The rise of China's securitization market

We study the development of asset securitization markets in China. We manually collect all asset securitization projects and securities data from 2005 to 2015. Inspection of this sample combined with related policy changes reveals distinct characteristics and some potential problems. At the macro level, asset securitization market in China is policy driven, regulation‐segmented, and highly illiquid. At the micro level, the underlying assets are mainly corporate loans or assets, rather than mortgage or consumption loans as in the US and European markets. State owned commercial banks and enterprises enjoy significantly lower interest rates when issuing securitization bonds. Finally, risk‐isolation and credit enhancing techniques significantly improve the rating of asset‐backed securities.     

住房资产对中国家庭风险金融资产配置的影响研究

随着时代的发展,住房资产与金融资产的联系越来越紧密,逐渐向住房资产金融产品化发展,成为一种新型金融产品,呈现出货币化和金融化的趋势。本文使用probit模型、普通最小二乘法(OLS)、中介效应以及调节效应,采用2015年中国家庭金融问卷调查微观数据(CHFS)对住房资产价值细化,从住房增值、住房贷款和住房总值三个方面对居民家庭风险金融市场进入和风险金融资产配置的影响进行研究。研究发现:(1)住房总值和住房增值对居民家庭是否参与金融市场呈现显著的负向影响,住房贷款对其具有正向影响。(2)住房贷款对居民家庭风险金融资产投资有负向影响,住房增值和住房总值对其有正向影响。(3)幸福感在居民家庭是否参与金融市场和住房增值中存在部分中介效应,安全感在居民家庭风险金融投资和住房贷款之间存在部分中介效应,未来预期在居民家庭是否参与金融市场与居民家庭是否拥有住房贷款中存在调节效应。最后,根据实证结果提出完善金融市场和优化居民金融资产结构的政策建议。     

Insurance, Bond Covenants, and Under- or Over-investment With Risky Asset Reconstitution

Traditional theory predicts that the shareholders of a limited liability company financed partly by bonds may underinvest by not replacing damaged company assets. It also precludes the possibility of overinvestment. By relaxing the restrictive assumption maintained under traditional theory, namely, that the effects of reconstituting damaged assets are nonstochastic, this article shows that both over and underinvestment are possible. It is shown that these moral hazard problems can be mitigated by incorporating appropriate insurance requirements into bond covenants. Moreover, it is shown that the insurance requirements for alleviating underinvestment and overinvestment are quite different. Particularly, for underinvestment, the required insurance only needs to make the bonds riskless in the best asset reconstitution states of the loss states in which the company value falls short of the promised bond repayment; however, for overinvestment, the required insurance should make the bonds totally riskless. The difference in insurance requirements is especially important when insurance is actuarially unfavorable such that more‐than‐required insurance is always undesirable.     

Asymmetric tail dependence between green bonds and other asset classes

This study analyzes the tail-dependence between green bonds and other asset classes including energy markets, stock markets, and conventional bonds. The study employs the cross- quantilogram method to identify the cross-quantile dependence between green bonds and other assets. Our data set covers the U.S. and European asset markets between October 2014 and February 2021. The empirical results show that the spillovers between asset classes and green bonds vary widely across the quantiles, indicating that the hedging benefits of green bonds against conventional asset classes differ across extreme and normal market conditions.     

Asset allocation and location over the life cycle with investment-linked survival-contingent payouts

This paper shows how survival-contingent investment-linked payouts can enhance investor wellbeing in the context of a portfolio choice model which integrates uninsurable labor income and asymmetric mortality expectations. In exchange for illiquidity, these products provide the consumer with access to mutual-fund style portfolio choice, as well as the survival credit generated from pooling mortality risk. Our model generates optimal asset location patterns indicating how much to hold in liquid versus illiquid survival-contingent payouts over the lifetime, and also asset allocation paths, showing how to invest in stocks versus bonds. We show that the investor who moves her money out of liquid saving into survival-contingent assets gradually from middle age to retirement and beyond, will enhance her welfare by as much as 50%. The results are robust to the introduction of uninsurable consumption shocks in housing expenses, income flows during the worklife and retirement, sudden changes in health status, and medical expenses.     

What is the impact of wealth shocks on asset allocation?

