Regulating Exclusion from Financial Markets

We study optimal enforcement in credit markets in which the only threat facing a defaulting borrower is restricted access to financial markets. We solve for the optimal level of exclusion, and link it to observed institutional arrangements. Regulation in this environment must accomplish two objectives. First, it must prevent borrowers from defaulting on one bank and transferring their resources to another bank. Second, and less obviously, it must give banks the incentive to make sizeable loans, and to honour their promises of future credit. We establish that the optimal regulation resembles observed laws governing default on debt. Moreover, if debtors have the right to a "fresh start" after bankruptcy then this must be balanced by enforceable provisions against fraudulent conveyance. Our optimal regulation is robust, in that it can be implemented in a way that does not require the regulator to have information about either the borrower or lender. Our results isolate the way in which specific institutions surrounding bankruptcy–namely rules governing asset garnishment and fraudulent conveyances–support loan markets in which borrowers have no collateral.     

Financial Structure Changes and the Central Bank Policy

In a response to the financial collapse of 2007–2009, central banks overstepped their narrow role of lender of last resort (LLR) and acted as dealers or market-makers of last resort (MMLR). Such an evolution of the central bank policy stems from the endogenous process of growing securities markets, financial innovations, and market-based credit intermediation. This article examines how changes in the structure of the banking and financial system transforms the central bank policy in financial stability. It considers the separation or integration of the LLR and MMLR functions, revisits the debate opposing lend-to-market and lend-to-institution theses, and discusses the LLR standard rule and its transposition to the MMLR rule. Inasmuch as private securities markets and financial innovations determine the structure of the credit system, central banks endogenously adopt the integrated approach, so that the extensive LLR policy prevails.     

Lender deception as a response to moral hazard

The paper considers a principal–agent relationship between a borrower and lender based on a model from Bowles (Microeconomics: behavior, institutions, & evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003). It expands the model by incorporating borrower collateral as an exogenous variable to partly assuage lender concerns about excessive risk, and a theory of lender deception is then developed. Deception is posited as a costly activity that effectively makes fraud undetectable and extracts the borrower’s economic rent arising from moral hazard despite the presence of third-party enforcement and borrower collateral. We identify under what conditions a lender may have sufficient incentives for employing deception and to what extent they would employ it. The likelihood of, and outcomes from, deception are compared between monopoly lenders those in competitive markets. The model suggests that competitive lenders have more incentive to deceive than a monopoly lender facing the same borrower.     

Governing Poverty in a Neoliberal Age: New Labour and the Case of Financial Exclusion

In the UK, from the 1990s, the concept of financial exclusion emerged as a focus of policymaking concern. In part, this reflects the growing scale and complexity of personal finance markets and how these are increasingly interwoven into the everyday lives of individuals. However, it is also argued that the development of the concept of financial exclusion reflects preeminent neoliberal discourses that emphasise the centrality of individual responsibility, autonomy and consumer participation within markets. In 2004 the then Labour government, in conjunction with academic experts, financial institutions and other organisations, established a project of financial inclusion in relation to three key domains: banking, affordable credit and financial capability. The consequence, it is suggested here, has not been so much to alleviate inequality as to nurture the poor to be precautionary, risk averse financial subjects. This stands in contrast with the virtues of enterprise and risk-taking called up in middle-class investor subjects.     

Emerging Market Countries’ Access to International Financial Markets

Recent global imbalances have changed the way international capital flows are shared among developed and developing countries. In the new environment, the U.S., a former lender, has become a borrower. This article discusses how the privileged position of this new borrower might influence developing countries?? access to international financial markets. It suggests that for some emerging market countries, the recent increase in current account surpluses might be because of worsening in their borrowing opportunities. Empirical analysis for 39 emerging market economies shows that the increase in the U.S. deficit limited the access of emerging market economies that we analyzed in Commonwealth of Independent States, Developing Asia, Central and Eastern Europe to international financial markets for the 1980?C2009 time period.     

Federal lending and aggregate economic activity

Attention to federal activity in credit markets is typically focused on the government's role as a borrower. In contrast, scant attention is paid to its equally large and dominant role as a lender. This paper evaluates the aggregate impact of federal lending activity within the framework of a vector autoregressive representation of the US macroeconomy. The empirical regularities uncovered suggest that aggregate federal lending activity does not have a net positive impact on output.     

