Funded pensions and intergenerational and international risk sharing in general equilibrium

We explore intergenerational and international risk sharing in a general equilibrium multiple-country model with two-tier pensions systems. The exact design of the pension system is key for the way in which risks are shared over generations. The laissez-faire market solution fails to provide an optimal allocation because the young cannot share in the financial risks. However, the existence of wage-indexed bonds combined with a pension system with a fully funded second tier that pays defined wage-indexed benefits can reproduce the first best. If wage-indexed bonds are not available, mimicking the first best is not possible, except under special circumstances. We also explore whether national pension funds want to deviate from the first best by increasing domestic equity holdings. With wage-indexed bonds this incentive is absent, while there is indeed such an incentive when wage-indexed bonds do not exist.     

Ownership structure and risk in publicly held and privately owned banks

Using detailed ownership data for a sample of European commercial banks, we analyze the link between ownership structure and risk in both privately owned and publicly held banks. We consider five categories of shareholders that are specific to our dataset. We find that ownership structure is significant in explaining risk differences but mainly for privately owned banks. A higher equity stake of either individuals/families or banking institutions is associated with a decrease in asset risk and default risk. In addition, institutional investors and non-financial companies impose the riskiest strategies when they hold higher stakes. For publicly held banks, changes in ownership structure do not affect risk taking. Market forces seem to align the risk-taking behavior of publicly held banks, such that ownership structure is no longer a determinant in explaining risk differences. However, higher stakes of banking institutions in publicly held banks are associated with lower credit and default risk.     

Inflation and inequality

Cross-country evidence on inflation and income inequality suggests that they are positively related. This article explores the hypothesis that this correlation is the outcome of a distributional conflict underlying the determination of government policies. A political economy model is presented in which equilibrium inflation is positively related to the degree of inequality in income due to the relative vulnerability to inflation of low income households.     

ARE TREASURY INFLATION PROTECTED SECURITIES REALLY TAX DISADVANTAGED?

In 1997, the U.S. Treasury introduced Inflation Protected Securities, commonly known as TIPS. Several in the finance field have since described these securities as “tax disadvantaged” relative to conventional securities, leading to serious questions regarding their appropriateness outside of tax‐deferred accounts. In this article, we develop a framework that demonstrates that at least in a real sense the tax treatment of TIPS is trivially different from that of conventional Treasury securities. Moreover, empirically we find evidence that TIPS generally have after‐tax yields comparable to, if not exceeding, conventional fixed‐rate Treasury securities. We also show that TIPS have generally outperformed matched‐maturity conventional Treasury securities in terms of after‐tax rates of return.     

Volatility in an era of reduced uncertainty: Lessons from Pax Britannica

Although it has been well established that financial volatility is related to news and macroeconomic shocks, less emphasis has been placed on the importance of underlying economic and political stability. In this paper we study the behavior of consol returns since 1729 and identify a greater-than-50% decline in volatility from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until the First World War. News events and macroeconomic variables cannot account for this extended period of reduced volatility. Underlying political stability under Pax Britannica seems to be a more likely explanation.     

Smoothing with liquid and illiquid assets

A quantitative examination of the demand for liquid assets arising from consumption smoothing motives reveals that such demand is very low. Consumers faced with income streams calibrated to match income and unemployment data and returns and transactions costs calibrated to match US Treasury Bill data almost exclusively buy and hold illiquid long term assets even though the return premium on long term assets is quite small. This is because, with standard preferences, savings are highly persistent even when risky income is not. In the calibrated model, the first order autocorrelation of savings is an order of magnitude larger than that of income.     

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.     

Can tax convexity be ignored in corporate financing decisions?

The standard modeling practice in corporate finance has been to assume a linear tax schedule. This paper extends the structural contingent-claim model of corporate finance to incorporate a more realistic convex tax schedule. It is shown that tax convexity raises the optimal default boundary and thus increases the likelihood of default, and also reduces the optimal leverage ratio. While the former effect seems insignificant in general, the effect of tax convexity on the optimal leverage ratio can be quantitatively significant. We conclude that tax convexity should not be ignored in corporate financing decisions, and theoretical models should use a convex tax schedule instead of a linear one. Thus, the short answer to the question in the title is “No”.     