I test the assumption of constant relative risk aversion using U.S. macroeconomic data and analyse the role of wealth shocks in generating transitory changes in asset portfolio composition. I show that the risky asset share exhibits cyclical behavior and it is significantly (and positively) affected by unexpected variation in wealth. Therefore, the empirical evidence suggests that risk aversion is counter-cyclical. I also find that the portfolio share of housing wealth falls when the agent is faced with a positive wealth shock, i.e. housing is a hedge against unfavorable wealth fluctuations. Finally, considering a variety of wealth definitions, the results show that: (i) wealth effects are stronger for direct holdings of risky assets than for indirect holdings, which highlights that investors do not typically trade some assets such as pension or mutual funds; (ii) although significant, wealth effects on asset allocation are mainly temporary as agents quickly rebalance the asset portfolio composition (i.e. there is weak evidence of inertia or slow adjustment in asset allocation); and (iii) changes in expected returns partially explain the variation in risky asset allocation.     

Payments and liquidity under adverse selection

Informational asymmetries regarding the future value of assets affect their role in exchange. I construct a random-matching economy composed of two assets: a risk-free bond and a Lucas tree whose terminal value is privately known to its holder. No restrictions are imposed on payment arrangements. The main finding supports a pecking-order theory of payments: Agents use their risk-free bonds first in order to finance their spending shocks, and they use their information-sensitive assets only if their holdings of bonds are depleted. The theory has implications for the optimal provision of risk-free bonds, the structure of asset returns, and liquidity.     

Book‐to‐Market Equity,Asset Correlations and the Basel Capital Requirement

This paper examines the effect of book‐to‐market equity (BE/ME) on asset correlations under the Basel capital requirement. We find that BE/ME captures variations in asset correlations after controlling for firm size, default probability and industry effects from 1987 to 2011. Obligors with higher BE/ME exhibit lower asset correlations compared to those with lower BE/ME. Decomposing BE/ME into assets‐in‐place and growth options based on the asset pricing literature shows that obligors with more assets‐in‐place or more fixed assets have higher BE/ME and lower asset correlations than those with more growth options. Overall, our findings suggest that BE/ME is an additional important factor that may improve the estimates of asset correlations and thereby banks’ capital adequacy.     

Regime switching based portfolio selection for pension funds

This paper shows how a mean variance criterion can be applied to a multi period setting in order to obtain efficient portfolios in an asset and liability context. The optimization model allows for rebalancing activities, transaction costs, stochastic volatilities for both assets and liabilities. Furthermore, a general framework for the projection of pension fund liabilities as well as for the generation of asset returns is given. In a further step the dynamics of the liability maturity structure is modeled as customized index, whose volatility and correlation with asset returns become integral components of the applied regime switching approach. The numerical results illustrate the diversification of the assets and its risk return pattern in dependency of the liability dynamics.     

Saving and Portfolio Allocation Before and After Job Loss

We investigate the development of household labor income, financial wealth, and asset holdings over a 9‐year period around job loss, using unique administrative panel data from Norway. Consistent with predictions from theory, the data show additional saving and a shift toward safer assets in the years leading up to unemployment, and depletion of savings after job loss. In the years after job loss, the households' after‐tax labor income is reduced by about USD 12,500. Over the same time period, households deplete USD 3,000 of their financial assets, of which one third is accumulated prior to the job loss. This suggests that at least some households can foresee and prepare for the upcoming unemployment, which indicates that private savings can, to some extent, serve as a substitute for publicly provided unemployment insurance.     

Investment beliefs of endowments

United States university and college endowments now hold close to one‐third of their portfolios in private equity and hedge funds. We estimate the implied beliefs of endowments on these alternative assets’ returns relative to equities and bonds. At the end of 2012, the typical endowment believes that its private equity investments will outperform a portfolio of conventional assets by 3.9% per year, and hedge funds will outperform by 0.7% per year. Taking into account the implied equity exposures in alternative asset positions, the effective equity holding of endowments is approximately 60%.     

Distortions Resulting from Residential Land Use Controls in Metropolitan Areas

Residential land use controls in metropolitan areas are intended to and typically do restrict housing supply and inevitably raise housing prices. This paper estimates the effects of metropolitan area land use controls on housing prices, employing a remarkable data set compiled by Gyourko, Saiz and Summers. We embed the estimates in a four equation model that estimates the effects of the resulting high housing prices on metropolitan population, real incomes and employment.     

Securitized banking and the run on repo

The panic of 2007–2008 was a run on the sale and repurchase market (the repo market), which is a very large, short-term market that provides financing for a wide range of securitization activities and financial institutions. Repo transactions are collateralized, frequently with securitized bonds. We refer to the combination of securitization plus repo finance as “securitized banking” and argue that these activities were at the nexus of the crisis. We use a novel data set that includes credit spreads for hundreds of securitized bonds to trace the path of the crisis from subprime-housing related assets into markets that had no connection to housing. We find that changes in the LIB-OIS spread, a proxy for counterparty risk, were strongly correlated with changes in credit spreads and repo rates for securitized bonds. These changes implied higher uncertainty about bank solvency and lower values for repo collateral. Concerns about the liquidity of markets for the bonds used as collateral led to increases in repo haircuts, that is the amount of collateral required for any given transaction. With declining asset values and increasing haircuts, the US banking system was effectively insolvent for the first time since the Great Depression.     

