Financial globalization, financial crises and contagion

Two observations suggest that financial globalization played an important role in the recent financial crisis. First, more than half of the rise in net borrowing of the U.S. non-financial sectors since the mid-1980s has been financed by foreign lending. Second, the collapse of the U.S. housing and mortgage-backed-securities markets had worldwide effects on financial institutions and asset markets. Using an open-economy model where financial intermediaries play a central role, we show that financial integration leads to a sharp rise in net credit in the most financially developed country and to large asset price spillovers of country-specific shocks to bank capital. The impacts of these shocks on asset prices are amplified by bank capital requirements based on mark-to-market.     

Cross-border interbank networks,banking risk and contagion

Recent events have highlighted the role of cross-border linkages between banking systems in transmitting local developments across national borders. This paper analyzes whether international linkages in interbank markets affect the stability of interconnected banking systems and channel financial distress within a network consisting of banking systems of the main advanced countries for the period 1994–2012. Methodologically, I use a spatial modeling approach to test for spillovers in cross-border interbank markets. The results suggest that foreign exposures in banking play a significant role in channeling banking risk: I find that countries that are linked through foreign borrowing or lending positions to more stable banking systems abroad are significantly affected by positive spillover effects. From a policy point of view, this implies that in stable times, linkages in the banking system can be beneficial, while they have to be taken with caution in times of financial turmoil affecting the whole system.     

How strong are the linkages between real estate and other sectors in China?

International experience points to the critical role of stable property markets in maintaining financial stability. This paper investigates the real and financial linkages between real estate sector and other sectors. The real linkage based on input–output analysis shows that the linkages have strengthened. The financial linkages in terms of credit risk spillovers across sectors are studied by using DAG method and SVAR. We find that that credit risk in the real estate sector has large-scale spillover effects onto other sectors. Consequently, shocks to the property market could have much larger impact on the Chinese economy than suggested by headline figures.     

Digital currencies in financial networks

We introduce a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the network of financial accounts. Simulating a shift of deposits by both households and non-financial corporations from the banking sector to the central bank, we model the different responses of the affected institutional sectors. We find that the introduction of CBDC generates funding shortages in banks, which may propagate to other sectors. In addition, significant adjustments in the balance sheets of all sectors trigger large moves in securities prices and induce changes in the financial network structure. Finally, we extend the analysis to the introduction of a crypto financial asset (stablecoin) issued by either a domestic or a foreign entity.     

Financial stress relationships among Euro area countries: an R-vine copula approach

One of the biggest challenges of keeping Euro area financial stability is the negative co-movement between the vulnerability of public finance, the financial sector, security markets stresses as well as economic growth, especially in peripheral economies. This paper utilizes a ARMA-GARCH based R-vine copula method to explore tail dependance between the Financial Stress Indices of 11 euro area countries with an aim of understanding how financial stress are interacting with each other. We find larger economies in the Euro area tend to have closer upper tail dependence in terms of positive shocks, while smaller economies tend to have closer lower tail dependence with respect to negative shocks. The R-vine copula results underline the complex dynamics of financial stress relations existing between Euro Area economies. The estimated R-vine shows Spain, Italy, France and Belgium are the most inter-connected nodes which underlying they might be more efficient targets to treat in order to achieve a quicker stabilizing. Our results relate to the fact that Eurozone is not a unified policy making area, therefore, it needs to follow divergent policies for taming the effects of financial instability to different regions or groups of economies that are more interconnected.     

International spillovers from Euro area and US credit and demand shocks: A focus on emerging Europe

In this paper, we examine the international effects of contractions in loan supply, loan demand and aggregate demand in the euro area and the USA. All three shocks have been at the forefront in spreading stress during the period of the global financial crisis and in particular so to countries that are strongly integrated with the euro area. We find that these shocks decrease international output and total credit to a varying degree. Loan demand and aggregate demand shocks in the euro area trigger significant negative spillovers on output in most other regions. Evidence for global negative output effects of euro area loan supply shocks is fraught with considerable estimation uncertainty. When these three types of shocks emanate from the USA, we find significant negative spillovers on output also for loan supply shocks. In general, international effects on total credit are an order of magnitude larger than those on output, with again more evidence that is significant for US than euro area shocks. Last, and taking a regional stance, our results indicate that economies from emerging Europe are most vulnerable to all shocks considered. Through their strong economic integration with the euro area, these economies are likewise exposed to euro area and US shocks, and spillover effects are often larger than the domestic response in the country of shock-origin.     

