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44
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.
43
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.
42
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.
41
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.
40 [Ver. juni 2015]
This paper studies the life cycle consumption-investment-insurance problem of a family. The wage earner faces the risk of a health shock that significantly increases his probability of dying. The family can buy long-term life insurance that can only be revised at significant costs, which makes insurance decisions sticky. Furthermore, a revision is only possible as long as the insured person is healthy. A second important feature of our model is that the labor income of the wage earner is unspanned. We document that the combination of unspanned labor income and the stickiness of insurance decisions reduces the long-term insurance demand significantly. This is because an income shock induces the need to reduce the insurance coverage, since premia become less affordable. Since such a reduction is costly and families anticipate these potential costs, they buy less protection at all ages. In particular, young families stay away from long-term life insurance markets altogether. Our results are robust to adding short-term life insurance, annuities and health insurance.
40
This paper studies the life cycle consumption-investment-insurance problem of a family. The wage earner faces the risk of a health shock that significantly increases his probability of dying. The family can buy term life insurance with realistic features. In particular, the available contracts are long term so that decisions are sticky and can only be revised at significant costs. Furthermore, a revision is only possible as long as the insured person is healthy. A second important and realistic feature of our model is that the labor income of
the wage earner is unspanned. We document that the combination of unspanned labor income and the stickiness of insurance decisions reduces the insurance demand significantly. This is because an income shock induces the need to reduce the insurance coverage, since premia become less affordable. Since such a reduction is costly and families anticipate these potential costs, they buy less protection at all ages. In particular, young families stay away from life insurance markets altogether.
39
Banks' financial distress, lending supply and consumption expenditure : [version december 2013]
(2014)
The paper employs a unique identification strategy that links survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank level data in order to estimate the effects of bank financial distress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures. Specifically, we show that households whose banks were more exposed to funding shocks report significantly lower levels of non-mortgage liabilities compared to a matched sample of households. The reduced access to credit, however, does not result in lower levels of consumption. Instead, we show that households compensate by drawing down liquid assets. Only households without the ability to draw on liquid assets reduce consumption. The results are consistent with consumption smoothing in the face of a temporary adverse lending supply shock. The results contrast with recent evidence on the real effects of finance on firms' investment, where even temporary adverse credit supply shocks are associated with significant real effects.
38
This paper tests whether an increase in insured deposits causes banks to become more risky. We use variation introduced by the U.S. Emergency Economic Stabilization Act in October 2008, which increased the deposit insurance coverage from $100,000 to $250,000 per depositor and bank. For some banks, the amount of insured deposits increased significantly; for others, it was a minor change. Our analysis shows that the more affected banks increase their investments in risky commercial real estate loans and become more risky relative to unaffected banks following the change. This effect is most distinct for affected banks that are low capitalized.
37
We introduce a new measure of systemic risk, the change in the conditional joint probability of default, which assesses the effects of the interdependence in the financial system on the general default risk of sovereign debtors. We apply our measure to examine the fragility of the European financial system during the ongoing sovereign debt crisis. Our analysis documents an increase in systemic risk contributions in the euro area during the post-Lehman global recession and especially after the beginning of the euro area sovereign debt crisis. We also find a considerable potential for cascade effects from small to large euro area sovereigns. When we investigate the effect of sovereign default on the European Union banking system, we find that bigger banks, banks with riskier activities, with poor asset quality, and funding and liquidity constraints tend to be more vulnerable to a sovereign default. Surprisingly, an increase in leverage does not seem to influence systemic vulnerability.
36
We show that market discipline, defined as the extent to which firm specific risk characteristics are reflected in market prices, eroded during the recent financial crisis in 2008. We design a novel test of changes in market discipline based on the relation between firm specific risk characteristics and debt-to-equity hedge ratios. We find that market discipline already weakened after the rescue of Bear Stearns before disappearing almost entirely after the failure of Lehman Brothers. The effect is stronger for investment banks and large financial institutions, while there is no comparable effect for non-financial firms.
35
Advances in technology and several regulatory initiatives have led to the emergence of a competitive but fragmented equity trading landscape in the US and Europe. While these changes have brought about several benefits like reduced transaction costs, regulators and market participants have also raised concerns about the potential adverse effects associated with increased execution complexity and the impact on market quality of new types of venues like dark pools. In this article we review the theoretical and empirical literature examining the economic arguments and motivations underlying market fragmentation, as well as the resulting implications for investors' welfare. We start with the literature that views exchanges as natural monopolies due to presence of network externalities, and then examine studies which challenge this view by focusing on trader heterogeneity and other aspects of the microstructure of equity markets.