Aggregate uncertainty, money and banking

This paper addresses the problem of monitoring the monitor in a model of money and banking with private information and aggregate uncertainty. There is no need to monitor a bank if it requires loans to be repaid partly with money. A market arises at the repayment stage and generates information-revealing prices that perfectly discipline the bank. This mechanism also applies when there exist multiple banks. With multiple banks, competition of private monies improves welfare. A prohibition on private money issue not only eliminates money competition but also triggers free-rider problems among banks, which is detrimental to welfare.     

Banking crises: An equal opportunity menace

The historical frequency of banking crises is similar in advanced and developing countries, with quantitative parallels in both the run-ups and the aftermath. We establish these regularities using a dataset spanning from the early 1800s to the present. Banking crises weaken fiscal positions, with government revenues invariably contracting. Three years after a crisis central government debt increases by about 86%. The fiscal burden of banking crisis extends beyond the cost of the bailouts. We find that systemic banking crises are typically preceded by asset price bubbles, large capital inflows and credit booms, in rich and poor countries alike.     

The paper‐bill spread and real output: what matters more,a change in the paper rate or a change in the bill rate?

This paper adds to the literature on the information content of the paper-bill spread by explicitly taking into account the two sources of wider spreads, rises in the paper rate and declines in the bill rate. Results from impulse response analysis and variance decompositions suggest that decreases in real output are greater and last longer when a widening of the paper-bill spread comes from an increase in the paper rate rather than from an equivalent decrease in the bill rate. This is consistent with the idea that changes in the commercial paper rate have greater information content about future business cycles than do changes in the Treasury bill rate.     

Why are excess returns on China’s Treasury bonds so predictable? The role of the monetary system

It is well documented that the time-varying bond excess returns can be explained by predetermined variables such as information in the term structure and macro economic variables. Recent studies suggest that demand and supply of bonds influence bond excess returns. We extend the literature and find that monetary system attributes affect return dynamics in the bond market. By introducing a theoretical model to forecast excess returns on Treasury bonds in the context of China’s unique monetary system, this paper attributes the predicted components of bond excess returns mainly to the inflexible term structures of official interest rates set by China’s central bank.     

Taylor rules, McCallum rules and the term structure of interest rates

Recent empirical research shows that a reasonable characterization of federal-funds-rate targeting behavior is that the change in the target rate depends on the maturity structure of interest rates and exhibits little dependence on lagged target rates. See, for example, Cochrane and Piazzesi [2002. The Fed and interest rates—a high-frequency identification. American Economic Review 92, 90-95.]. The result echoes the policy rule used by McCallum [1994a. Monetary policy and the term structure of interest rates. NBER Working Paper No. 4938.] to rationalize the empirical failure of the ‘expectations hypothesis’ applied to the term structure of interest rates. That is, rather than forward rates acting as unbiased predictors of future short rates, the historical evidence suggests that the correlation between forward rates and future short rates is surprisingly low. McCallum showed that a desire by the monetary authority to adjust short rates in response to exogenous shocks to the term premiums imbedded in long rates (i.e. “yield-curve smoothing”), along with a desire for smoothing interest rates across time, can generate term structures that account for the puzzling regression results of Fama and Bliss [1987. The information in long-maturity forward rates. The American Economic Review 77, 680-392.]. McCallum also clearly pointed out that this reduced-form approach to the policy rule, although naturally forward looking, needed to be studied further in the context of other response functions such as the now standard Taylor [1993. Discretion versus policy rules in practice. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 39, 195-214.] Rule. We explore both the robustness of McCallum's result to endogenous models of the term premium and also its connections to the Taylor Rule. We model the term premium endogenously using two different models in the class of affine term-structure models studied in Duffie and Kan [1996. A yield-factor model of interest rates. Mathematical Finance 57, 405-443.]: a stochastic volatility model and a stochastic price-of-risk model. We then solve for equilibrium term structures in environments in which interest rate targeting follows a rule such as the one suggested by McCallum (i.e., the “McCallum Rule”). We demonstrate that McCallum's original result generalizes in a natural way to this broader class of models. To understand the connection to the Taylor Rule, we then consider two structural macroeconomic models which have reduced forms that correspond to the two affine models and provide a macroeconomic interpretation of abstract state variables (as in Ang and Piazzessi [2003. A no-arbitrage vector autoregression of term structure dynamics with macroeconomic and latent variables. Journal of Monetary Economics 50, 745-787.]). Moreover, such structural models allow us to interpret the parameters of the term-structure model in terms of the parameters governing preferences, technologies, and policy rules. We show how a monetary policy rule will manifest itself in the equilibrium asset-pricing kernel and, hence, the equilibrium term structure. We then show how this policy can be implemented with an interest-rate targeting rule. This provides us with a set of restrictions under which the Taylor and McCallum Rules are equivalent in the sense if implementing the same monetary policy. We conclude with some numerical examples that explore the quantitative link between these two models of monetary policy.     

