O. Groot, Falk Mazelis, Roberto Motto, Annukka Ristiniemi
{"title":"A Toolkit for Computing Constrained Optimal Policy Projections (COPPs)","authors":"O. Groot, Falk Mazelis, Roberto Motto, Annukka Ristiniemi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3849839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3849839","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a toolkit for generating optimal policy projections. It makes five contributions. First, the toolkit requires a minimal set of inputs: only a baseline projection for target and instrument variables and impulse responses of those variables to policy shocks. Second, it solves optimal policy projections under commitment, limited-time commitment, and discretion. Third, it handles multiple policy instruments. Fourth, it handles multiple constraints on policy instruments such as a lower bound on the policy rate and an upper bound on asset purchases. Fifth, it allows alternative approaches to address the forward guidance puzzle. The toolkit that accompanies this paper is Dynare compatible, which facilitates its use. Examples replicate existing results in the optimal monetary policy literature and illustrate the usefulness of the toolkit for highlighting policy trade-offs. We use the toolkit to analyse US monetary policy at the height of the Great Financial Crisis. Given the Fed’s early-2009 baseline macroeconomic projections, we find the Fed’s planned use of the policy rate was close to optimal whereas a more aggressive QE program would have been beneficial.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128404495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moral Hazard During the Housing Boom: Evidence from Private Mortgage Insurance","authors":"Neil Bhutta, Benjamin J. Keys","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3811996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3811996","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We provide novel evidence of misaligned incentives fueling a portion of the 2000s mortgage boom. We document that private mortgage insurance (PMI) companies expanded insurance issuance on high-risk mortgages purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the tail end of the housing boom, without changing pricing and despite knowledge of heightened housing risk. The expansion of PMI facilitated an unprecedented increase in Fannie and Freddie’s risky purchases, extending the mortgage boom into 2007 and precipitating their collapse. We argue that this unraveling reflects a general moral hazard problem in insurance, coupled with misaligned incentives in the government-backed mortgage market.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114855115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correlated Portfolio Inventory Risk of Liquidity Providers: Frictions and Market Fragility","authors":"R. Kozhan, Vikas Raman, P. Yadav","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3669329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3669329","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate, for limit order book equity markets, how trading, liquidity provision, and the overall market quality in one security are influenced by correlated inventory risk exposures of liquidity providers to other securities in their portfolios. We find strong support for Ho and Stoll (1983). Our results are also consistent with large and correlated portfolio inventories worsening different measures of market quality – including bid-ask spreads and pricing errors – and increasing the number and likelihood of extreme price movements and transitory jumps in stock returns. We accordingly highlight a significant but often overlooked source of market frictions, contagion, and fragility.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133973330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital Finance, COVID-19 and Existential Sustainability Crises: Setting the Agenda for the 2020s","authors":"D. Arner, Ross P. Buckley, A. Dahdal, D. Zetzsche","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3783605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3783605","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines how the digital financial infrastructure that emerged in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis is being tested and leveraged to meet some of the financial, economic and health challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The origins of the 2008 crisis and the current crisis are different: the 2008 crisis was a financial crisis that spilt over into the real economy, while COVID-19 is a health and geopolitical crisis spilling over into the real economy. As such, COVID-19 – a pandemic and an existential sustainability crisis – requires different approaches. This paper explores the role of digital finance in this context on two levels. At the macro level, it identifies how digital finance has been used to address areas of systemic risk and underpin wider financial stability. At the micro level, it illustrates how digital financial tools can address a range of emerging challenges particularly relating to recovery. COVID-19 experiences are driving forward a range of efforts to build better infrastructure to address future crises, in particular interoperable electronic payments systems (including central bank digital currencies and other forms of sovereign digital currency), sovereign digital identification (particularly in the context of market integrity and non face-to-face transactions), and use of technology for regulatory, supervisory and compliance purposes, At the same time, we argue that digitization generally and of finance in particular driven by the COVID-19 crisis – while providing effective tools to support the response – have also raised new challenges, particularly around forms of TechRisk arising from control and use of data from both state and non-state actors. Looking forward, these are among the most significant challenges for policy, law and regulation in the 2020s.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130008544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dynamic Banking with Non-Maturing Deposits","authors":"Urban Jermann, Haotian Xiang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3775790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3775790","url":null,"abstract":"Bank liabilities include debt with long-term maturities and deposits that typically are not withdrawn for extended periods. This subjects bank liabilities to debt dilution. Our analysis shows that this has major effects for how monetary policy shocks are transmitted to banks and for optimal capital regulation. Interest rate cuts produce protracted increases in bank risk which are stronger in low rate regimes. Capital regulation addresses debt dilution but is subject to a time-inconsistency problem. We compare Ramsey and Markov-perfect optimal policies and find that regulator commitment significantly impacts optimal bank capital regulation, sometimes in unexpected ways.