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236
Asset transaction prices sampled at high frequency are much staler than one might expect in the sense that they frequently lack new updates showing zero returns. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for formalizing this phenomenon. It hinges on the existence of a latent continuous-time stochastic process pt valued in the open interval (0; 1), which represents at any point in time the probability of the occurrence of a zero return. Using a standard infill asymptotic design, we develop an inferential theory for nonparametrically testing, the null hypothesis that pt is constant over one day. Under the alternative, which encompasses a semimartingale model for pt, we develop non-parametric inferential theory for the probability of staleness that includes the estimation of various integrated functionals of pt and its quadratic variation. Using a large dataset of stocks, we provide empirical evidence that the null of the constant probability of staleness is fairly rejected. We then show that the variability of pt is mainly driven by transaction volume and is almost unaffected by bid-ask spread and realized volatility.
233
This paper presents new evidence on the expectation formation process from a Dutch household survey. Households become too optimistic about their future income after their income has improved, consistent with the over-extrapolation of their experience. We show that this effect of experience is persistent and that households over-extrapolate income losses more than income gains. Furthermore, older households over-extrapolate more, suggesting that they did not learn over time to form more accurate expectations. Finally, we study the relationship between expectation errors and consumption. We find that more over-optimistic households intend to consume more and subsequently report higher consumption, even though they do not consume as much as they intended to. These results suggests that overextrapolation hurts consumers and amplify business cycles.
239
Higher capital ratios are believed to improve system-wide financial stability through three main channels: (i) higher loss-absorption capacity, (ii) lower moral hazard, (iii) stabilization of the financial cycle if capital ratios are increased during good times. We examine these mechanisms in a laboratory asset market experiment with indebted participants. We find support for the loss-absorption channel: higher capital ratios reduce the bankruptcy rate. However, we do not find support for the moral hazard channel. Higher capital ratios (insignificantly) increase asset price bubbles, an aggregate measure of excessive risk-taking. Additional evidence suggests that bankruptcy aversion explains this surprising result. Finally, the evidence supports the idea that higher capital ratios in good times stabilize the financial cycle.
205
In contrast to the popularity of financial education interventions worldwide, studies on the economic effects of those interventions report mixed results. With a focus on the effect on disadvantaged groups, we review both the theoretical and empirical findings in order to understand why this discrepancy exists. The survey first highlights that it is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of, and the relationships between, financial education, financial literacy and financial behavior to identify the true effects of financial education. The review addresses possible biases caused by third factors such as numeracy. Next, we review theories on financial literacy which make clear that the effect of financial education interventions is heterogeneous across the population. Last, we look closely at main empirical studies on financial education targeted at the migrants/immigrants, the low-income earners and the young, and compare their methodologies. There seems to be a positive effect on short-term financial knowledge and awareness of the young, but there is no proven evidence on long-term behavior after being grown up. Studies on financial behavior of migrants and immigrants show almost no effect of financial education.
209
This paper studies the distributional consequences of a systematic variation in expenditure shares and prices. Using European Union Household Budget Surveys and Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices data, we construct household-specific price indices and reveal the existence of a pro-rich inflation in Europe. Particularly, over the period 2001-15, the consumption bundles of the poorest deciles in 25 European countries have, on average, become 10.5 percentage points more expensive than those of the richest decile. We find that ignoring the differential inflation across the distribution underestimates the change in the Gini (based on consumption expenditure) by up to 0.03 points. Cross-country heterogeneity in this change is large enough to alter the inequality ranking of numerous countries. The average inflation effect we detect is almost as large as the change in the standard Gini measure over the period of interest.
208
The paper analyses the contagion channels of the European financial system through the stochastic block model (SBM). The model groups homogeneous connectivity patterns among the financial institutions and describes the shock transmission mechanisms of the financial networks in a compact way. We analyse the global financial crisis and European sovereign debt crisis and show that the network exhibits a strong community structure with two main blocks acting as shock spreader and receiver, respectively. Moreover, we provide evidence of the prominent role played by insurances in the spread of systemic risk in both crises. Finally, we demonstrate that policy interventions focused on institutions with inter-community linkages (community bridges) are more effective than the ones based on the classical connectedness measures and represents consequently, a better early warning indicator in predicting future financial losses.