违约与杠杆周期——一个带有救助的金融加速器模型

我国为应对2008年国际金融危机的冲击采取了一系列经济刺激政策,在发挥“稳增长”作用的同时,也在一定程度上导致我国企业部门杠杆水平快速上升,但与此同时,不良贷款率并没有随企业部门杠杆的上升而显著增加。为了解释企业部门违约与杠杆的周期特征,本文在金融加速器模型(Bernanke et al.,1999)基础上,引入政府对企业部门的违约救助机制,建立DSGE模型进行讨论。进一步地,本文还通过一个不合意的去杠杆政策试验表明,忽略资产价格稳定(或者说金融稳定)前提下的去杠杆政策,反而会使企业部门的杠杆和违约率同时上升到一个较高水平。最后,引入一个盯住预期资产价格的动态救助规则能够发挥稳定经济的作用,并提高社会福利水平。     

Saving the Euro: Mitigating Financial or Trade Spillovers?

This paper analyzes through what channels the euro crisis affected firms and the efficacy of policies to mitigate the crisis. It analyzes stock price responses for 3,045 nonfinancial firms in 16 countries to four key policy events during 2010–11. Using precrisis benchmarks, it separates financial effects from trade effects and examines how bank and trade linkages propagated shocks. It finds that policy measures affected financially dependent firms more, particularly in creditor countries with greater bank exposure to peripheral euro countries, in statistically and economically significant ways. Trade linkages with peripheral countries played little role, although euro movements meant some differential effects.     

宏观审慎政策协调能否抑制国际性银行危机传染？——基于跨境金融关联视角的实证研究

本文基于跨境金融关联视角对宏观审慎政策能否抑制国际性银行危机传染这一重要的理论与实践问题进行了实证研究。选取亚洲金融危机和全球金融危机时期遭受冲击的10个代表性国家作为样本,构建Logit模型和多元回归模型探讨本国及具有金融关联的国家协调实施宏观审慎政策对本国系统性银行危机传染的影响。研究表明,具有金融关联的国家出现金融危机会显著增加本国系统性银行危机的发生概率,具有金融关联的国家实施宏观审慎政策对本国信贷的影响比对房价的影响更明显,本国及具有金融关联的国家协调实施宏观审慎政策会显著降低本国系统性银行危机的发生概率。在调整银行危机指标及考虑贸易关联和流动性风险的影响后,研究结果依然保持稳健。本文的研究结论揭示了加强宏观审慎政策协调有助于维护全球金融稳定,对于中国政策当局强化宏观审慎管理具有极其重要的政策含义。     

Fiscal Policy Shocks in the Euro Area and the US: An Empirical Assessment*

We analyse the impact of fiscal policy shocks in the euro area as a whole, using a newly‐available quarterly data set of fiscal variables for the period 1981–2007. To allow for comparability with previous results on euro‐area countries and the US, we use a standard structural vector autoregressive (VAR) framework, and study the impact of aggregated and disaggregated government spending and net‐tax shocks. In addition, to frame euro‐area results, we apply the same methodology for the same sample period to US data. We also explore the sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of variables aiming to control for underlying financial and fiscal conditions. The main new findings are that: expansionary fiscal shocks have a short‐term positive impact on GDP and private consumption, with government spending shocks entailing, in general, higher effects on economic activity than (net) tax reductions; output multipliers to government expenditure shocks are of similar size in the euro area and in the US; the persistence of a fiscal spending shock is higher in the US than in the euro area, which appears to be related to military spending in the US; and fiscal multipliers have increased over the recent past in both geographical areas.     

Balance sheet effects on monetary and financial spillovers: The East Asian crisis plus 20

We study how the financial conditions in the Center Economies [the U.S., Japan, and the Euro area] impact other countries over the period 1986 through 2015. Our methodology relies upon a two-step approach. We focus on five possible linkages between the center economies (CEs) and the non-Center economics, or peripheral economies (PHs), and investigate the strength of these linkages. For each of the five linkages, we first regress a financial variable of the PHs on financial variables of the CEs while controlling for global factors. Next, we examine the determinants of sensitivity to the CEs as a function of country-specific macroeconomic conditions and policies, including the exchange rate regime, currency weights, monetary, trade and financial linkages with the CEs, the levels of institutional development, and international reserves. Extending our previous work (Aizenman et al., 2016), we devote special attention to the impact of currency weights in the implicit currency basket, balance sheet exposure, and currency composition of external debt. We find that for both policy interest rates and the real exchange rate (REER), the link with the CEs has been pervasive for developing and emerging market economies in the last two decades, although the movements of policy interest rates are found to be more sensitive to global financial shocks around the time of the emerging markets’ crises in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and since 2008. When we estimate the determinants of the extent of connectivity, we find evidence that the weights of major currencies, external debt, and currency compositions of debt are significant factors. More specifically, having a higher weight on the dollar (or the euro) makes the response of a financial variable such as the REER and exchange market pressure in the PHs more sensitive to a change in key variables in the U.S. (or the euro area) such as policy interest rates and the REER. While having more exposure to external debt would have similar impacts on the financial linkages between the CEs and the PHs, the currency composition of international debt securities does matter. Economies more reliant on dollar-denominated debt issuance tend to be more vulnerable to shocks emanating from the U.S.     

