On Targeting Frameworks And Optimal Monetary Policy

We show that speed limit policy, a monetary policy strategy that focuses on stabilizing inflation and the change in the output gap, consistently outperforms flexible inflation targeting and flexible price level targeting in empirical medium‐scale DSGE models under discretionary policymaking. In contrast to small‐scale New Keynesian models, this welfare ranking of the targeting frameworks is not overturned when inflation dynamics are mostly backward‐looking. Importantly, the performance of the speed limit policy shows less sensitivity to its parameterization than other frameworks that target the inflation rate or the price level.     

The Market for Conflicted Advice

We present a model of the market for advice in which advisers have conflicts of interest and compete for heterogeneous customers through information provision. The competitive equilibrium features information dispersion and partial disclosure. Although conflicted fees lead to distorted information, they are irrelevant for customers' welfare: banning conflicted fees improves only the information quality, not customers' welfare. Instead, financial literacy education for the least informed customers can improve all customers' welfare because of a spillover effect. Furthermore, customers who trade through advisers realize lower average returns, which rationalizes empirical findings.     

Bounded Rationality and Use of Alternative Financial Services

The increasing pervasiveness of high‐cost alternative financial services (AFS) has captured the attention of policymakers, consumer educators, and financial counselors. Using data from the 2009 to 2012 waves of the National Financial Capability Study (NFCS), this article investigates AFS borrowing behaviors through the lens of a boundedly rational choice framework, with an emphasis on overconfidence. Through repeated testing of isolated samples of individuals with characteristics that make them less likely to objectively need such products, the roles of actual (objective) and perceived (subjective) financial knowledge in the decision‐making process are explored. Consistent results indicate that individuals with lower objective financial knowledge and those that are overconfident in their self‐assessed knowledge level are significantly more likely to utilize AFS instruments. These results suggest that a significant portion of AFS users may select these products without conducting adequate search, resulting in less than optimal financial decisions holding all else equal.     

Should Derivatives Be Privileged in Bankruptcy?

Derivatives enjoy special status in bankruptcy: they are exempt from the automatic stay and effectively senior to virtually all other claims. We propose a corporate finance model to assess the effect of these exemptions on a firm's cost of borrowing and incentives to engage in derivative transactions. While derivatives are value‐enhancing risk management tools, seniority for derivatives can lead to inefficiencies: it transfers credit risk to debtholders, even though this risk is borne more efficiently in the derivative market. Seniority for derivatives is efficient only if it provides sufficient cross‐netting benefits to derivative counterparties that provide hedging services.     

Absolute and Relative Restriction and Consumer Behavior: Implications for Understanding Global Consumption

Our premise is that researchers have much to gain from an understanding of the global marketplace experiences of impoverished consumers. We argue that influences of absolute and relative restriction, across peoples and societies, are particularly critical. Therefore, this research makes progress by evaluating consumer data from diverse cultures and nations using hierarchical linear models, revealing ways restriction through poverty and consumption impacts well‐being. We find that understanding both absolute and relative poverty is necessary for a more complete picture. Specifically, interactions show that absolute restriction moderates relationships between relative restriction and consumption and well‐being by muting or exacerbating the effects.     

Disciplining the ‘black sheep of the Balkans’: financial supervision and sovereignty in Bulgaria, 1902–38

Using the example of Bulgaria, we argue that familiar models of international political economy fail to capture the tension between national sovereignty and access to capital markets experienced by peripheral debtors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Existing accounts exaggerate the significance of the gold standard as a good housekeeping seal of approval and underestimate the role of direct financial controls. Furthermore, they underestimate the linkage in zones of inter‐imperial rivalry, such as the Balkans, between foreign borrowing and strategic alignment. We show how Bulgaria found its politics destabilized prior to 1914 by the demands of its creditors. After defeat in the First World War, Bulgaria was forced to submit to an even tighter system of creditor control. Though it obtained substantial debt relief during the 1930s, these concessions were gained not through an assertion of national sovereignty and default, but at the price of even closer supervision. This in turn casts new light on the conventional view of Bulgaria as a victim of Nazi ‘informal imperialism’. In light of Bulgaria's previous experience, the more striking feature of its trade relations with Hitler's Germany is that they were conducted on a basis of sovereign equality.