227
We study the role of various trader types in providing liquidity in spot and futures markets based on complete order-book and transactions data as well as cross-market trader identifiers from the National Stock Exchange of India for a single large stock. During normal times, short-term traders who carry little inventory overnight are the primary intermediaries in both spot and futures markets, and changes in futures prices Granger-cause changes in spot prices. However, during two days of fast crashes, Granger-causality ran both ways. Both crashes were due to large-scale selling by foreign institutional investors in the spot market. Buying by short-term traders and cross-market traders was insufficient to stop the crashes. Mutual funds, patient traders with better trade-execution quality who were initially slow to move in, eventually bought sufficient quantities leading to price recovery in both markets. Our findings suggest that market stability requires the presence of well-capitalized standby liquidity providers.
210
We show that time-varying volatility of volatility is a significant risk factor which affects the cross-section and the time-series of index and VIX option returns, beyond volatility risk itself. Volatility and volatility-of-volatility measures, identified model-free from the option price data as the VIX and VVIX indices, respectively, are only weakly related to each other. Delta-hedged index and VIX option returns are negative on average, and are more negative for strategies which are more exposed to volatility and volatility-of-volatility risks. Volatility and volatility of volatility significantly and negatively predict future delta-hedged option payoffs. The evidence is consistent with a no-arbitrage model featuring time-varying market volatility and volatility-of-volatility factors, both of which have negative market price of risk.
215
In the last decade, central bank interventions, flights to safety, and the shift in derivatives clearing resulted in exceptionally high demand for high quality liquid assets, such as German treasuries, in the securities lending market besides the traditional repo market activities. Despite the high demand, the realizable securities lending income has remained economically negligible for most beneficial owners. We provide empirical evidence of pricing inefficiencies in the non-transparent, oligopolistic securities lending market for German treasuries from 2006 to 2015. Consistent with Duffie, Gârleanu and Pedersen (2005)’s theory, we find that the less connected market participants’ interests are underrepresented, evident in the longer maturity segment, where lenders are more likely to be conservative passive investors, such as pension funds and insurance firms. The low price elasticity in this segment hinders these beneficial owners to fully capitalize on the additional income from securities lending, giving rise to important negative welfare implications.
193
This paper analyses whether the post-crisis regulatory reforms developed by global-standard-setting bodies have created appropriate incentives for different types of market participants to centrally clear Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivative contracts. Beyond documenting the observed facts, we analyze four main drivers for the decision to clear: 1) the liquidity and riskiness of the reference entity; 2) the credit risk of the counterparty; 3) the clearing member’s portfolio net exposure with the Central Counterparty Clearing House (CCP) and 4) post trade transparency. We use confidential European trade repository data on single-name Sovereign Credit Derivative Swap (CDS) transactions, and show that for all the transactions reported in 2016 on Italian, German and French Sovereign CDS 48% were centrally cleared, 42% were not cleared despite being eligible for central clearing, while 9% of the contracts were not clearable because they did not satisfy certain CCP clearing criteria. However, there is a large difference between CCP clearing members that clear about 53% of their transactions and non-clearing members, even those that are subject to counterparty risk capital requirements, that almost never clear their trades. Moreover, we find that diverse factors explain clearing members’ decision to clear different CDS contracts: for Italian CDS, counterparty credit risk exposures matter most for the decision to clear, while for French and German CDS, margin costs are the most important factor for the decision. Clearing members use clearing to reduce their exposures to the CCP and largely clear contracts when at least one of the traders has a high counterparty credit risk.
228
The paper investigates the determinants of the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle by allowing linkages across asset returns. The first contribution of the paper is to show that portfolios sorted by increasing indegree computed on the network based on Granger causality test have lower expected returns, not related to idiosyncratic volatility. Secondly, empirical evidence indicates that stocks with higher idiosyncratic volatility have the lower exposition on the indegree risk factor.