Household Housing Demand: Empirical Analysis and Theoretical Reconciliation

Since owner-occupied housing is partly a financial asset, expectations of capital gain or loss play a role in housing demand. In recent years, some “hot” housing markets have exhibited an increase in demand when housing prices rise and a decrease when they fall, suggesting the presence of capital gains forces that outweigh the traditional neoclassical demand response associated with the standard consumer good. To explore whether this behavior is systematic, we estimate individual household housing demand equations for two large and geographically diverse metropolitan areas, San Francisco and Atlanta. The data base consists of forty nine Public Use Microdata Area samples. The econometric results indicate that own-housing demand is downward sloping in one market but upward sloping in the other. These disparate results are reconciled by showing that they are consistent with two different and explicit special case predictions of the same theoretical model of housing demand and reflect the differing relative strengths of a standard consumption good demand response and of an asset based capital gains effect.     

The integration substitute: the role of controls in managing human asset specificity

As the integration solution to the problem of specific assets cannot be replicated on human asset specificity because slavery is illegal, economic theory states that control systems substitute for integration through a balanced structure to help align diverse interests. To understand the intricate design features of the balance, we examine a case‐study firm. For low human asset specificity, the restriction and segregation of usable decision rights link with standards. However, incentives are traced to individuals only to the extent task deviations do not create relevant future costs that are difficult to be self‐corrected. For high specificity, incentives are related to outputs rather than outcomes, because outcome variations reduce the attractiveness of maintaining the balance. Subjective assessment is used as an efficient alternate ‘balancing’ solution and decision control is shared when available subjective data are inadequate.     

Optimal Gradual Annuitization: Quantifying the Costs of Switching to Annuities

We compute the optimal dynamic annuitization and asset allocation policy for a retiree with Epstein–Zin preferences, uncertain investment horizon, potential bequest motives, and pre‐existing pension income. In our setting the retiree can decide each year how much he consumes and how much he invests in stocks, bonds, and life annuities, while the prior literature mostly considered restricted so‐called deterministic or stochastic switching strategies. We show that postponing the annuity purchase is no longer optimal in the gradual annuitization (GA) case since investors are able to attain the optimal mix between liquid assets (stocks and bonds) and illiquid life annuities each year. In order to assess potential utility losses, we benchmark various restricted annuitization strategies against the unrestricted GA strategy.     

What are the Capital Structure Determinants for Tax‐Exempt Organizations?

I study the determinants of capital structure in the absence of tax incentives. I find that debt use is positively related to asset tangibility, growth, and size, and negatively related to age, liquidity, and profitability. Tax‐exempt sector‐specific findings indicate that debt is also positively related to the efficacy of state laws against the misuse of assets and to the percentage of decision makers that are paid and negatively related to decision‐maker compensation and to charitable contributions. Religious organizations most commonly borrow from internal sources, those in education use tax‐exempt bonds, while human services organizations use mortgages and notes payable.     

Pricing Contingent Claims under Interest Rate and Asset Price Risk

This paper presents a general framework for pricing contingent claims under interest rate and asset price uncertainty. The framework extends Ho and Lee's (1986) valuation framework by allowing not only future interest rates but also future asset prices to depend on the current term structure of interest rates. The approach is shown to provide risk-neutral valuation relationships that are consistent with the initial term structure of interest rates and can be applied to valuation of a broad class of assets including stock options, convertible bonds, and junk bonds.     

Which demands affect optimal international portfolio choices?

This study analyzes the asset allocations of simple international portfolios that include domestic risky assets, foreign risky assets, and domestic risk-free bonds, through a theoretical analysis. A close-form solution for the optimal holding rates is derived, and can be further sub-divided into three categories of demand: speculative demand, diversified demand, and hedging demands. We carefully explore the essential problem of identifying the underlying reasons for asset allocations, which in turn allows us to answer the question of which of these demands are critical in influencing holding changes.     

Liquidity Risk of Private Assets: Evidence from Real Estate Markets

Investment in thinly traded private assets involves liquidity risk. Existing literature provides limited guidance as it mainly focuses on publicly traded security assets such as stocks and bonds. This paper develops an analytical tool for quantifying liquidity risk of private assets. Using commercial real estate as a model asset and under reasonable assumptions, we find that the magnitude of liquidity risk is too large to be ignored, especially in down markets when liquidity risk is a great concern.