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124763566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Counter-Hegemonic Finance: The Gamestop Short Squeeze","authors":"Usman W. Chohan","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3775127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3775127","url":null,"abstract":"The events that surrounded the short squeeze of various downtrodden stocks such as Gamestop (GME) allude to a counter-hegemonic financial effort, with small-scale investors pooling in to sabotage the short-positions of large Wall Street players such as hedge funds. This paper frames these events in terms of public reprisal for the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and public contempt for insular financial private interest. The discussion suggests that such people-power initiatives, abetted by powerful elite sympathizers, have a powerful signalling effect on the public in terms of highlighting fundamental vulnerabilities in an extractive financial system.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"610 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131964169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Financial Network and Systemic Risk -- A Dynamic Model","authors":"H. Chen, Tan Wang, D. Yao","doi":"10.1111/POMS.13384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/POMS.13384","url":null,"abstract":"We develop a dynamic model to study the systemic risk of the banking network, so as to study the dynamics of bank defaults. In contrast to the existing literature, we show that while the possibility of contagion is determined by interconnectedness of the financial network, whether a financial crisis can occur depends on the profile of the liquid assets of the banks in the system. Based on the dynamic model, we introduce a time to crisis index that allows us to predict the occurrence of a financial crisis. We then provide an intuitive measure of systemic risk. To illustrate the potential usefulness of our model, we provide an analysis of the system of twenty two German banks. We show how many of the banks are fundamentally weak, where the contagion effect may arise from, how strong the contagion effect is, and how significant the systemic risk is.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127685040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The COVID-19 Pandemic and Sovereign Credit Risk","authors":"Wei-Fong Pan, Xinjie Wang, Ge Wu, Weike Xu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3769644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3769644","url":null,"abstract":"PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads using a large sample of countries.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors use a wide set of the sovereign CDS data of 78 countries. To measure the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors use the daily change of confirmed cases collected from Our World in Data. They use panel regressions to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sovereign credit risk.FindingsThe authors show how sovereign CDS spreads have widened significantly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the most conservative estimate, a 1% increase in COVID-19 infections leads to a 0.17% increase in sovereign CDS spreads. Furthermore, this effect is stronger for developing countries and countries with worse healthcare systems. Government policies partially offset the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, although these same policies also lead to widening sovereign CDS spreads. Sovereign CDS spreads narrow dramatically several months after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, the results suggest that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a massive shock to the global financial stability.Originality/valueThis paper provides new evidence that COVID-19 widens sovereign CDS spreads. The authors further show that this widening effect is felt most strongly in developing economies.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125548283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bank Herding, Size, and Financial Health: Evidence from Japanese Regional Banks","authors":"Ryuichi Nakagawa","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3767260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3767260","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the herd behavior of regional banks during financial fluctuations using loan data on Japanese banks from the 1980s to the 1990s. We use the herding measure developed by Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny (1992) and Uchida and Nakagawa (2007) to detect evidence of herding and its inefficiency. The findings are threefold. First, herding and its inefficiency was consistently observed, regardless of financial fluctuations. Second, the magnitude of herding was not related with bank sizes. Finally, the herding magnitude was positively related with bank's financial health.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"223 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115315319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of Covid-19 on Us Firms","authors":"N. Bloom, Robert S. G. Fletcher, Ethan Yeh","doi":"10.3386/W28314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W28314","url":null,"abstract":"We use survey data on an opt-in panel of around 2,500 US small businesses to assess the impact of COVID-19. We find a significant negative sales impact that peaked in Quarter 2 of 2020, with an average loss of 29% in sales. The large negative impact masks significant heterogeneity, with over 40% of firms reporting zero or a positive impact, while almost a quarter report losses of more than 50%. These impacts also appear to be persistent, with firms reporting the largest sales drops in mid-2020 still forecasting large sales losses a year later in mid-2021. In terms of business types, we find that the smallest offline firms experienced sales drops of over 40% compared to less than 10% for the largest online firms. Finally, in terms of owners, we find female and black owners reported significantly larger drops in sales. Owners with a humanities degree also experienced far larger losses, while those with a STEM degree saw the least impact.","PeriodicalId":123550,"journal":{"name":"Financial Crises eJournal","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114393334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}