235
Through the lens of market participants' objective to minimize counterparty risk, we provide an explanation for the reluctance to clear derivative trades in the absence of a central clearing obligation. We develop a comprehensive understanding of the benefits and potential pitfalls with respect to a single market participant's counterparty risk exposure when moving from a bilateral to a clearing architecture for derivative markets. Previous studies suggest that central clearing is beneficial for single market participants in the presence of a sufficiently large number of clearing members. We show that three elements can render central clearing harmful for a market participant's counterparty risk exposure regardless of the number of its counterparties: 1) correlation across and within derivative classes (i.e., systematic risk), 2) collateralization of derivative claims, and 3) loss sharing among clearing members. Our results have substantial implications for the design of derivatives markets, and highlight that recent central clearing reforms might not incentivize market participants to clear derivatives.
238
Much ado about nothing : a study of differential pricing and liquidity of short and long term bonds
(2018)
Are yields of long-maturity bonds distorted by demand pressure of clientele investors, regulatory effects, or default, flight-to-safety or liquidity premiums? Using data on German nominal bonds between 2005 and 2015, we study the differential pricing and liquidity of short and long maturity bonds. We find statistically significant, but economically negligible segmentation in yields and some degree of liquidity segmentation of short-term versus long-term bonds. These results have important policy implications for the e17.5 trillion European pension and insurance industries: long maturity bond yields seem appropriate for the valuation of long-term liabilities.
224
An important assumption underlying the designation of some insurers as systemically important is that their overlapping portfolio holdings can result in common selling. We measure the overlap in holdings using cosine similarity, and show that insurers with more similar portfolios have larger subsequent common sales. This relationship can be magnified for some insurers when they are regulatory capital constrained or markets are under stress. When faced with an exogenous liquidity shock, insurers with greater portfolio similarity have even larger common sales that impact prices. Our measure can be used by regulators to predict which institutions may contribute most to financial instability through the asset liquidation channel of risk transmission.
214
In this study we investigate which economic ideas were prevalent in the macroprudential discourse post-crises in order to understand the availability of ideas for reform minded agents. We base our analysis on new findings in the field of ideational shifts and regulatory science, which posit that change-agents engage with new ideas pragmatically and strategically in their effort to have their economic ideas institutionalized. We argue that in these epistemic battles over new regulation, scientific backing by academia is the key resource determining the outcome. We show that the present reforms implemented internationally follow this pattern. In our analysis we contrast the entire discourse on systemic risk and macroprudential regulation with Borio’s initial 2003 proposal for a macroprudential framework. We find that mostly cross-sectional measures targeted towards increasing the resilience of the financial system rather than inter-temporal measures dampening the financial cycle have been implemented. We provide evidence for the lacking support of new macroprudential thinking within academia and argue that this is partially responsible for the lack of anti-cyclical macroprudential regulation. Most worryingly, the financial cycle is largely absent in the academic discourse and is only tacitly assumed instead of fully fledged out in technocratic discourses, pointing to the possibility that no anti-cyclical measures will be forthcoming.
237
A number of recent studies have concluded that consumer spending patterns over the month are closely linked to the timing of income receipt. This correlation is interpreted as evidence of hyperbolic discounting. I re-examine patterns of spending in the diary sample of the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey, incorporating information on the timing of the main consumption commitment for most households - their monthly rent or mortgage payment. I find that non-durable and food spending increase with 30-48% on the day housing payments are made, with smaller increases in the days after. Moreover, households with weekly, biweekly and monthly income streams but the same timing of rent/mortgage payments have very similar consumption patterns. Exploiting variation in income, I find that households with extra liquidity decrease non-durable spending around housing payments, especially those households with a large budget share of housing.
195
We investigate different designs of circuit breakers implemented on European trading venues and examine their effectiveness to manage excess volatility and to preserve liquidity. Specifically, we empirically analyze volatility and liquidity around volatility interruptions implemented on the German and Spanish stock market which differ regarding specific design parameters. We find that volatility interruptions in general significantly decrease volatility in the post interruption phase. Unfortunately, this decrease in volatility comes at the cost of decreased liquidity. Regarding design parameters, we find tighter price ranges and shorter durations to support volatility interruptions in achieving their goals.
231
We study the introduction of single-market liquidity provider incentives in fragmented securities markets. Specifically, we investigate whether fee rebates for liquidity providers enhance liquidity on the introducing market and thereby increase its competitiveness and market share. Further, we analyze whether single-market liquidity provider incentives increase overall market liquidity available for market participants. Therefore, we measure the specific liquidity contribution of individual markets to the aggregate liquidity in the fragmented market environment. While liquidity and market share of the venue introducing incentives increase, we find no significant effect for turnover and liquidity of the whole market.
