We conducted a simple, anonymous survey at the beginning of 2014, asking around 200 economists worldwide to reveal their inflation expectations, conditional on either Ben Bernanke or Janet Yellen being the chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. We use the change in the Fed's leadership to focus attention on the difference in conditional expectations, while we are interested in the distribution of those expectations. The outcome of the survey shows that a significant share of respondents revealed asymmetric inflation expectations and that the deviation from symmetry is sizeable. Nonetheless, individual asymmetry in forecasts appears to be irrelevant for the aggregate distribution, as the number of respondents who factor in excess inflation broadly matches the number of those who gave more weight to disinflationary outcomes. The aggregate distribution we obtain is largely comparable to the outcome of the Survey of Professional Forecasters for the first quarter of 2014.
How can a central bank control interest rates in an environment with large excess reserves? In this paper, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of a secured money market and calibrate it to the Swiss franc repo market to study this question. The theoretical model allows us to identify the factors that determine demand and supply of central bank reserves, the money market rate and trading activity in the money market. In addition, we simulate various instruments that a central bank can use to exit from unconventional monetary policy. These instruments are assessed with respect to the central bank's ability to control the money market rate, their impact on the trading activity and the operational costs of an exit. All exit instruments allow central banks to attain an interest rate target. However, the trading activity differs significantly among the instruments and central bank bills and reverse repos are the most cost-effective.
This paper shows that standard multifactor asset pricing models provide an adequate description of excess returns on stock indexes of German industrial sectors. The only exception is the banking sector index. It offers lower monthly excess returns than suggested by exposures to risk factors in the sample period from 1973 to 2014. This evidence is robust to various changes in the specification of the empirical model. Rolling time window regressions highlight that this finding has been most pronounced since the peak of the global financial crisis in 2008/2009 when the government guarantee for big, systemically important German banks became explicit.
This paper investigates the impact of international swap lines on stock returns using data from banks in emerging markets. The analysis shows that swap lines by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) had a positive impact on bank stocks in Central and Eastern Europe. It then highlights the importance of individual bank characteristics in identifying the impact of swap lines on bank stocks. Bank-level evidence suggests that stock prices of local and less-well capitalized banks responded strongly to SNB swap lines. This new evidence is consistent with the view that swap lines not only enhanced market liquidity but also reduced risks associated with micro-prudential issues.
We argue that the issuance of central bank reserves per se can matter for the effectof central bank large-scale asset purchases-commonly known as quantitative easing- on long-term interest rates. This effect is independent of the assets purchased, and runs through a reserve-induced portfolio balance channel. For evidence we analyze the reaction of Swiss long-term government bond yields to announcements by the Swiss National Bank to expand central bank reserves without acquiring any long-lived securities. We find that declines in long-term yields following the announcements mainly reflected reduced term premiums suggestive of reserve-induced portfolio balance effects.
Mortgage arrears arise if a household faces affordability problems and/or is in negative equity. Because widespread arrears pose a risk to the stability of banks and limit households' future access to credit, a crucial question is how monetary or macroprudential policies influence their incidence. We use a European household data set to analyse what drives arrears and find that affordability problems, such as unemployment, low income and high mortgage payments, matter, which suggests that monetary policy has an impact. Households facing the dual trigger of affordability problems and negative equity are more likely to go into longer-term arrears; macroprudential regulation preventing high loan-to-value (LTV) ratios can thus also have an impact.
This paper presents a dynamic North-South general-equilibrium model where households have non-homothetic preferences. Innovation takes place in a rich North while firms in a poor South imitate products manufactured in the North. Introducing non-homothetic preferences delivers a complete international product cycle as described by Vernon (1966), where the different stages of the product cycle are determined not only by supply side factors but also by the distribution of income between North and South. We ask how changes in Southern labour productivity, population size in the South and inequality across regions affect the international product cycle. In line with presented stylised facts about the product cycle we predict a negative correlation between adoption time and per capita incomes.
Asset prices tend to undergo wide swings around long-run equilibrium values, which can have detrimental effects on the real economy. To get a better understanding of how the financial sector and the real economy interact, this paper models the long swings in the Swiss franc-US dollar foreign currency market using the I(2) Cointegrated VAR model. The results show strong evidence of self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in the Swiss-US foreign exchange market that are consistent with the observed pronounced persistence in Swiss-US parity conditions. Generally, the results provide support for models allowing expectations formation in financial markets to be based on imperfect information.
This paper introduces a methodology to estimate the re-use of collateral based on actual transaction data. With a comprehensive dataset from the Swiss franc repo market we are able to provide the first systematic empirical study on the re-use of collateral. We find that re-use was most popular prior to the financial crisis, when roughly 10% of the outstanding interbank volume was based on re-used collateral. Furthermore, we show that re-use increases with the scarcity of collateral. By giving an estimate of collateral re-use and explaining its drivers, the paper contributes to the ongoing debate on collateral availability.
This paper first shows that capital inflows to and outflows from financial centres were disproportionately affected by the global financial crisis. Switzerland was no exception. The paper then identifies waves of capital flows to and from Switzerland from 2000:Q1 to 2014:Q2 by using a simple statistical method. The analysis shows that private capital inflows to and outflows from Switzerland have become exceptionally muted and less volatile since the crisis. Further, strong and long-lasting 'home bias' behaviour can be observed for both Swiss and foreign investors. By contrast, net private capital flows have shown significantly higher volatility since the financial crisis, frequently registering extreme movements driven by extreme movements in bank lending flows. These findings suggest that the financial crisis generated a breaking point for capital flows to and from Switzerland.