34
We analyze the equilibrium in a two-tree (sector) economy with two regimes. The output of each tree is driven by a jump-diffusion process, and a downward jump in one sector of the economy can (but need not) trigger a shift to a regime where the likelihood of future jumps is generally higher. Furthermore, the true regime is unobservable, so that the representative Epstein-Zin investor has to extract the probability of being in a certain regime from the data. These two channels help us to match the stylized facts of countercyclical and excessive return volatilities and correlations between sectors. Moreover, the model reproduces the predictability of stock returns in the data without generating consumption growth predictability. The uncertainty about the state also reduces the slope of the term structure of equity. We document that heterogeneity between the two sectors with respect to shock propagation risk can lead to highly persistent aggregate price-dividend ratios. Finally, the possibility of jumps in one sector triggering higher overall jump probabilities boosts jump risk premia while uncertainty about the regime is the reason for sizeable diffusive risk premia.
33
We present a thought-provoking study of two monetary models: the cash-in-advance and the Lagos and Wright (2005) models. We report that the different approach to modeling money — reduced-form vs. explicit role — neither induces theoretical nor quantitative differences in results. Given conformity of preferences, technologies and shocks, both models reduce to one difference equation. The equations do not coincide only if price distortions are differentially imposed across models. To illustrate, when cash prices are equally distorted in both models equally large welfare costs of inflation are obtained in each model. Our insight is that if results differ, then this is due to differential assumptions about the pricing mechanism that governs cash transactions, not the explicit microfoundation of money.
32
Monetary theorists have advanced an intriguing notion: we exchange money to make up for a lack of enforcement, when it is difficult to monitor and sanction opportunistic behaviors. We demonstrate that, in fact, monetary equilibrium cannot generally be sustained when monitoring and punishment limitations preclude enforcement — external or not. Simply put, monetary systems cannot operate independently of institutions — formal or informal — designed to monitor behaviors and sanction undesirable ones. This fundamental result is derived by integrating monetary theory with the theory of repeated games, studying monetary equilibrium as the outcome of a matching game with private monitoring.
31
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.
30
We examine whether the robustifying nature of Taylor rule cross-checking under model uncertainty carries over to the case of parameter uncertainty. Adjusting monetary policy based on this kind of cross-checking can improve the outcome for the monetary authority. This, however, crucially depends on the relative welfare weight that is attached to the output gap and also the degree of monetary policy commitment. We find that Taylor rule cross-checking is on average able to improve losses when the monetary authority only moderately cares about output stabilization and when policy is set in a discretionary way.
29
The analyses of intersectoral linkages of Leontief (1941) and Hirschman (1958) provide a natural way to study the transmission of risk among interconnected banks and to measure their systemic importance. In this paper we show how classic input-output analysis can be applied to banking and how to derive six indicators that capture different aspects of systemic importance, using a simple numerical example for illustration. We also discuss the relationship with other approaches, most notably network centrality measures, both formally and by means of a simulated network.
28
This paper compares two classes of models that allow for additional channels of correlation between asset returns: regime switching models with jumps and models with contagious jumps. Both classes of models involve a hidden Markov chain that captures good and bad economic states. The distinctive feature of a model with contagious jumps is that large negative returns and unobservable transitions of the economy into a bad state can occur simultaneously. We show that in this framework the filtered loss intensities have dynamics similar to self-exciting processes. Besides, we study the impact of unobservable contagious jumps on optimal portfolio strategies and filtering.
27
This paper analyzes the evolving architecture for the prudential supervision of banks in the euro area. It is primarily concerned with the likely effectiveness of the SSM as a regime that intends to bolster financial stability in the steady state.
By using insights from the political economy of bureaucracy it finds that the SSM is overly focused on sharp tools to discipline captured national supervisors and thus under-incentives their top-level personnel to voluntarily contribute to rigid supervision. The success of the SSM in this regard will hinge on establishing a common supervisory culture that provides positive incentives for national supervisors. In this regard, the internal decision making structure of the ECB in supervisory matters provides some integrative elements. Yet, the complex procedures also impede swift decision making and do not solve the problem adequately. Ultimately, a careful design and animation of the ECB-defined supervisory framework and the development of inter-agency career opportunities will be critical.
The ECB will become a de facto standard setter that competes with the EBA. A likely standoff in the EBA’s Board of Supervisors will lead to a growing gap in regulatory integration between SSM-participants and other EU Member States.
Joining the SSM as a non-euro area Member State is unattractive because the cur-rent legal framework grants no voting rights in the ECB’s ultimate decision making body. It also does not supply a credible commitment opportunity for Member States who seek to bond to high quality supervision.
26
In this paper we provide new evidence that corporate financing decisions are associated with managerial incentives to report high equity earnings. Managers rely most heavily on debt to finance their asset growth when their future earnings prospects are poor, when they are under pressure due to past declines in earnings, negative past stock returns, and excessively optimistic analyst earnings forecasts, and when the earnings yield is high relative to bond yields so that from an accounting perspective equity is ‘expensive’. Managers of high debt issuing firms are more likely to be newly appointed and also more likely to be replaced in subsequent years. Abnormal returns on portfolios formed on the basis of asset growth and debt issuance are strongly positively associated with the contemporaneous changes in returns on assets and on equity as well as with earnings surprises. This may account for the finding that debt issuance forecasts negative abnormal returns, since debt issuance also forecasts negative changes in returns on assets and on equity and negative earnings surprises. Different mechanisms appear to be at work for firms that retire debt.