196
Coordination of circuit breakers? Volume migration and volatility spillover in fragmented markets
(2018)
We study circuit breakers in a fragmented, multi-market environment and investigate whether a coordination of circuit breakers is necessary to ensure their effectiveness. In doing so, we analyze 2,337 volatility interruptions on Deutsche Boerse and research whether a volume migration and an accompanying volatility spillover to alternative venues that continue trading can be observed. Different to prevailing theoretical rationale, trading volume on alternative venues significantly decreases during circuit breakers on the main market and we do not find any evidence for volatility spillover. Moreover, we show that the market share of the main market increases sharply during a circuit breaker. Surprisingly, this is amplified with increasing levels of fragmentation. We identify high-frequency trading as a major reason for the vanishing trading activity on the alternative venues and give empirical evidence that a coordination of circuit breakers is not essential for their effectiveness as long as market participants shift to the dominant venue during market stress.
230
We study the impact of transparency on liquidity in OTC markets. We do so by providing an analysis of liquidity in a corporate bond market without trade transparency (Germany), and comparing our findings to a market with full post-trade disclosure (the U.S.). We employ a unique regulatory dataset of transactions of German financial institutions from 2008 until 2014 to find that: First, overall trading activity is much lower in the German market than in the U.S. Second, similar to the U.S., the determinants of German corporate bond liquidity are in line with search theories of OTC markets. Third, surprisingly, frequently traded German bonds have transaction costs that are 39-61 bp lower than a matched sample of bonds in the U.S. Our results support the notion that, while market liquidity is generally higher in transparent markets, a sub-set of bonds could be more liquid in more opaque markets because of investors "crowding" their demand into a small number of more actively traded securities.
201
We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium feedback of private precautionary saving. For logarithmic utility our full analytical solution of the Ramsey problem shows that the optimal aggregate saving rate is independent of income risk. The optimal time-invariant tax on capital is increasing in income risk. Its sign depends on the extent of risk and on the Pareto weight of future generations. If the Ramsey tax rate that maximizes steady state utility is positive, then implementing this tax rate permanently generates a Pareto-improving transition even if the initial equilibrium is dynamically efficient. We generalize our results to Epstein-Zin-Weil utility and show that the optimal steady state saving rate is increasing in income risk if and only if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is smaller than 1.
221
We propose a unified framework to measure the effects of different reforms of the pension system on retirement ages and macroeconomic indicators in the face of demographic change. A rich overlapping generations (OLG) model is built and endogenous retirement decisions are explicitly modeled within a public pension system. Heterogeneity with respect to consumption preferences, wage profiles, and survival rates is embedded in the model. Besides the expected direct effects of these reforms on the behavior of households, we observe that feedback effects do occur. Results suggest that individual retirement decisions are strongly influenced by numerous incentives produced by the pension system and macroeconomic variables, such as the statutory eligibility age, adjustment rates, the presence of a replacement rate, and interest rates. Those decisions, in turn, have several impacts on the macro-economy which can create feedback cycles working through equilibrium effects on interest rates and wages. Taken together, these reform scenarios have strong implications for the sustainability of pension systems. Because of the rich nature of our unified model framework, we are able to rank the reform proposals according to several individual and macroeconomic measures, thereby providing important support for policy recommendations on pension systems.
216
We develop a model that reproduces the average return and volatility spread between sin and non-sin stocks. Our investors do not necessarily boycott sin companies. Rather, they are open to invest in any company while trading off dividends against ethicalness. We show that when dividends and ethicalness are complementary goods and investors are sufficiently risk averse, the model predicts that the dividend share of sin companies exhibits a positive relation with the future return and volatility spreads. Our empirical analysis supports the model's predictions.