A dynamic model of unsecured credit

We study the terms of credit in a competitive market in which sellers (lenders) are willing to repeatedly finance the purchases of buyers (borrowers) by engaging in a credit relationship. The key frictions are: (i) the lender cannot observe the borrower?s ability to repay a loan; (ii) the borrower cannot commit to any long-term contract; (iii) it is costly for the lender to contact a borrower and to walk away from a contract; and (iv) transactions within each credit relationship are not publicly observable. The lender?s optimal contract has two key properties: delayed settlement and debt forgiveness. Finally, we study the impact of changes in the initial cost of lending on the contract terms.     

经济负债、金融稳定与明斯基周期*

我国是否逼近“明斯基时刻”成为当前经济关注的热点。本文首次基于明斯基周期核心理论“金融不稳定假说”，构建投资负债系统模型，应用面板VAR模型，从公司层面实证研究我国经济是否存在明斯基周期。研究结果表明，我国经济主体负债率在经济扩张期呈现显著的逆周期性，负债对投资的负向影响在经济扩张期表现最为显著，上述两点结论与明斯基“金融不稳定假说”的核心观点相冲突，说明根植于西方自由金融市场土壤的明斯基周期理论并不适用于我国。但值得注意的是，由于我国当前阶段也存在“金融拖拽效应”，在当前宏观经济政策中要进一步明确去杠杆的重要性。     

Instability and Crisis in Financial Complex Systems

This paper contrasts the Efficient Markets Hypothesis with Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH), taking into account the dynamic complexity of financial markets. This approach offers analytical tools that can account for crisis through processes endogenous to contemporary economies. Recent work, notably by J. Barkley Rosser, has suggested that complex dynamics is a strong foundations for Keynesian models and results. Group dynamics enter into the analysis in at least two ways: they provide an independent source of fundamental uncertainty which, as discussed by Keynes himself, can lead to speculative bubbles in asset markets, and they can cause overreactions in both lenders' and borrowers' attitudes toward risk. These aspects can lead to financial fragility and instability following a variety of complex dynamics. I shall argue that a financially complex system is, according to the FIH, inherently flawed and unstable: in the absence of adequate economic policy boom and bust phenomena, in financial markets which are fuelled by credit booms and busts, may generate endogenous instability and systemic crisis, such as the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis.

[O]ur economic leadership does not seem to be aware that the normal functioning of our economy leads to financial trauma and crisis, inflation, currency depreciations, unemployment, and poverty in the midst of what could be virtually universal affluence—in short, that financially complex capitalism is inherently flawed. (Minsky, 1986, p. 287; our emphasis)     

Remittances and rural credit markets: Evidence from Senegal

This study investigates the relationship between remittances and credit markets in Senegal, focusing on rural areas where financial constraints are more challenging. Using a household fixed effects model, the findings show that remittances and credit markets are complements; namely, the receipt of remittances is positively associated with the likelihood of having a loan in a household. This means that migrants can increase the reliability of their family members and close relatives back home through their remittances, insuring them vis‐à‐vis lenders for their credit contracts. They are the collateral or the “element of trust” in the credit contract between the borrower and the lender, representing a potential alternative in case of non‐repayment. This result is robust to alternative models and various robustness tests mitigating the potential endogeneity of remittances. A detailed analysis also shows that the relationship between remittances and credit markets is mainly driven by loans taken for consumption and food, in particular, as well as loans provided by informal institutions.     

Minsky’s financial fragility: an empirical analysis of electricity distribution firms in Brazil (2007–2015)

This article applies Hyman P. Minsky’s insights on financial fragility to analyze the behavior of electricity distribution firms in Brazil from 2007 to 2015. More specifically, it builds an analytical framework to classify these firms into Minskyan risk categories and assess how financial fragility evolved over time, in each firm and in the sector as a whole. This work adapts Minsky’s financial fragility indicators and taxonomy to the conditions of the electricity distribution sector and applies them to regulatory accounting data for more than 60 firms. This empirical application of Minsky’s theory for analyzing firms engaged in the provision of public goods and services is a novelty. The results show an increase in the financial fragility of those firms as well as of the sector throughout the period, especially between 2008 and 2013.     

