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This paper makes a conceptual contribution to the effect of monetary policy on financial stability. We develop a microfounded network model with endogenous network formation to analyze the impact of central banks' monetary policy interventions on systemic risk. Banks choose their portfolio, including their borrowing and lending decisions on the interbank market, to maximize profit subject to regulatory constraints in an asset-liability framework. Systemic risk arises in the form of multiple bank defaults driven by common shock exposure on asset markets, direct contagion via the interbank market, and firesale spirals. The central bank injects or withdraws liquidity on the interbank markets to achieve its desired interest rate target. A tension arises between the beneficial effects of stabilized interest rates and increased loan volume and the detrimental effects of higher risk taking incentives. We find that central bank supply of liquidity quite generally increases systemic risk.
This paper explores consequences of consumer education on prices and welfare in retail financial markets when some consumers are naive about shrouded add-on prices and firms try to exploit it. Allowing for different information and pricing strategies we show that education is unlikely to push firms to disclose prices towards all consumers, which would be socially efficient. Instead, price discrimination emerges as a new equilibrium. Further, due to a feedback on prices, education that is good for consumers who become sophisticated may be bad for consumers who stay naive and even for the group of all consumers as a whole
This paper makes a conceptual contribution to the effect of monetary policy on financial stability. We develop a microfounded network model with endogenous network formation to analyze the impact of central banks' monetary policy interventions on systemic risk. Banks choose their portfolio, including their borrowing and lending decisions on the interbank market, to maximize profit subject to regulatory constraints in an asset-liability framework. Systemic risk arises in the form of multiple bank defaults driven by common shock exposure on asset markets, direct contagion via the interbank market, and firesale spirals. The central bank injects or withdraws liquidity on the interbank markets to achieve its desired interest rate target. A tension arises between the beneficial effects of stabilized interest rates and increased loan volume and the detrimental effects of higher risk taking incentives. We find that central bank supply of liquidity quite generally increases systemic risk.
Banks can deal with their liquidity risk by holding liquid assets (self-insurance), by participating in interbank markets (coinsurance), or by using flexible financing instruments, such as bank capital (risk-sharing). We use a simple model to show that undiversifiable liquidity risk, i.e. the liquidity risk that banks are unable to coinsure on interbank markets, represents an important risk factor affecting their capital structures. Banks facing higher undiversifiable liquidity risk hold more capital. We posit that empirically banks that are more exposed to undiversifiable liquidity risk are less active on interbank markets. Therefore, we test for the existence of a negative relationship between bank capital and interbank market activity and find support in a large sample of U.S. commercial banks.
I analyze a critical illness insurance in a consumption-investment model over the life cycle. I solve a model with stochastic mortality risk and health shock risk numerically. These shocks are interpreted as critical illness and can negatively affect the expected remaining lifetime, the health expenses, and the income. In order to hedge the health expense effect of a shock, the agent has the possibility to contract a critical illness insurance. My results highlight that the critical illness insurance is strongly desired by the agents. With an insurance profit of 20%, nearly all agents contract the insurance in the working stage of the life cycle and more than 50% of the agents contract the insurance during retirement. With an insurance profit of 200%, still nearly all working agents contract the insurance, whereas there is little demand in the retirement stage.
I numerically solve realistically calibrated life cycle consumption-investment problems in continuous time featuring stochastic mortality risk driven by jumps, unspanned labor income as well as short-sale and liquidity constraints and a simple insurance. I compare models with deterministic and stochastic hazard rate of death to a model without mortality risk. Mortality risk has only minor effects on the optimal controls early in the life cycle but it becomes crucial in later years. A diffusive component in the hazard rate of death has no significant impact, whereas a jump component is desired by the agent and influences optimal controls and wealth evolution. The insurance is used to ensure optimal bequest such that there is no accidental bequest. In the absence of the insurance, the biggest part of bequest is accidental.
We explore the sources of household balance sheet adjustment following the collapse of the housing market in 2006. First, we use microdata from the Federal Reserve Board’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey to document that banks cumulatively tightened consumer lending standards more in counties that experienced a house price boom in the mid-2000s than in non-boom counties. We then use the idea that renters, unlike homeowners, did not experience an adverse wealth shock when the housing market collapsed to examine the relative importance of two explanations for the observed deleveraging and the sluggish pickup in consumption after 2008. First, households may have optimally adjusted to lower wealth by reducing their demand for debt and implicitly, their demand for consumption. Alternatively, banks may have been more reluctant to lend in areas with pronounced real estate declines. Our evidence is consistent with the second explanation. Renters with low risk scores, compared to homeowners in the same markets, reduced their levels of nonmortgage debt and credit card debt more in counties where house prices fell more. The contrast suggests that the observed reductions in aggregate borrowing were more driven by cutbacks in the provision of credit than by a demand-based response to lower housing wealth.
In this paper, we study the effect of proportional transaction costs on consumption-portfolio decisions and asset prices in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with a financial market that has a single-period bond and two risky stocks, one of which incurs the transaction cost. Our model has multiple investors with stochastic labor income, heterogeneous beliefs, and heterogeneous Epstein-Zin-Weil utility functions. The transaction cost gives rise to endogenous variations in liquidity. We show how equilibrium in this incomplete-markets economy can be characterized and solved for in a recursive fashion. We have three main findings. One, costs for trading a stock lead to a substantial reduction in the trading volume of that stock, but have only a small effect on the trading volume of the other stock and the bond. Two, even in the presence of stochastic labor income and heterogeneous beliefs, transaction costs have only a small effect on the consumption decisions of investors, and hence, on equity risk premia and the liquidity premium. Three, the effects of transaction costs on quantities such as the liquidity premium are overestimated in partial equilibrium relative to general equilibrium.
Even though fiscal sovereignty still counts as a fundamental principle of government, global and regional economic integration as well as increasing levels of sovereign debt severely limit governments’ tax policy choices. In particular the redistributive function of taxation has suffered in the pursuit of economic competitiveness. As inequality rises and attention is directed again at taxation as a means for redistribution, international cooperation appears as an avenue to enable redistribution through taxation. Yet, one of the predominant international institutions dealing with tax matters – the OECD – with its focus on economic growth and competitiveness and resulting tax policy advice prevents rather than promotes national and international debates on taxation as a question of social justice. The paper argues that questions of taxation need to be perceived as questions of social justice and thus as questions of politics, and not merely of economics. Only if taxation is not considered a mere economic instrument can a ‘political economy’ be maintained. The paper addresses the three objectives of taxation – revenue generation, redistribution and regulation -- and how they are affected as governments aim for fiscal consolidation to conclude that governments’ power to freely pursue and calibrate these objectives has come to appear rather as a myth than the core of sovereignty. It then demonstrates how the OECD’s tax policy advice and cooperation in tax matters react to the constraints on governmental taxation powers; how they aim at economic growth and competitiveness to the detriment of (other) ideas of social justice. The paper concludes with a call for (re)integrating social and global justice concerns into debates on taxation.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the ECB has experienced an unprecedented deterioration in the level of trust. This raises the question as to what factors determine trust in central banking. We use a unique cross-country dataset which includes a rich set of socio-economic characteristics and supplement it with variables meant to reflect a country’s macroeconomic condition. We find that besides individual socio-economic characteristics, macroeconomic conditions play a crucial role in the trust-building process. Our results suggest that agents are boundedly rational in the trust-building process and that current ECB market operations may even be beneficial for trust in the ECB in the long-run.