200
This paper investigates the roles psychological biases play in empirically estimated deviations between subjective survival beliefs (SSBs) and objective survival probabilities (OSPs). We model deviations between SSBs and OSPs through age-dependent inverse S-shaped probability weighting functions (PWFs), as documented in experimental prospect theory. Our estimates suggest that the implied measures for cognitive weakness, likelihood insensitivity, and those for motivational biases, relative pessimism, increase with age. We document that direct measures of cognitive weakness and motivational attitudes share these trends. Our regression analyses confirm that these factors play strong quantitative roles in the formation of subjective survival beliefs. In particular, cognitive weakness is an increasingly important contributor to the overestimation of survival chances in old age.
253
We show that "quasi-dark" trading venues, i.e., markets with somewhat non-transparent trading mechanisms, are important parts of modern equity market structure alongside lit markets and dark pools. Using the European MiFID II regulation as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that dark pool bans lead to (i) volume spill-overs into quasi-dark trading mechanisms including periodic auctions and order internalization systems; (ii) little volume returning to transparent public markets; and consequently, (iii) a negligible impact on market liquidity and short-term price efficiency. These results show that quasi-dark markets serve as close substitutes for dark pools and consequently mitigate the effectiveness of dark pool regulation. Our findings highlight the need for a broader approach to transparency regulation in modern markets that takes into consideration the many alternative forms of quasi-dark trading.
248
We study how the informativeness of stock prices changes with the presence of high-frequency trading (HFT). Our estimate is based on the staggered start of HFT participation in a panel of international exchanges. With HFT presence, market prices are a less reliable predictor of future cash flows and investment, even more so for longer horizons. Further, firm-level idiosyncratic volatility decreases, and the holdings and trades by institutional investors deviate less from the market-capitalization weighted portfolio as a benchmark. Our results document that the informativeness of prices decreases subsequent to the start of HFT. These findings are consistent with theoretical models of HFTs' ability to anticipate informed order flow, resulting in decreased incentives to acquire fundamental information.
252
We study the effects of market incompleteness on speculation, investor survival, and asset pricing moments, when investors disagree about the likelihood of jumps and have recursive preferences. We consider two models. In a model with jumps in aggregate consumption, incompleteness barely matters, since the consumption claim resembles an insurance product against jump risk and effectively reproduces approximate spanning. In a long-run risk model with jumps in the long-run growth rate, market incompleteness affects speculation, and investor survival. Jump and diffusive risks are more balanced regarding their importance and, therefore, the consumption claim cannot reproduce approximate spanning.
242
Using a unique confidential contract level dataset merged with firm-level asset price data, we find robust evidence that firms' stock market valuations and employment levels respond more to monetary policy announcements the higher the degree of wage rigidity. Data on the renegotiations of collective bargaining agreements allow us to construct an exogenous measure of wage rigidity. We also find that the amplification induced by wage rigidity is stronger for firms with high labor intensity and low profitability, providing evidence of distributional consequences of monetary policy. We rationalize the evidence through a model in which firms in different sectors feature different degrees of wage rigidity due to staggered renegotiations vis-a-vis unions.
251
Decisions under ambiguity depend on both the belief regarding possible scenarios and the attitude towards ambiguity. This paper exclusively investigates the belief formation and belief updating process under ambiguity, using laboratory experiments. The results show that half of the subjects tend to adopt a simple heuristic strategy when updating beliefs, while the other half seems to partially adopt the Bayesian updates. We recover beliefs, represented by distributions of the priors/posteriors. The recoverable initial priors mostly follow a uniform distribution. We also find that subjects on average demonstrate slight pessimism in an ambiguous environment.
250
Do household inflation expectations affect consumption-savings decisions? We link survey data on quantitative inflation expectations to administrative data on income and wealth. We document that households with higher inflation expectations save less. Estimating panel data models with year and household fixed effects, we find that a one percentage point increase in a household's inflation expectation over time is associated with a 250-400 euro reduction in the household's change in net worth per year on average. We also document that households with higher inflation expectations are more likely to acquire a car and acquire higher-value cars. In addition, we provide a quantitative model of household-level inflation expectations.