货币政策、消费品和投资品通货膨胀——基于金融加速器视角

本文建立一个包含消费品和投资品生产的两部门新凯恩斯DSGE模型,并且引入金融加速器以分析货币政策对消费品和投资品通货膨胀的影响机制,同时使用1999Q1至2015Q4的中国宏观经济数据对模型进行贝叶斯估计。估计结果表明,两个部门的菲利普斯曲线都具有较高的价格粘性。外部融资溢价对两个部门企业投资的影响存在异质性,投资品部门的金融加速器效应更加明显。脉冲响应分析表明货币政策扩张时,投资品部门的产出和通胀膨胀上升幅度比消费品部门更大。理论模型的脉冲响应与VAR实证分析得到的经验事实相一致。金融摩擦导致的消费品和投资品部门需求结构的异质性是解释货币政策对两个部门影响差异的关键。数值模拟分析发现金融加速器机制主要改变货币政策对投资品产出和通货膨胀的影响,对消费品部门影响改变较小。方差分解结果表明加总技术冲击、投资边际效率冲击和货币政策冲击是经济波动的主要来源。     

Leverage and valuation effects: How global liquidity shapes sectoral balance sheets

Global financial conditions have been shown to be important drivers of cross-border capital flows. But how do they interact with the leverage of the domestic sectors? That is the question this paper proposes to answer. Financial and non-financial sectors increase their leverage pro-cyclically, i.e., during periods of favourable domestic economic performance and whenever global financial conditions are more loose. The general government is an exception: it has a stabilizing counter-cyclical role, by taking on more debt in times of worse economic outcomes. Moreover, there is an important interaction between financial market stress and leverage, whereby heightened financial stress leads to higher leverage via the valuation component of balance sheets - this relationship vanishes when leverage measures are stripped of these price swings.     

Euro area banking and monetary policy shocks in the QE era

This paper assesses the effects of monetary policy shocks on the macroeconomy and the euro area banking sector after the global financial crisis. First, financial risk-return indicators of the banking sector based on a compound option-based structural credit risk model are embedded in a large macro-financial quarterly database covering the period 2008Q4–2019Q4. Second, a SFAVAR identifies and estimates the shocks’ responses relating them to the endogenous build-up of banks’ vulnerabilities which are consistent with the internally coherent structure of the credit risk model. By introducing structure in the understanding of banks’ asset-liability management behavior following monetary policy shocks, the research strategy contributes to disentangling results that are often mixed in the empirical literature. The study finds that unconventional monetary policy, in particular the Asset Purchase Program of the European Central Bank, seems to have been more successful than conventional monetary policy in raising output and inflation. The desired boost to bank lending has been muted and loan cyclicality has varied across countries and loan types. The performance of the banking sector following monetary policy shocks can be characterized by a drop in expected return on equity and assets, a relaxation of lending conditions and increased correlation between banks’ assets return and the market return, a mechanism pointing to enhanced risk-taking. While banks’ probabilities of default fall following monetary policy shocks, the price of risk increases. Banks’ net worth rises via higher market capitalization and implied assets value together with lower volatility, despite often incurring more debt. Risk-taking in the banking sector may pose a risk to financial stability, especially if its effects on banks’ vulnerability spread and increase systemic risk. The unintended endogenous build-up of macro-financial vulnerabilities may need to become part of monetary policymaking.     

Comovements in the equity prices of large complex financial institutions

In recent years, mergers, acquisitions and organic growth have meant that some of the largest and most complex financial groups have come to transcend national boundaries and traditionally defined business-lines. As a result, they have become a potential channel for the cross-border and cross-market transmission of financial shocks. This paper analyses the degree of comovement in the equity prices of a selected group of large complex financial institutions (LCFIs), and assesses the extent to which movements are driven by common factors. A relatively high degree of commonality is found for most LCFIs although there are still noticeable divisions between sub-groups of LCFIs, both according to geography and to a lesser extent primary business-line.     

