Does the presence of immigrants in one's neighborhood affect voting for far right-wing parties? We study the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) that, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, increased its vote share from less than 5% in the early 1980s to 27% by the end of the 1990s and continued to attract more than 20% of voters in the 2013 national election. We find that the inflow of immigrants into a community has a significant impact on the increase in the community's voting share for the FPÖ, explaining roughly a tenth of the regional variation in vote changes. Our results suggest that voters worry about adverse labor market effects of immigration, as well as about the quality of their neighborhood. In fact, we find evidence of a negative impact of immigration on “compositional amenities”. In communities with larger immigration influx, Austrian children commute longer distances to school, and fewer daycare resources are provided. We do not find evidence that Austrians move out of communities with increasing immigrant presence.
This paper provides a unique snapshot of the exposures of EU banks to shadow banking entities within the global financial system. Drawing on a rich and novel dataset, the paper documents the cross-sector and cross-border linkages and considers which are the most relevant for systemic risk monitoring. From a macroprudential perspective, the identification of potential feedback and contagion channels arising from the linkages of banks and shadow banking entities is particularly challenging when shadow banking entities are domiciled in different jurisdictions. The analysis shows that many of the EU banks’ exposures are towards non-EU entities, particularly US-domiciled shadow banking entities. At the individual level, banks’ exposures are diversified although this diversification leads to high overlap across different types of shadow banking entities.
In this paper, we show both theoretically and empirically that the size of over-the-counter (OTC) markets can be reduced without affecting individual net positions. First, we find that the networked nature of these markets generates an excess of notional obligations between the aggregate gross amount and the minimum amount required to satisfy each individual net position. Second, we show conditions under which such excess can be removed. We refer to this netting operation as compression and identify feasibility and effciency criteria, highlighting intermediation as the key element for excess levels. We show that a trade-off exists between the amount of notional that can be eliminated from the system and the conservation of original trading relationships. Third, we apply our framework to a unique and comprehensive transaction-level dataset on OTC derivatives including all firms based in the European Union. On average, we find that around 75% of market gross notional relates to excess. While around 50% can in general be removed via bilateral compression, more sophisticated multilateral compression approaches are substantially more effcient. In particular, we find that even the most conservative multilateral approach which satisfies relationship constraints can eliminate up to 98% of excess in the markets.
Any solvency regime for financial institutions should be aligned with the two fundamental objectives of regulation: protecting liability holders and securing the stability of the financial system. From these objectives wederive two normative requirements for capital adequacy tests, called surplus and numeraire invariance, respectively. We characterize capital adequacy tests that satisfy surplus and numeraire invariance, establish anintimate link between these requirements, and highlight aninherent tension between the ability to meet them and the desire to give credit for diversification.
Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, a deep analogy between the origins of instability in financial systems and complex ecosystems has been pointed out: in both cases, topological features of network structures influence how easily distress can spread within the system. However, in financial network models, the details of how financial institutions interact typically play a decisive role, and a general understanding of precisely how network topology creates instability remains lacking. Here we show how processes that are widely believed to stabilize the financial system, that is, market integration and diversification, can actually drive it towards instability, as they contribute to create cyclical structures which tend to amplify financial distress, thereby undermining systemic stability and making large crises more likely. This result holds irrespective of the details of how institutions interact, showing that policy-relevant analysis of the factors affecting financial stability can be carried out while abstracting away from such details.
Die Verwaltungsräte börsenkotierter Unternehmen stehen zunehmend aktiveren und kritischeren Investoren gegenüber. Gleichzeitig häufen sich regulatorische Anforderungen. Der Artikel beleuchtet anhand einer empirischen Analyse den Verwaltungsrat im Spannungsfeld zwischen Regulierung und Marktdisziplin.
In this a paper a non-linear macro stress testing methodology with focus on early warning is developed. The methodology builds on a variant of Random Forests and its proximity measures. It is embedded in a framework, in which naturally defined contagion and feedback effects transfer the impact of stressing a relatively small part of the observations on the whole dataset, allowing to estimate a stressed future state. It will be shown that contagion can be directly derived from the proximities while iterating the proximity based contagion leads to naturally defined feedback effects. Since the methodology is Random Forests based the framework can be estimated on large numbers of risk indicators up to big data dimensions, fostering the stability of the results while reducing inaccuracies in estimated stress scenarios by only stressing a small part of the observations. This procedure allows accurate forecasting of events under stress and the emergence of a potential macro crisis. The framework also estimates a set of the most influential economic indicators leading to the potential crisis, which can then be used as indications of remediation or prevention.