Credit Policy in times of Financial Distress

This essay evaluates two central bank policy tools, capital requirements and lending of last resort, designed to avert financial panics in the context of endowment economies with complete markets and limited borrower commitment. Credit panics are self-fulfilling shocks to expected credit conditions which cause transitions from an optimal but fragile steady state to a suboptimal state with zero unsecured credit. The main findings are: (i) Countercyclical reserve policies protect the optimal equilibrium against modest shocks but are powerless against large shocks. (ii) If we ignore private information and central bank inefficiencies, this class of models bears out Bagehot’s 1873 claim in Lombard Street: panics are averted if central banks stand ready to lend at a rate somewhat above the one associated with the optimal state.     

Bargaining power and enforcement in credit markets

In a credit market with enforcement constraints, we study the effects of a change in the outside options of a potential defaulter on the terms of the credit contract, as well as on borrower payoffs. The results crucially depend on the allocation of “bargaining power” between the borrower and the lender. We prove that there is a crucial threshold of relative weights such that if the borrower has power that exceeds this threshold, her expected utility must go up whenever her outside options come down. But if the borrower has less power than this threshold, her expected payoff must come down with her outside options. In the former case a deterioration in outside options brought about, say, by better enforcement, must create a Lorenz improvement in state-contingent consumption. In particular, borrower consumption rises in all “bad” states in which loans are taken. In the latter case, in contrast, the borrower's consumption must decline, at least for all the bad states. These disparate findings within a single model permit us to interpret existing literature on credit markets in a unified way.     

Design and rating of risk-contingent credit for balancing business and financial risks for Kenyan farmers

Weather-related agricultural risks and limited access to credit are serious impediments to agricultural productivity and growth in developing countries. This paper describes a novel insurance linked credit model piloted in Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent, and farmers do not borrow because of the risk of losing their collateral. One of the challenges in deigning bundled credit products, in the absence of traded securities, is the actuarial pricing and risk rating of the insurance and the loan product. We develop a rainfall linked risk-contingent credit that transfers drought risk related perils from borrower to lender via insurance mechanism that provide a balance between business and credit risks for smallholder farmers. We describe the methodology used to design and rating of a risk-contingent structured operating agricultural credit instrument using CHIRPS rainfall data from 1981–2016 in Kenya. We illustrate the use of Monte Carlo methods to risk modelling that can be integrated within the general insurance and credit rating framework. The innovative design and methodology presented in this paper are as important as the product delivery mechanism and will be of interest to specialists in development economics and agricultural finance.     

The Confidence Trap: Japan’s Past Bubble and China’s Recent Bubble

This paper explores the origin of China’s recent credit and asset boom by comparing it with the Japanese bubble economy in the late 1980s by focusing on the asymmetric pattern of financial liberalisation under high savings. It argues that (1) both cases show a ‘confidence trap’ in that policy-makers of the government shared a complacent mindset that they can achieve the optimal mix of market liberalisation and repression, while believing that their political economic system is fundamentally different from others; (2) Such complacent confidence precipitated the supply-side driven financial reforms, in which both governments tried to diversify the credit channels of bank deposits by promoting non-bank financial intermediaries; (3) Exogenous shocks played a pivotal role in enforcing the government to take aggressive monetary easing and fiscal expansionary measures. But the Chinese case is different from the Japanese case in that (1) local politics has promoted a ‘too secure to fail’ situation in which rent-seeking activities are difficult to be detected, thus aggravating the hidden systemic risks; (2) China needs to liberalise its capital account with the more strengthened macroprudential regulatory governance, as the global foreign exchange markets have drastically changed from the period of the 1980s.     

