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Credit booms are a focal point for policymakers and scholars of financial crises. Yet our understanding of how the real sector behaves during booms, and why some booms may go bad, is limited. Despite a large and growing body of literature, most of the work has focused on aggregate economic activity, and relatively little is known about which industries benefit and which suffer during these episodes. This note aims to fill this gap by analyzing disaggregated output and employment data in a large sample of advanced and emerging market economies between 1970 and 2014.
It is challenging to explain the collapse in the price of subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) during the Financial Crisis of 2008, using the existing models of fire-sale. I present a model to demonstrate that fire-sales may happen even when there is a relatively sizable pool of natural buyers and in the absence of asymmetric information, due to a coordination failure among buyers: buyers’ waiting to trade at a lower price tomorrow, can lead to a collapse in the price and trade volume today. In particular, I show that when trade is decentralized and participation is endogenous, a medium level of asset demand and liquidity needs that are ex-pected to increase over time create complementarity among buyers’ decisions to wait. This complementarity makes competitive markets prone to coordination failures and fire-sales accompanied by a collapse in the trade volume. Fire-sales may also be inefficient. I also discuss various policy options to eliminate the risk of fire-sales in such a setup.
This paper studies a novel type of misallocation of credit between investments of varying liquidity. One type of investment is more liquid, i.e., its return is more pledgeable, and the other is more productive. Low liquidities of both investment types imply that the allocation of credit is constrained inefficient and that there is overinvestment in the liquid type. Constrained inefficient equilibria feature non-positive, i.e., one less than or equal the economy’s growth rate, and yet too high interest rate, too much investment and too little consumption. Financial development can reduce long-term welfare and output in a constrained inefficient equilibrium if it raises the liquidity of the liquid type. I show a maximum liquid asset ratio or a simple debt tax can achieve constrained efficiency. Introducing government bonds can make Pareto improvement whenever it does not raise the interest rate.
This Technical Assistance followed a request by the Debt Management Directorate of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MINECOFIN) of Rwanda to develop the capacity in public debt projections and analysis. The development and discussion of DDT scenarios by officials contributed to a better understanding of debt projections across the MINECOFIN.
We explore the early warning properties of a composite indicator which summarizes signals from a range of asset price growth and asset price volatility indicators to capture mispricing of risk in asset markets. Using a quarterly panel of 108 advanced and emerging economies over 1995-2017, we show that the combination of rapid asset price growth and low asset price volatility is a good predictor of future financial crises. Elevated levels of our indicator significantly increase the probability of entering a crisis within the next three years relative to normal times when the indicator is not elevated. The indicator outperforms credit-based early warning metrics, a result robust to prediction horizons, methodological choices, and income groups. Our results are consistent with the idea that measures based on asset prices can offer critical information about systemic risk levels to policymakers.
Using a sample of publicly listed banks from 62 countries over the 1991-2017 period, we investigate the impact of capital on banks’ cost of equity. Consistent with the theoretical prediction that more equity in the capital mix leads to a fall in firms’ costs of equity, we find that better capitalized banks enjoy lower equity costs. Our baseline estimations indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in a bank’s equity-to-assets ratio lowers its cost of equity by about 18 basis points. Our results also suggest that the form of capital that investors value the most is sheer equity capital; other forms of capital, such as Tier 2 regulatory capital, are less (or not at all) valued by investors. Additionally, our main finding that capital has a negative effect on banks’ cost of equity holds in both developed and developing countries. The results of this paper provide the missing evidence in the debate on the effects of higher capital requirements on banks’ funding costs.
Motivated by the world-wide surge of FinTech lending, we analyze the implications of lenders’ information technology adoption for financial stability. We estimate bank-level intensity of IT adoption before the global financial crisis using a novel dataset that provides information on hardware used in US commercial bank branches after mapping them to their parent bank. We find that higher intensity of IT-adoption led to significantly lower non-performing loans when the crisis hit: banks with a one standard deviation higher IT-adoption experienced 10% lower non-performing loans. High-IT-adoption banks were not less exposed to the crisis through their geographical footprint, business model, f...
This paper examines how the growing presence of FinTech firms affects the performance of traditional financial institutions. The findings point to a negative impact on profitability, primarily due to a reduction in interest income and a rise in operational costs. Although established financial institutions have tried to diversify their revenue streams, these efforts have proven inadequate to offset the losses associated with increased competition from FinTech firms. Our study also reveals that various FinTech business models, such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending and Balance Sheet lending, have varying effects on financial institutions. Cooperative banks experience more significant profit deter...
During the last decade, Hong Kong SAR has experienced a large increase in house prices and credit, prompting the authorities to respond with several rounds of tightening macroprudential rules and increasing stamp duty taxes. This paper provides a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model for Hong Kong SAR and analyzes the effectiveness of these measures, and finds that they have helped reduce house price appreciation and household leverage. A baseline small open economy real business cycle model is extended by including a housing sector, financial frictions, foreign demand for the domestic housing stock, and is estimated using Bayesian methods and data for Hong Kong SAR between 1996 and 2017. The paper finds that, without these policies, house prices would have been 10.5 percent higher, and the household credit-GDP ratio 14 percent higher.
We analyze how bank profitability impacts financial stability from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We first develop a theoretical model of the relationship between bank profitability and financial stability by exploring the role of non-interest income and retail-oriented business models. We then conduct panel regression analysis to examine the empirical determinants of bank risks and profitability, and how the level and the source of bank profitability affect risks for 431 publicly traded banks (U.S., advanced Europe, and GSIBs) from 2004 to 2017. Results reveal that profitability is negatively associated with both a bank’s contribution to systemic risk and its idiosyncratic r...