Spillover effects of banking systemic risk on firms in China: A financial cycle analysis

This paper investigates the spillover effects of banking sector risk on firms in China and explores the risk transmission channels from the perspective of financial cycle. We use the banking risk-taking and systemic risk as the proxies of financial booms and busts. Our study yields four main findings. First, the banking risk-taking reduces firm risk in financial booms. Higher financing costs and constraints, larger firm size and financing scale, and state ownership inhibit the spillover effects. Second, the banking systemic risk increases firm risk during financial busts. Higher financing costs and constraints, larger firm size and financing scale, and state ownership facilitate the spillover effects. Third, the magnitudes of banking risk spillovers vary across industries, and this effect is more pronounced in the manufacturing industry. Fourth, bank risk-taking affects firm risk differently through various channels in different leading periods. When leading 1 to 3quarters, banking risk-taking reduces firm risk, and channel variables inhibit the spillover effects. However, when leading 4 to 8 quarters, the rising bank risk-taking eventually increases firm risk, and channel variables amplify its spillover effects. Our study offers important policy implications for risk assessment and mitigation in the Chinese loan market.     

Explaining House Price Dynamics: Isolating the Role of Nonfundamentals

This paper examines the role of nonfundamentals‐based sentiment in house price dynamics, including the well‐documented volatility and persistence of house prices during booms and busts. To measure and isolate sentiment's effect, we employ survey‐based indicators that proxy for the sentiment of three major agents in housing markets: home buyers (demand side), home builders (supply side), and lenders (credit suppliers). After orthogonalizing each sentiment measure against a broad set of fundamental variables, we find strong and consistent evidence that the changing sentiment of all three sets of market participants predicts house price appreciation in subsequent quarters, above and beyond the impact of changes in lagged price changes, fundamentals, and market liquidity. More specifically, a one‐standard‐deviation shock to market sentiment is associated with a 32–57 basis point increase in real house price appreciation over the next two quarters. These price effects are large relative to the average real price appreciation of 71 basis points per quarter observed over the full sample period. Moreover, housing market sentiment and its effect on real house prices is highly persistent. The results also reveal that the dynamic relation between sentiment and house prices can create feedback effects that contribute to the persistence typically observed in house price movements during boom and bust cycles.     

Real Estate Markets and Macroprudential Policy in Europe

Boom‐bust cycles in real estate markets have been major factors in systemic financial crises and therefore need to be at the forefront of macroprudential policy. The geographically differentiated nature of real estate market fluctuations implies that these policies need to be granular across regions and countries. Before the financial crisis that started in 2007 property markets were overvalued in a range of European countries, but much like in other constituencies active policies addressing this were an exception. An increasing number of studies suggest that borrower‐based regulatory policies, such as reductions in loan‐to‐value or debt‐to‐income limits, can be effective in leaning against real estate booms. But many of the new macroprudential policy authorities in Europe do not have clear powers to determine them. Moreover, the cross‐border spillovers they may give rise to suggest the establishment of a well‐defined macroprudential coordination mechanism for the single European market.     

Overaccumulation,Interest, and Prices

I use a financial accelerator model to study interest and prices under boom–busts driven by changes in expectations about total factor productivity (TFP) and credit. I show that inflation falls in the boom phase of the TFP episode and then recovers during the bust, yet rises in the boom phase of the credit episode and then falls during the bust. Furthermore, for both episodes, the overaccumulation of debt relative to capital during the boom is critical for the busts since it implies a fall in credit worthiness. Finally, I show that stricter inflation targeting reduces inefficiencies in all instances but the boom phase of the TFP episode.     

Real and Financial Industry Booms and Busts

We examine how product market competition affects firm cash flows and stock returns in industry booms and busts. Our results show how real and financial factors interact in industry business cycles. In competitive industries, we find that high industry-level stock market valuation, investment, and financing are followed by sharply lower operating cash flows and abnormal stock returns. Analyst estimates are positively biased and returns comove more. In concentrated industries these relations are weak and generally insignificant. Our results are consistent with participants in competitive industries not fully internalizing the negative externality of industry competition on cash flows and stock returns.     

Interaction between housing prices and household borrowing: The Finnish case

Employing time series econometrics this study shows that there has been a significant two-way interaction between housing prices and housing loan stock in Finland since the financial liberalization in the late 1980s. Before the financial deregulation the interaction was substantially weaker. Furthermore, housing appreciation has a notable positive impact on the outstanding consumption loan stock. It appears that there is no similar relationship between stock prices and credit. Understanding the two-way interaction between housing prices and credit is of importance, since the interdependence is likely to augment boom–bust cycles in the economy and increase the fragility of the financial sector.     