244
We propose a shrinkage and selection methodology specifically designed for network inference using high dimensional data through a regularised linear regression model with Spike-and-Slab prior on the parameters. The approach extends the case where the error terms are heteroscedastic, by adding an ARCH-type equation through an approximate Expectation-Maximisation algorithm. The proposed model accounts for two sets of covariates. The first set contains predetermined variables which are not penalised in the model (i.e., the autoregressive component and common factors) while the second set of variables contains all the (lagged) financial institutions in the system, included with a given probability. The financial linkages are expressed in terms of inclusion probabilities resulting in a weighted directed network where the adjacency matrix is built “row by row". In the empirical application, we estimate the network over time using a rolling window approach on 1248 world financial firms (banks, insurances, brokers and other financial services) both active and dead from 29 December 2000 to 6 October 2017 at a weekly frequency. Findings show that over time the shape of the out degree distribution exhibits the typical behavior of financial stress indicators and represents a significant predictor of market returns at the first lag (one week) and the fourth lag (one month).
246
We show that banks that are facing relatively high locally non-diversifiable risks in their home region expand more across states than banks that do not face such risks following branching deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s. These banks with high locally non-diversifiable risks also benefit relatively more from deregulation in terms of higher bank stability. Further, these banks expand more into counties where risks are relatively high and positively correlated with risks in their home region, suggesting that they do not only diversify but also build on their expertise in local risks when they expand into new regions.
262
We investigate the default probability, recovery rates and loss distribution of a portfolio of securitised loans granted to Italian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). To this end, we use loan level data information provided by the European DataWarehouse platform and employ a logistic regression to estimate the company default probability. We include loan-level default probabilities and recovery rates to estimate the loss distribution of the underlying assets. We find that bank securitised loans are less risky, compared to the average bank lending to small and medium enterprises.
249
Job loss expectations, durable consumption and household finances : evidence from linked survey data
(2019)
Job security is important for durable consumption and household savings. Using surveys, workers express a probability that they will lose their job in the next 12 months. In order to assess the empirical content of these probabilities, we link survey data to administrative data with labor market outcomes. Workers predict job loss quite well, in particular those whose job loss is followed by unemployment. Workers with higher job loss expectations acquire cheaper cars, and are less likely to buy new cars. In line with models of precautionary saving, higher job loss expectations are associated with more savings and less exposure to risky assets.
257
Depressed demand and supply
(2019)
We investigate the implications of experienced-based learning on consumption-saving and labor supply, two fundamental decisions in business cycle models. Using the Dutch Household Survey, we find that individuals who have experienced higher national unemployment rates over their lifetime save more, borrow less, and work less, after controlling for aggregate shocks, income, wealth, and demographics. Possibly explaining these behavioral responses, these individuals find it more important to save for retirement and to cover unexpected expenses, are more worried about losing their job, and dislike their job more. These results have implications for business cycle models and stabilization policies.
259
We uncover a new channel for spillovers of funding dry-ups. The 2016 US money market fund (MMF) reform exogenously reduced unsecured MMF funding for some banks. We use novel data to trace those banks to a platform for corporate deposit funding. We show that intensified competition for corporate deposits spilled the funding squeeze over to other banks with no MMF exposure. These banks paid more for deposits, and their pool of funding providers deteriorated. Moreover, their lending volumes and margins declined, and their stocks underperformed. Our results suggest that banks' competitiveness in funding markets affect their competitiveness in lending markets.
241
This paper analyzes the effect of financial constraints on firms' corporate social responsibility. Exploiting heterogeneity in firms' exposure to a monetary policy shock in the U.S., which reduced financial constraints for some firms, I find that firms increase their environmental responsibility. I use facility-level data to account for unobservable time-varying influences on pollution and find that toxic emissions decrease when parent companies are more exposed to the monetary policy shock. I further find that these facilities are also more likely to implement pollution abatement activities. Examining within-parent company heterogeneity I find that pollution abatement investments center on facilities at greater risk of facing additional costs due to environmental regulation. The findings are consistent with the idea that a reduction in financial constraints reduces pollution as it allows firms to implement pollution abatement measures.
258
We study nominal wage rigidity in the Netherlands using administrative data, which has three key features: (1) high-frequency (monthly), (2) high-quality (administrative records), and (3) high coverage (the universe of workers and the universe of firms). We find wage rigidity patterns in the data that are similar to wage behavior documented for other European countries. In particular we find that the hazard function has two spikes, one at 12 months and another one at 24 months and wage changes have time and state dependency components. As a novel and important piece of evidence we also uncover substantial heterogeneity in the frequency of wage changes due to explicit terms of the labor contract. In particular, contracts featuring flexible hours, such as on-call contracts, exhibit a higher probability of a change in the contract wage compared to fixed hour contracts. Once we split the sample based on contract characteristics, we also find that the response of wage changes to the time and state component is heterogeneous across different type of contracts - with relatively more downward adjustments in flexible-hour contract wages in response to aggregate unemployment.
