We study the risk-taking channel of monetary policy in Bolivia, a dollarized country where monetary changes are transmitted exogenously from the USA. We find that a lower policy rate spurs the granting of riskier loans, to borrowers with worse credit histories, lower ex-ante internal ratings, and weaker ex-post performance (acutely so when the rate subsequently increases). Effects are stronger for small firms borrowing from multiple banks. To uniquely identify risk-taking, we assess collateral coverage,expected returns, and risk premia of the newly granted riskier loans, finding that their returns and premia are actually lower, especially at banks suffering from agency problems.
We analyze the impact of foreign bank presence on foreign direct investment in China. Our estimates demonstrate that foreign direct investment across regions in China is increasing in the existing network of regional branches of foreign banks, which itself is driven (and therefore instrumented) by the timing of the regional phasing out of the local limits for foreign banks on local currency business. This effect of foreign bank presence is particularly strong for foreign direct investment in those sectors in the region when banks are locally present that come from source countries where these specific sectors are importantly represented.
The impact of U.S. bank loan announcements on the stock prices of the corporate borrowers
has been decreasing during the two last decades with estimated two-day cumulative abnormal returns slipping from almost 200 basis points in the beginning of the 1980s to close to zero by the turn of the Century. We estimate excess returns before and after the onset of the most recent financial crisis. We find that while prior to August 2007 returns were indeed close to zero, afterwards returns jump back up to around 200 basis points. We surmise that in a booming credit market the certification of corporate borrowers by banks started to play a lesser role, while during the crisis the banks’ role was revitalized. Consistent with this interpretation we find that after August 2007 excess returns increase especially for loans with a longer maturity, and for smaller, levered, less profitable or lowly rated firms.
We develop a measure of maximum sustainable government debt for advanced economies. How much investors are willing to lend to a country's government depends on how high a primary surplus they expect that government to generate, how fast they expect the country to grow, how volatile they expect that growth to be, and how much debt they expect the government will be able to raise in the future for the purpose of servicing the debt it seeks to raise today. This last observation points to the presence of a borrowing multiplier, which raises a country's borrowing well above what it would be, absent the ability to service maturing debt out of new debt's proceeds. Present debt is sustainable when implied future debt remains bounded. A country's probability of default displays a marked asymmetry around that country's maximum sustainable debt (MSD): it increases slowly below and rapidly above. We calibrate our measure for 23 OECD countries: Korea has the highest MSD at 281% of GDP and Greece the lowest at 89%. The probabilities of default at MSD are very low, from Norway's 0.27% to Korea's 0.81%. Most countries' actual debt-to-GDP ratios in 2010 are below MSD; some countries are above; these are generally the countries that have received some form of financial support in the wake of the financial crisis.
We study the dynamics of an innovative industry when agents learn about its strength, i.e., the likelihood that it gets hit by negative shocks. Managers can exert risk-prevention effort to mitigate the consequences of such shocks. As time goes by, if no shock occurs, confidence improves. This attracts managers to the innovative sector. But, when confidence becomes high, less managers exerting low risk-prevention effort also enter. This accelerates the growth of the industry, while inducing a decline in risk-prevention. The longer the boom, the stronger the confidence, the larger the losses if a shock occurs. While the above dynamics arise in the first best, with asymmetric information there is excessive entry of inefficient managers, earning informational rents at the expense of efficient managers. This inflates the innovative sector and increases its vulnerability.
This paper discusses how income inequality developed during the current crisis in euro area countries, as well as the role played by each income source. Based on an extended definition of income – including additional components which do not appear in the standard Eurostat definitions – we complement the information provided by the Gini index and quantile ratios by computing an alternative inequality indicator, developed by Zenga (2007), and its decomposition by income source. While broadly confirming the distributional effect of the crisis documented in previous studies, we find that in specific countries the level of inequality appears higher when alternative measures are taken into account, and that the rise of inequality since 2008 has not been as modest as the previous studies would suggest. The paper further looks at how the distribution of income has evolved during the crisis by income quantile groups (i.e. ‘zooming-in’). The results point to varying contribution of labour income in 2011 compared to 2007. In addition, while the impact of individual households' characteristics shows a non-linear pattern across income quantile groups before the crisis, such dispersion has decreased in 2011.
We argue that, on the basis of our analysis, not only euro area countries are “differently unequal” in that inequality has developed in a very peculiar way in different countries, but also because it needs to be tackled at a finer level of analysis.
We investigate the impact of legislative reforms in merger control legislation in nineteen industrial countries between 1987 and 2004. We find that strengthening merger control decreases the stock prices of non-financial firms, while increasing those of banks. Cross sectional regressions show that the discretion embedded in the supervisory control of bank mergers is a major determinant of the positive bank stock returns. One explanation is that merger control introduces “checks and balances” that mitigates the potential abuse and wasteful enforcement of supervisory control in the banking sector.
We investigate geoengineering as a possible substitute for adaptation and mitigation measures to address climate change. With the help of an integrated assessment model, we distinguish between the effects of solar radiation management on atmospheric temperature levels and its side-effects on ecosystems. To address the uncertainty regarding the magnitude of side-effects, we rely on a distributional analysis. Our results indicate that mitigation is the preferred strategy, with adaptation acting as an effective complement. As geoengineering brings significant side-effectson the environment, it is used in only a few of theanalyzed scenarios. We then discuss additional concerns with geoengineering, and analyze their impacts on policy choices. In particular, we account for the possibility to make wrong assumptions about side-effects.