Infrequent Housing Adjustment,Limited Participation,and Monetary Policy

This paper asks why monetary contractions have strong effects on the housing market. The paper presents a model with staggered housing adjustment in which monetary policy has real effects in the absence of any rigidity in producer pricing or wages. Limited participation in financial markets leads to a rise in the real mortgage rate following an increase in the nominal short rate. Since households must take on a mortgage to consume housing, the rise in the real interest rate reduces the share of residential investment in output.     

Rapid Credit Growth in Emerging Markets: Boon or Boom-Bust?

Episodes of rapid credit growth, especially credit booms, tend to end abruptly, typically in the form of financial crises. This paper presents the findings of a comprehensive event study focusing on sixty credit booms across emerging markets. The build-up of credit booms across emerging markets seems to be characterized by loose monetary policy stances, with domestic policy rates below trend during the prepeak phase of credit booms. While credit booms are associated with episodes of large capital inflows, international interest rates (a proxy for global liquidity) are virtually flat during these periods. Therefore, although external factors such as global liquidity conditions matter, and possibly increasingly so over time, domestic factors (especially monetary policy) also appear to be tightly associated with real credit growth across emerging markets.     

Bailout uncertainty in a microfounded general equilibrium model of the financial system

This paper develops a micro-founded general equilibrium model of the financial system composed of ultimate borrowers, ultimate lenders and financial intermediaries. The model is used to investigate the impact of uncertainty about the likelihood of governmental bailouts on leverage, interest rates, the volume of defaults and the real economy. The distinction between risk and uncertainty is implemented by applying the multiple priors framework to beliefs about the probability of bailout.Results of the analysis include: (i) An unanticipated increase in bailout uncertainty raises interest rates, the volume of defaults in both the real and financial sectors and may lead to a total drying up of credit markets. (ii) Lower exante bailout uncertainty is conducive to higher leverage, which in turn raises moral hazard and makes the economy more vulnerable to expost increases in bailout uncertainty. (iii) Bailout uncertainty affects the likelihood of bubbles, the amplitude of booms and busts as well as the banking and the credit spreads. (iv) Higher bailout uncertainty is associated with higher returns’ variability in diversified portfolios and higher systemic risks, (v) Pre-crisis expansionary monetary policy reinforces those effects by inducing higher aggregate leverage levels. (vi) The larger the change in bailout uncertainty and the change in aversion to this uncertainty, the stronger the pre-crisis buildup and the deeper the ensuing crisis.A central policy implication of the analysis is that the vaguest is bailout policy prior to a crisis, the lower is the magnitude of investments destroyed or missed due to errors in evaluating bailout and other intervention policies. On the other hand, the clearer is bailout policy upon the eruption of a crisis, the smaller the contraction of credit and the destruction of investment activity.     

Housing and the Macroeconomy: Inflation and the Financial Accelerator

Three themes connecting housing and the macroeconomy are discussed. First, evidence is presented for the property market as one of the drivers of U.S. consumer price inflation. Second, key drivers of house prices are explained to account for the remarkable diversity of international experience. Finally, three potential links between housing, credit, and the financial accelerator are discussed. These are the consumption channel, the investment channel, and feedback between bad loans and risk‐spreads via the financial system—and how institutional differences between countries can explain the presence, absence and magnitudes of these linkages.     

Optimal Monetary Policy Rules and House Prices: The Role of Financial Frictions

We probe the scope for reacting to house prices in simple and implementable monetary policy rules, using a New Keynesian model with a housing sector and financial frictions on the household side. We show that the social‐welfare‐maximizing monetary policy rule features a reaction to house price variations, when the latter are generated by housing demand or financial shocks. The sign and size of the reaction crucially depend on the degree of financial frictions in the economy. When the share of constrained agents is relatively small, the optimal reaction is negative, implying that the central bank must move the policy rate in the opposite direction with respect to house prices. However, when the economy is characterized by a sufficiently high average loan‐to‐value ratio, then it becomes optimal to counter house price increases by raising the policy rate.     

Information manipulation and rational investment booms and busts

A model of endogenous investment booms and busts with rational agents is presented where outside investors are uncertain about both industry (aggregate) and firm-specific capital productivity, and insiders manipulate information through strategic productivity disclosures. For intermediate and high levels of agency conflict, there are aggregate investment distortions along the equilibrium path, investment dynamics are history-dependent, and depict patterns of persistent investment booms or investment busts even though investors design optimal incentive contracts based on Bayes-rational beliefs. Moreover, the aggregate uncertainty may not be resolved in the limit, as the number of firms and disclosures gets arbitrarily large.     