255
Using a novel regulatory dataset of fully identified derivatives transactions, this paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of the structure of the euro area interest rate swap (IRS) market after the start of the mandatory clearing obligation. Our dataset contains 1.7 million bilateral IRS transactions of banks and non-banks. Our key results are as follows:
1) The euro area IRS market is highly standardised and concentrated around the group of the G16 Dealers but also around a significant group of core “intermediaries"(and major CCPs).
2) Banks are active in all segments of the IRS euro market, whereas non-banks are often specialised.
3) When using relative net exposures as a proxy for the “flow of risk" in the IRS market, we find that risk absorption takes place in the core as well as the periphery of the network but in absolute terms the risk absorption is largely at the core.
4) Among the Basel III capital and liquidity ratios, the leverage ratio plays a key role in determining a bank's IRS trading activity.
254
Exploiting heterogeneity in U.S. firms' exposure to an unconventional monetary policy shock that reduced debt financing costs, I identify the impact of financing conditions on firms' toxic emissions. I find robust evidence that lower financing costs reduce toxic emissions and boost investments in emission reduction activities, especially capital-intensive pollution control activities. The effect is stronger for firms in noncompliance with environmental regulation. Examining the ability of regaining regulatory compliance by implementing pollution control activities I find that only capital-intensive activities help firms regaining compliance. These findings underscore the impact of firms' financing conditions for emissions and the environment.
260
The use of contractual engineering to create channels of credit intermediation outside of the realm of banking regulation has been a recurring activity in Western financial systems over the last 50 years. After the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, this phenomenon, at that time commonly referred to as ‘shadow banking’, evoked a large-scale regulatory backlash, including several specific regulatory constraints being placed on non-bank financial institutions (NBFI). This paper proposes a different avenue for regulators to keep regulatory arbitrage under control and preserve sufficient space for efficient financial innovation. Rather than engaging in the proverbial race between hare and hedgehog that is emerging with increasingly specific regulation of particular contractual arrangements, this paper argues for a normative approach to supervision. We outline this approach in detail by showing that regulators should primarily analyse the allocation of tail risk inherent in the respective contractual arrangements. Our paper proposes to assign regulatory burdens equivalent to prudential banking regulation, in case these arrangements become only viable through indirect or direct access to an (ad hoc) public backstop. In order to make the pivotal assessment, regulators will need information about recent contractual innovations and their risk-allocating characteristics. According to the scholarship on regulatory networks serving as communities of interpretation, we suggest in particular how regulators should structure their relationships with semi-public gatekeepers such as lawyers, auditors and consultants to keep abreast of the real-world implications of evolving transactional structures. This paper then uses the rise of credit funds as a non-bank entities economically engaged in credit intermediation to apply this normative framework, pointing to recent contractual innovations that call for more regulatory scrutiny in a multipolar regulatory dialogue.
263
Implications of money-back guarantees for individual retirement accounts: protection then and now
(2019)
In the wake of the financial crisis and continued volatility in international capital markets, there is growing interest in mechanisms that can protect people against retirement account volatility. This paper explores the consequences for savers’ wellbeing of implementing market-based retirement account guarantees, using a life cycle consumption and portfolio choice model where investors have access to stocks, bonds, and tax-qualified retirement accounts. We evaluate the case of German Riester plans adopted in 2002, an individual retirement account produce that includes embedded mandatory money-back guarantees. These guarantees influenced participant consumption, saving, and investment behavior in the higher interest rate environment of that era, and they have even larger impacts in a low-return world such as the present. Importantly, we conclude that abandoning these guarantees could enhance old-age consumption for over 80% of retirees, particularly lower earners, without harming consumption during the accumulation phase. Our results are of general interest for other countries implementing default investment options in individual retirement accounts, such as the U.S. 401(k) defined contribution plans and the Pan European Pension Product (PEPP) recently launched by the European Parliament.