Tax without Design: Recent Developments in UK Tax Policy

This paper considers the development of tax policy in the UK over the last decade or so and assesses policy change against a low bar – consistency and coherence. While this government has followed some consistent policies – notably, in some aspects of corporation tax and in increasing the income tax personal allowance – there are few signs of a wider coherent strategy. The same has been true of other recent governments. Many aspects of the system have become more complex. There have been numerous policy reversals. And few of those aspects of the system in most need of reform have been tackled. The need for reform, and a clear strategy for reform, remain as pressing as ever.     

The effect of monetary policy shocks on stock prices accounting for endogeneity and omitted variable biases

A new high frequency data set is used to estimate the impact of the Fed on the level and volatility of stock prices while accounting for endogeneity and omitted variable biases and potential asymmetries. Results show that after addressing these issues, the effect of policy shocks on the level and volatility of stock returns is higher than previously reported. GARCH findings indicate that the volatility impact is tent-shaped, spiking during policy announcements and declining before and after the release. The level and conditional volatility of stock returns is found to respond asymmetrically to the type of policy shocks (timing versus future path of monetary policy) and the type of policy action (easing versus tightening).     

An unobserved component model of asset pricing across financial markets

Our research focuses on multifactor asset pricing models that investigate the importance of economic factors in the pricing of assets beyond the scope of the stock market. We present a Bayesian learning model of asset pricing across financial markets in which unobserved components are estimated using a Kalman filter (KF). Economic factors serve to drive the pricing of risk in the market, and agents update expectations recursively, as new information becomes available. We generally find that the Kalman filter provides superior performance and that economic factors like industrial production and unanticipated inflation provide consistent implications across financial markets.     

Implications of state-dependent pricing for dynamic macroeconomic models

State-dependent pricing (SDP) models treat the timing of price changes as a profit-maximizing choice, symmetrically with other decisions of firms. Using quantitative general equilibrium models which incorporate a “generalized (S,s) approach,” we investigate the implications of SDP for topics in two major areas of macroeconomic research, the early 1990s SDP literature and more recent work on persistence mechanisms. First, we show that state-dependent pricing leads to unusual macroeconomic dynamics, which occur because of the timing of price adjustments chosen by firms as in the earlier literature. In particular, we display an example in which output responses peak at about a year, while inflation responses peak at about 2 years after the shock. Second, we examine whether the persistence-enhancing effects of two New Keynesian model features, namely specific factor markets and variable elasticity demand curves, depend importantly on whether pricing is state dependent. In an SDP setting, we provide examples in which specific factor markets perversely work to lower persistence, while variable elasticity demand raises it.     

Risk,uncertainty, and asset prices

We identify the relative importance of changes in the conditional variance of fundamentals (which we call “uncertainty”) and changes in risk aversion in the determination of the term structure, equity prices, and risk premiums. Theoretically, we introduce persistent time-varying uncertainty about the fundamentals in an external habit model. The model matches the dynamics of dividend and consumption growth, including their volatility dynamics and many salient asset market phenomena. While the variation in price–dividend ratios and the equity risk premium is primarily driven by risk aversion, uncertainty plays a large role in the term structure and is the driver of countercyclical volatility of asset returns.     

Firm-specific information and the efficiency of investment

In the three-year period following stock market liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm's capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by an average of 4.1 percentage points. Cross-sectional changes in investment are significantly correlated with the signals about fundamentals embedded in the stock price changes that occur upon liberalization. Panel-data estimations show that a 10-percentage point increase in a firm's expected future sales growth predicts a 2.9- to 3.5-percentage point increase in the growth rate of its capital stock. Country-specific changes in the cost of capital drive changes in investment but firm-specific changes in the cost of capital do not.