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For about three decades until the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Covered Interest Parity (CIP) appeared to hold quite closely—even as a broad macroeconomic relationship applying to daily or weekly data. Not only have CIP deviations significantly increased since the GFC, but potential macrofinancial drivers of the variation in CIP deviations have also become significant. The variation in CIP deviations seems to be associated with multiple factors, not only regulatory changes. Most of these do not display a uniform importance across currency pairs and time, and some are associated with possible temporary considerations (such as asynchronous monetary policy cycles).
This paper documents the features of a new database that focuses on changes in the intensity in the usage of several widely used prudential tools, taking into account both macro-prudential and micro-prudential objectives. The database coverage is broad, spanning 64 countries, and with quarterly data for the period 2000Q1 through 2014Q4. The five types of prudential instruments in the database are: capital buffers, interbank exposure limits, concentration limits, loan to value (LTV) ratio limits, and reserve requirements. A total of nine prudential tools are constructed since some useful further decompositions are presented, with capital buffers divided into four subindices: general capital r...
We analyze the joint impact of macroprudential and capital control measures on cross-border banking flows, while controlling for multidimensional aspects in lender-and-borrower-relationships (e.g., distance, cultural proximity, microprudential regulations). We uncover interesting spillover effects from both types of measures when applied either by lender or borrowing countries, with many of them most likely associated with circumvention or arbitrage incentives. While lender countries’ macroprudential policies reduce direct cross-border banking outflows, they are associated with larger outflows through local affiliates. Direct cross-border inflows are higher in borrower countries with more usage of macroprudential policies, and are linked to circumvention motives. In the case of capital controls, most spillovers seem to be present through local affiliates. We do not find evidence to support the idea that additional capital inflow controls could interact with macro-prudential policies to mitigate cross-border spillovers.
Global trade growth has slowed since 2012 relative both to its strong historical performance and to overall economic growth. This paper aims to quantify the role of weak economic growth and changes in its decomposition in accounting for the slowdown in trade using a reduced form and a structural approach. Both analytical investigations suggest that the overall weakness in economic activity, particularly investment, has been the primary restraint on trade growth, accounting for over 80 percent of the decline in the growth of the volume of goods trade between 2012–16 and 2003–07. However, other factors are also weighing on trade in recent years, especially in emerging market and developing economies, as evidenced by the non-negligible role attributed to trade costs by the structural approach.
This paper analyses the nature of the increasing regionalization process in global banking. Despite the large decline in aggregate cross-border banking lending volumes, some parts of the global banking network are currently more interlinked regionally than before the Global Financial Crisis. After developing a simple theoretical model capturing banks' internationalization decisions, our estimation shows that this regionalization trend is present even after controlling for traditional gravitational variables (e.g. distance, language, legal system, etc.), especially among lenders in EMs and non-core banking systems, such as Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Moreover, this regionalization trend was present before the GFC, but it has increased since then, and it seems to be associated with regulatory variables and the opportunities created by the retrenchment of several European lenders.
During the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), state-owned or public banks lent relatively more than domestic private banks in many countries. However, data limitations have hindered a thorough assessment of what led public banks to better maintain lending during the GFC. Using a novel bank-level dataset covering 25 emerging market economies, we show that public banks lent relatively more during the GFC because they pursued an objective of helping to stabilize the economy, rather than because they had superior fundamentals or access to public or depositors’ funding. Nonetheless, their countercyclical behavior seems unique to the GFC rather than a regular characteristic of public banks before and after the GFC.
A cross-country comparative analysis shows that there is substantial room for further integration of China into global financial markets, especially in the case of the international bond market. A further successful liberalization of the Chinese bond market would encompass not only loosening bond market regulations, but also further developing of other markets, notably the foreign exchange market. Even though the increased integration of China into international capital markets would increase its exposure to the global financial cycle, the costs in terms of monetary autonomy would not be large given China’s size and especially under a well-articulated macroeconomic framework.
Post-crisis dynamics show a shrinkage in the overall amount of crossborder bank lending, which has been interpreted in the literature as a retreat in financial globalization. In this paper, we argue that aggregate figures are not sufficient to support such a claim in terms of the overall structure of the global banking network. Based on a systematic approach to measuring, mapping and analyzing financial interconnectedness among countries using network theory, we show that, despite the decline in aggregate lending volumes, the structure of the network has developed increased connections in some dimensions. Some parts of the network are currently more interlinked regionally than before the cri...
We provide a systematic empirical treatment of short-term Covered Interest Parity (CIP) deviations for a large set of emerging market (EM) currencies. EM CIP deviations have much larger volatilities than most G10 currencies and move in an opposite direction during global risk-off episodes. While off-shore EM CIP deviations are sensitive to changes in FX dealers’ risk-bearing capacities and global risk aversion, on-shore EM CIP deviations are largely unresponsive in segmented FX markets. Moreover, the sensitivity of offshore EM CIP deviations to global risk factors for currencies with segmented FX markets is stronger compared to their counterparts with integrated FX markets. We find weak evidence of country default risk affecting EM CIP deviations after accounting for global factors.
Superficial examination of aggregate gross cross-border capital inflow data suggests that there was no substitution between portfolio inflows and bank loans in recent years. However, our novel analysis of disaggregate inflows (both by types of instrument and borrower) shows interesting heterogeneity. There has been substitution of bank loans for portfolio debt securities not only in the case of corporate and sovereign borrowers in advanced countries, but also sovereign borrowers in emerging countries. In the case of corporate borrowers in emerging markets, the relationship corresponds to complementarity across types of gross capital inflows, especially during periods of positive capital gross inflows after the global financial crisis. A large part of these patterns does not seem to be driven by a common phenomenon across countries associated with the global financial cycle, but rather by country-specific factors.