243
This paper examines how networks of professional contacts contribute to the development of the careers of executives of North American and European companies. We build a dynamic model of career progression in which career moves may both depend upon existing networks and contribute to the development of future networks. We test the theory on an original dataset of nearly 73 000 executives in over 10 000 _rms. In principle professional networks could be relevant both because they are rewarded by the employer and because they facilitate job mobility. Our econometric analysis suggests that, although there is a substantial positive correlation between network size and executive compensation, with an elasticity of around 20%, almost all of this is due to unobserved individual characteristics. The true causal impact of networks on compensation is closer to an elasticity of 1 or 2% on average, all of this due to enhanced probability of moving to a higher-paid job. And there appear to be strongly diminishing returns to network size.
261
In this paper, we investigate the relation between buildings' energy efficiency and the probability of mortgage default. To this end, we construct a novel panel dataset by combining Dutch loan-level mortgage information with provisional building energy ratings that are calculated by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. By employing the Logistic regression and the extended Cox model, we find that buildings' energy efficiency is associated with lower likelihood of mortgage default. The results hold for a battery of robustness checks. Additional findings indicate that credit risk varies with the degree of energy efficiency.
245
Self-control failure is among the major pathologies (Baumeister et al. (1994)) affecting individual investment decisions which has hardly been measurable in empirical research. We use cigarette addiction identified from checking account transactions to proxy for low self-control and compare over 5,000 smokers to 14,000 nonsmokers. Smokers self-directing their investment trade more frequently, exhibit more biases and achieve lower portfolio returns. We also find that smokers, some of which might be aware of their limited levels of self-control, exhibit a higher propensity than nonsmokers to delegate decision making to professional advisors and fund managers. We document that such precommitments work successfully.
264
A common prediction of macroeconomic models of credit market frictions is that the tightness of financial constraints is countercyclical. As a result, theory implies a negative collateralizability premium; that is, capital that can be used as collateral to relax financial constraints provides insurance against aggregate shocks and commands a lower risk compensation compared with non-collateralizable assets. We show that a longshort portfolio constructed using a novel measure of asset collateralizability generates an average excess return of around 8% per year. We develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and financial constraints to quantitatively account for the collateralizability premium.
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It has been documented that vertical customer-supplier links between industries are the basis for strong cross-sectional stock return predictability (Menzly and Ozbas (2010)). We show that robust predictability also arises from horizontal links between industries, i.e., from the fact that industries are competitors or offer products, which are substitutes for each other. These horizontally linked industries exhibit positively correlated fundamentals. The signal derived from this type of connectedness is the basis for significant alpha in sorted portfolio strategies, and informed investors take the related information into account when they form their portfolios. We thus provide evidence of return predictability based on a new type of economic links between industries not captured in previous studies.
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Do competition and incentives offered to designated market makers (DMMs) improve market liquidity? Using data from NYSE Euronext Paris, we show that an exogenous increase in competition among DMMs leads to a significant decrease in quoted and effective spreads, mainly through a reduction in adverse selection costs. In contrast, changes in incentives, through small changes in rebates and requirements for DMMs, do not have any tangible effect on market liquidity. Our results are of relevance for designing optimal contracts between exchanges and DMMs and for regulatory market oversight.
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Households buy life insurance as part of their liquidity management. The option to surrender such a policy can serve as a buffer when a household faces a liquidity need. In this study, we investigate empirically which individual and household specific sociodemographic factors influence the surrender behavior of life insurance policyholders. Based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), an ongoing wide-ranging representative longitudinal study of around 11,000 private households in Germany, we construct a proxy to identify life insurance surrender in the data. We use this proxy to conduct fixed effect regressions and support the results with survival analyses. We find that life events that possibly impose a liquidity shock to the household, such as birth of a child and divorce increase the likelihood to surrender an existing life insurance policy for an average household in the panel. The acquisition of a dwelling and unemployment are further aspects that can foster life insurance surrender. Our results are robust with respect to different models and hold conditioning on region specific trends; they vary however for different age groups. Our analyses contribute to the existing literature supporting the emergency fund hypothesis. The findings obtained in this study can help life insurers and regulators to detect and understand industry specific challenges of the demographic change.