How likely is contagion in financial networks?

Interconnections among financial institutions create potential channels for contagion and amplification of shocks to the financial system. We estimate the extent to which interconnections increase expected losses and defaults under a wide range of shock distributions. In contrast to most work on financial networks, we assume only minimal information about network structure and rely instead on information about the individual institutions that are the nodes of the network. The key node-level quantities are asset size, leverage, and a financial connectivity measure given by the fraction of a financial institution’s liabilities held by other financial institutions. We combine these measures to derive explicit bounds on the potential magnitude of network effects on contagion and loss amplification. Spillover effects are most significant when node sizes are heterogeneous and the originating node is highly leveraged and has high financial connectivity. Our results also highlight the importance of mechanisms that go beyond simple spillover effects to magnify shocks; these include bankruptcy costs, and mark-to-market losses resulting from credit quality deterioration or a loss of confidence. We illustrate the results with data on the European banking system.     

货币政策冲击对实体企业投资选择影响的“宿醉效应”

本文研究货币政策冲击对实体企业投资选择的动态影响效应。与传统分析方法不同,本文运用利率衍生品价格数据来识别中国货币政策冲击,利用工具变量局部投影法获得货币政策冲击对微观实体企业投资选择的动态影响效应。研究表明,动态效应呈现出更丰富的信息:货币政策冲击对企业金融资产占比有显著驱动效应,效应大小表现出先升后降趋势,在冲击发生一年半后达到峰值。值得注意的是,货币政策冲击会导致企业货币资金占比在短期内显著减少,而在中长期显著增加。进一步分析表明,货币政策冲击使实业投资和金融投资在短期内都更有利可图,所以在短期内企业倾向于减少货币资金占比,增加非货币金融资产投资和实业投资;政策冲击在中长期对企业资产收益率的提升作用消退,盈余效应使企业在中长期的金融资产占比提高,表现出一定的“宿醉效应”。     

Econometric measures of connectedness and systemic risk in the finance and insurance sectors

We propose several econometric measures of connectedness based on principal-components analysis and Granger-causality networks, and apply them to the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, broker/dealers, and insurance companies. We find that all four sectors have become highly interrelated over the past decade, likely increasing the level of systemic risk in the finance and insurance industries through a complex and time-varying network of relationships. These measures can also identify and quantify financial crisis periods, and seem to contain predictive power in out-of-sample tests. Our results show an asymmetry in the degree of connectedness among the four sectors, with banks playing a much more important role in transmitting shocks than other financial institutions.     

金融开放背景下金融发展对跨境资本流动的影响研究

金融开放能够促进跨境资本流动,也具有引发跨境资本流动失衡和波动性增加的风险,而一国金融发展水平在其金融开放效应中发挥着重要作用。本文基于58个国家及地区1999-2016年的数据建立动态面板模型,研究金融开放背景下金融发展对直接投资和证券投资流入、流出以及总跨境资本流动波动性的影响。研究结果表明:金融开放本身有可能造成跨境资本流出大于流入的失衡现象,并显著增加跨境资本流动波动性风险,而金融发展水平的提高有助于在一定程度上抑制金融开放带来的跨境资本流动失衡现象和波动性风险。因此,在扩大金融开放进程中,为获得跨境资本流动的积极效应,应密切关注跨境资本流向和资本波动性变化,提高国内金融发展水平,使之与金融开放水平相匹配。     

Financial fragility of euro area households

Until recently, the lack of appropriate harmonized micro data covering both income and wealth has been the major obstacle in analyzing financial vulnerability of the household sector in the euro area. This data problem has been partially circumvented by the dissemination of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Based on this unique data set, we put forward a stress testing method of household balance sheets in a consistent manner across euro area countries. To this end, we put forward a metric of distress which takes into account both the solvency and liquidity position of the household and demonstrate that this metric outperforms the most common metrics used in the literature, which do not take into account the households’ asset holdings. We calibrate this metric using the country level data on non-performing loan ratios and estimate stress-test elasticities in response to an interest rate shock, an income shock and a house price shock. We find that, albeit euro-area households are relatively resilient as a whole, there are large discrepancies in the impact of macroeconomic shocks across countries. Finally, we demonstrate that our framework could be used to assess some measures mitigating losses to the banks, such as engaging in the restructurings of loans that are at risk of defaulting.