infonet-economy

We examine how the geographical proximity to a microfinance bank affects financial inclusion. We study the expansion of the branch network of ProCredit banks in South-East Europe between 2006 and 2010. We report three main findings: First, ProCredit is more likely to open a new branch in areas with a large share of low-income households. Second, in locations where ProCredit opens a new branch the share of banked households increases more than in locations where it does not open a new branch. Third, this increase is particularly strong among low-income households, older households, and households which rely on transfer income.

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 credit boom as well as a smaller credit contraction and fewer credit losses in the crisis period. With respect to bank governance we document that a higher share of financial experts on the supervisory board is associated with more rapid credit growth in the pre-crisis period and a larger contraction of credit in the crisis period, but not with larger credit losses. With respect to risk management we document that a strong risk committee is associated with more moderate pre-crisis credit growth but not with fewer credit losses in the crisis. We find no evidence of an organizational learning process among crisis-hit banks: those banks with the largest credit losses during the crisis are least likely to improve their risk management in the aftermath of the crisis.

In this article, we propose a consistent view on the recent oil-price history based on fundamental data and economic theory. We sum up: After the turn of the century three major stylized shocks have hit market. First, the demand curve has shifted fight outwards, mainly driven, as extensively reported in the media, by sustained growth in China and other Asian Countries. Second, supply disruptions in countries with low extraction costs (Iraq and Venezuela) have shifted the supply curve to the left. Third, we show that speculators adjust their inventories in order to take advantage of predictable price fluctuations and play themselves a major role in the price formation. Optimal storage theory implies that aggregate inventories are negatively related to the oil price and positively to the volatility of supply and demand shocks.

We provide evidence that the political events in the last years have increased volatility and induced the inventory curve to shift right outwards. We analyze in a graphical framework the interaction of all these shocks and conclude that speculators have caused the oil price to overshoot in the short run its long-run fundamental value. However, this is not at all attributable to market failure or the harmfulness of speculators. In fact, the opposite is true. Speculators have in general a dampening effect on the oil price. The record oil price in the very recent history is partly a consequence of speculators maintaining or building-up inventories to cope with the supply and demand shocks to come. Hence, high prices represent a short-term toll for future price stability.

It follows from our analysis that the oil price is expected to fall towards its long-term mean, provided that no further shocks hit the economy and, critically, the oil supply. As we saw, this prediction is consistent with the observed prices in the futures markets. Also in terms of future price volatility, the outlook is rather upbeat. The increased inventory levels held by speculators will cushion the spot market against fluctuations in natural supply and demand and limit the degree to which the currently high underlying volatility will translate into higher price volatility.

Using a comprehensive high-frequency foreign exchange dataset, we present evidence of time-of-day effects in foreign exchange returns through a significant tendency for currencies to depreciate during local trading hours. We confirm this pattern across a range of currencies and time zones. We also find that this pattern is reflected in order flow and suggest that both patterns relate to the tendency of market participants to be net purchasers of foreign exchange in their own trading hours. Data from a single market maker appears to corroborate that interpretation.

Models for realized covariance matrices may suffer from the curse of dimensionality as more traditional multivariate volatility models (such as GARCH and stochastic volatility). Within the class of realized covariance models, we focus on the Wishart specification introduced by C. Gourieroux, J. Jasiak, and R.
Sufana [2009. The Wishart autoregressive process of multivariate stochastic volatility. Journal of Econometrics 150, no. 2: 167-81] and analyze here the forecasting performances of the parametric restrictions discussed in M. Bonato [2009. Estimating the degrees of freedom of the realized volatilityWishart autoregressive model. Manuscript available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1357044], which are motivated by asset features such as their economic sector and book-to-market or price-to-earnings ratios, among others. Our purpose is to verify if restricted model forecasts are statistically equivalent to full-model specification, a result that would support the use of restrictions when the problem cross-sectional dimension is large.