Liberalisation,Financial Risk,and Formal Financial Participation in Pakistan: Hyperinflationary Microeconomic Responses to Moderate Volatility in a Developing Economy

With formal financial inclusion much lower than its neighbours, Pakistan has been the focus of intensive efforts to ‘bank’ the ‘unbanked’. Yet, after a drop in deposits in the wake of Pakistan’s 2008 crisis, deposits are still struggling to return to their mid-1990s’ levels. Focusing on distortions in the banking sector, the Central Bank attributes this to ‘crowding out’ amidst a steep rise in the propensity to consume. This study draws on extensive fieldwork, identifying heightened financial risk driven by multifaceted monetary instability since the liberalisation of the rupee and of Pakistani markets. It proposes that heightened monetary risk has translated into a broad-based shift out of the rupee akin to hyperinflationary responses, but revealed in relatively moderate monetary conditions. It argues that, exposed to global markets, national currency itself has become a risky asset, pushing store-of-value and transactional holdings into unconventional liquid assets. This suggests that monetary stability, expressed in the currency itself and in broader pricing patterns in the economy, is key to the uptake of financial intermediation. The issue at the root of disintermediation in Pakistan, it is argued, is less one of ‘crowding out’ than of disruption to the role of national currency as money itself.     

影子银行体系的信用创造：机制、效应和应对思路

本文从金融功能视角,将影子银行体系的范畴界定在发挥了类似于商业银行存款、贷款、结算等功能的三大类非银行金融机构。在此前提下,从金融机构和金融产品视角,重点剖析了前两类金融机构的信用创造机制。同时,提出影子银行体系的信用创造机制对商业银行具有有限替代效应,并在货币市场上产生外部溢出效应。即流动性之谜。最后,基于影子银行体系信用创造机制缺陷,提出从抵押品管理角度入手。在金融市场中建立证券最后贷款人,以规避影子银行体系信用扩张的风险。     

Adverse selection as an explanation of credit rationing and different lender types

An adverse selection model is utilized to demonstrate that informational asymmetry may make it wealth optimal for the financial intermediary (FI) to credit ration and to rationalize the existence of different lenders in the credit market. The crucial assumption is that borrowers differ in their tolerance for a lender-imposed default penalty, the severity of which also varies with the lender. The credit rationing portion proves that the FI will: 1) be forced by a binding regulatory constraint to overinvest in capital; 2) ration its worst risk class borrowers; 3) establish its optimal loan interest rate on the basis of the average quality of its loans and the interest rate elasticity of the borrower demand in its best risk category; and 4) decrease the total loan volume and increase the loan interest rate due to an increase in the capital requirement, but the effect on the default risk quality of its loan portfolio is ambiguous. The existence result is that if a lender has a high default penalty, he can charge a lower rate and attract only “good” borrowers, i.e., heterogeneous lender types encourage the screening of borrowers and vice versa.     

Borrower credit access and credit performance after loan modifications

While the preventive effect of loan modifications on mortgage default has been well-documented, evidence on the broad consequences of modifications has been fairly limited. Based on two unique loan-level data sets with borrower credit profiles, this study reports novel empirical evidence on how homeowners manage their credit before and after receiving modifications. The paper has several main findings. First, loan modifications improve borrowers’ overall credit standing and access to credit. Modifications that provide principal reduction, rate reduction, or greater payment relief, as well as those received by borrowers not in financial catastrophe, lead to a larger improvement in borrowers’ credit rating than others. Second, loan modifications lead to a slight increase in borrowers’ debts, primarily on home equity line of credit accounts and auto loans. Third, borrowers’ performance on nonmortgage accounts, however, has not been negatively impacted by modifications. This study demonstrates that interventions designed to improve household balance sheets could have a direct and sizeable impact on borrower financial outcomes.     

The legal theory of finance and the financial instability hypothesis: Convergences and possible integration

This article presents the legal theory of finance (LTF) and compares it with the financial instability hypothesis (FIH), identifying points of convergence and divergence. The study aims to contribute to the literature by connecting these theories and provides the following main conclusions. First, the LTF incorporates aspects of the FIH, as the theories share several key elements, particularly the presence of fundamental uncertainty, the constraint of liquidity, and the necessity for governments to act as lenders of last resort. Second, the liquidity concept used in the LTF can be better comprehended with the use of Keynesian and post Keynesian literature on the topic. Third, the LTF aims to advance and update certain aspects of Minsky’s theory, particularly with regard to the globalization of markets, power relations, and the interdependencies of the political economy of finance. The study concludes that the theories are more complementary than divergent and future studies should create an analytical framework that integrates the theories’ most insightful aspects.