infonet-economy

This paper investigates to what extent risk management and corporate governance mitigate the involvement of banks in credit boom and bust cycles. Using a unique, hand-collected dataset on 156 banks from Central and Eastern Europe during 2005-2012, we assess whether banks with stronger risk management and corporate governance display more moderate credit growth in the pre-crisis...

Glode (2011) shows, both theoretically and empirically, that U.S. equity mutual funds have a systematically better performance during periods of economic downturn and that investors are willing to pay higher fund fees for this recession insurance. In this paper, we test these hypotheses out-of-sample using international mutual fund data from 16 different countries. Surprisingly, we...

Using a sample of firms matched with their suppliers, we study the use of trade credit as firms approach a default event. We show that, in the extensive margin, around one third of suppliers exit the relationship well ahead of default, but the rest continue the relationship. Relationships are more likely to continue when suppliers sell differentiated goods, are located close to their...

We investigate the damage to real-sector investment spending and corporate financing activities triggered by the failure of three major investment banks during the 2007-09 financial crisis. We find that corporations characterized by pre-crisis corporate investment banking relationships with troubled investment banks exhibit significantly lower post-crisis investment spending activity...

Model builders face ambiguity about the true data generating process. Consequently, they need to deal with ambiguity attitudes (inside uncertainty) and ambiguous financial reality (outside uncertainty) when developing and estimating financial models. We introduce a novel approach for systematically dealing with outside uncertainty in addition to inside uncertainty in a tractable way...

We define risk spillover as the dependence of a given asset variance on the past covariances and variances of other assets. Building on this idea, we propose the use of a highly flexible and tractable model to forecast the volatility of an international equity portfolio. According to the risk management strategy proposed, portfolio risk is seen as a specific combination of daily...

Based on the theory of static replication of variance swaps we assess the sign and magnitude of variance risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. We find significantly negative risk premiums when realized variance is computed from intraday data with low frequency. As a likely consequence of microstructure effects however, the evidence is ambiguous when realized variance is based on...

This paper examines the impact of the recent banking crises in Europe and Central Asia on households’ incomes and consumption patterns. The analysis is based on the 2010 wave of the Life in Transition Survey, which covers 12,704 households in eleven countries that experienced
a banking crisis between 2008 and 2011. It finds that households in middle-income crisis countries are...

If central banks value the ex-post accuracy of their forecasts, previously announced interest rate paths might affect the current policy rate. We explore whether this "forecast adherence" has influenced the monetary policies of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Norges Bank, the two central banks with the longest history of publishing interest rate paths. We derive and...