the creation of di↵erent benchmarks. This implies that in the asset management industry it is extremely dicult to measure the ability of a fund manager if financial performances are strongly conditioned by the chosen ESG benchmark. Finally, we find that the disagreement in the scores provided by the rating agencies disperses the e↵ect of preferences of ESG investors on asset prices, to the point that even when there is agreement, it has no impact on financial performances.
We introduce Implied Volatility Duration (IVD) as a new measure for the timing of uncertainty resolution, with a high IVD corresponding to late resolution. Portfolio sorts on a large cross-section of stocks indicate that investors demand on average about seven percent return per year as a compensation for a late resolution of uncertainty. In a general equilibrium model, we show that `late' stocks can only have higher expected returns than `early' stocks if the investor exhibits a preference for early resolution of uncertainty. Our empirical analysis thus provides a purely market-based assessment of the timing preferences of the marginal investor.
Using a novel experimental design, I test how the exposure to information about a group’s relative performance causally affects the members’ level of identification and thereby their propensity to harm affiliates of comparison groups. I find that both, being informed about a high and poor relative performance of the ingroup similarly fosters identification. Stronger ingroup identification creates increased hostility against the group of comparison. In cases where participants learn about poor relative performance, there appears to be a direct level effect additionally elevating hostile discrimination. My findings shed light on a specific channel through which social media may contribute to intergroup fragmentation and polarization.
We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher- order risk. We estimate our extended income process by GMM for household data from the United States. We find countercyclical variance and procyclical skewness of persistent shocks. All shock distributions are highly leptokurtic. The existing tax and transfer system reduces dispersion and left-skewness of shocks. We then show that in a standard incomplete-markets life-cycle model, first, higher-order risk has sizable welfare implications, which depend crucially on risk attitudes of households; second, higher-order risk matters quantitatively for the welfare costs of cyclical idiosyncratic risk; third, higher-order risk has non-trivial implications for the degree of self-insurance against both transitory and persistent shocks.
We show that High Frequency Traders (HFTs) are not beneficial to the stock market during flash crashes. They actually consume liquidity when it is most needed, even when they are rewarded by the exchange to provide immediacy. The behavior of HFTs exacerbate the transient price impact, unrelated to fundamentals, typically observed during a flash crash. Slow traders provide liquidity instead of HFTs, taking advantage of the discounted price. We thus uncover a trade-o↵ between the greater liquidity and efficiency provided by HFTs in normal times, and the disruptive consequences of their trading activity during distressed times.
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 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.
Fiscal policies and household consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic: a review of early evidence
(2020)
We review early evidence on how household consumption behavior has evolved over the pandemic and how different groups of households have responded to fiscal stimulus programs. Due to the scarcity of evidence for Europe, our review focuses on evidence from the US. Notwithstanding the institutional and demographic differences, we highlight generalizable findings and challenges to the design of stimulus policies from the pandemic. In conclusion, we identify several open issues for dis cussion.
The paper compares provision of public infrastructure via public-private partnerships (PPPs) with provision under government management. Due to soft budget constraints of government management, PPPs exert more effort and therefore have a cost advantage in building infrastructure. At the same time, hard budget constraints for PPPs introduce a bankruptcy risk and bankruptcy costs. Consequently, if bankruptcy costs are high, PPPs may be less efficient than public management, although this does not result from PPPs’ higher interest costs.