Housing and Tax Policy

This paper investigates the effects of housing‐related tax policy measures on macroeconomic aggregates using a dynamic general‐equilibrium model featuring borrowing and lending across heterogeneous households, financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints tied to house prices, and a rental housing market alongside owner‐occupied housing. We analyze the effects of various tax policies and find that they all lead to significant output losses, with large long‐run tax multipliers of around 2. Among them, reducing the mortgage interest deduction is the most effective in raising tax revenue per unit of output lost, whereas reducing the depreciation allowance for rental income is the least effective.     

Are capital controls countercyclical?

A growing theoretical literature advocates the use of countercyclical capital control policy, that is, the tightening of restrictions on net capital inflows during booms and the relaxation thereof during recessions. We examine the behavior of capital controls in 78 countries over the period 1995–2011. We find that capital controls are remarkably acyclical. Booms and busts in aggregate activity are associated with virtually no movements in capital controls. These results are robust to controlling for the level of development, external indebtedness, and the exchange-rate regime. They also obtain around the great contraction of 2007.     

Does inequality lead to a financial crisis?

The recent global crisis has sparked interest in the relationship between income inequality, credit booms, and financial crises. Rajan (2010) and Kumhof and Rancière (2011) propose that rising inequality led to a credit boom and eventually to a financial crisis in the US in the first decade of the 21st century as it did in the 1920s. Data from 14 advanced countries between 1920 and 2000 suggest these are not general relationships. Credit booms heighten the probability of a banking crisis, but we find no evidence that a rise in top income shares leads to credit booms. Instead, low interest rates and economic expansions are the only two robust determinants of credit booms in our data set. Anecdotal evidence from US experience in the 1920s and in the years up to 2007 and from other countries does not support the inequality, credit, crisis nexus. Rather, it points back to a familiar boom-bust pattern of declines in interest rates, strong growth, rising credit, asset price booms and crises.     

Pricing the US residential asset through the rent flow: A cross-sectional study

The paper explores how the standard consumption-CAPM fares in pricing housing returns and regional rental income streams in a cross-section of regions. In particular, we estimate the Euler equations associated with the gross housing returns inclusive of price appreciations and rents jointly for several metropolitan areas of the US. The representative agent has a Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) utility. The rent growth is allowed to depend on the business cycle. When biannual data from 1978 to 2007 is used, the parameter estimates are reasonable, and the model is not rejected. Large standard errors indicate uninformative estimates. The implied price rent ratio time series averages are similar to the data; however the model misses the boom-bust pattern in the prices. The model significantly understates the average and the variance of the price appreciations. Results are robust to allowing housing consumption directly in the utility function or using the Epstein–Zin–Weil utility.     

Excessive Financial Support,Real Estate Development and Macroeconomic Growth: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Using monthly panel data for China’s 30 provinces from 2007 to 2017, this article analyzes how level of financial support affects the interplay between real estate development and macroeconomic growth. Based on a threshold model, the results suggest that housing price increases substantially impede economic growth, but there is no significant threshold effect for the sample as a whole. On investigating regional cross-sectional variations, we found that local economic situation clearly impacts on this effect, with significant threshold effects detected in subsamples. While housing price may have positive influences on economic growth in the mid-west subgroup with appropriate financial support, more developed regions returned contrary results.     

The Inventory-Sales Ratio and Homebuilder Return Predictability

The firm’s inventory-sales ratio prices exposure to the housing cycle with a predictable sign. The buyer of a new home holds a pre-construction contract at a guaranteed price with the right to cancel at any date up to delivery. The demand for contracts rises with falling user costs while lot supply is inelastic, leading to land bidding in booms. During busts sales decline and land bidding largely disappears. Delivery is from inventory at a cost of carry below that of construction. The firm’s inventory-sales ratio leads and is negatively correlated with its subsequent returns. For U.S. homebuilders over 1975 to 2009, a 1% increase in the inventory-sales ratio lowers next-quarter returns by five basis points.     

Auditing,Reasoning Systems,Reporting Frameworks,and Accounting Policy Risk: A Response to Alexander

This response to Alexander (2010 ) clarifies the approach taken in Smieliauskas et al. (2008 ). Here we elaborate further on the significance of the accounting risk concept for fairness of presentation in financial reporting. In the process we show how Alexander's potentially important concept of accounting policy risk can be made operational via the concept of accounting risk.     

Imperfect Common Knowledge, Staggered Price Setting, and the Effects of Monetary Policy

This paper studies the consequences of a lack of common knowledge in the transmission of monetary policy by integrating the Woodford (2003a) imperfect common knowledge model with Taylor–Calvo staggered price-setting models. The average price set by monopolistically competitive firms depends on their higher-order expectations about not only the current state of the economy but also about the states in the future periods in which prices are to be fixed. This integrated model provides a plausible explanation for the observed effects of monetary policy: it shows analytically how price adjustments are delayed and how the response of output to monetary disturbances is amplified.