Financial crises and liquidity shocks a bank-run perspective

In contrast with the financial multiplier literature, this note explores a case in which the shock triggering a financial crisis stems from the financial sector itself; it is not a shock stemming from the real sector which gets amplified by, say, agency problems. The basic intuition is provided by the bank-run literature of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) variety. Financial development is modeled as a mechanism that endows real assets (e.g., land and capital) with liquidity. However, liquidity can be impaired by shocks that are equivalent to a bank run. Liquidity creation enhances real asset prices, while a liquidity crunch generates asset price collapse. This bubble-looking episode is not driven by standard fundamentals, although it is fully in line with rationality. In this context, devoid of other frictions like price stickiness, the note examines the effect of monetary policy in the absence of nominal rigidities. It shows that preventing price deflation is not enough to offset relative (to output) asset price meltdown, but lower policy interest rates increase relative asset prices and steady-state output. Moreover, in the neighborhood of a first-best capital allocation, an increase in the liquidity of capital may lower the welfare of the representative individual, even if the higher liquidity of capital is sustainable and, hence, not destroyed by future crash – illustrating the possibility of “excessive” financial innovation. An extension of the basic model supports the conjecture that low policy interest rates may have given further incentives to the development of “shadow banking.”     

The future shocks: On discontinuity and scenario development

Allegedly, an important function of scenario development is the exploration of potential discontinuity. However, there are indications that the approach does not deliver on its promises. This article investigates how discontinuity is addressed in futures literature, particularly those sources that focus on scenarios, and how the concept is used in scenario practice. A literature review reveals a multitude of terms, including wild cards and surprises, from which characteristics of discontinuity in the context of foresight can be derived. Insights from the review help investigate how discontinuity is addressed in contemporary scenario development. The investigation described in this article exposes a rather ambiguous approach to discontinuity in current scenario practice. The article closes with questions regarding scenario method where the investigation of potential discontinuity is concerned.     

Financial systems and the cost channel transmission of monetary policy shocks

We study the role of financial systems for the cost channel transmission of monetary policy in a calibrated business cycle model. We characterize financial systems by the share of bank-dependent firms and by the degree of the pass-through from policy to bank lending rates, for which we provide empirical estimates for the euro area and the US. For plausible calibrations of the dynamics of the lending rate we find that the cost effects directly related to interest rate movements have only a limited effect on the transmission mechanism.     

Political risk and the expectations hypothesis

This paper develops and empirically supports, using 3 and 6 month interest rates, a theory that political risk can explain the shifting term premia found in U.S. data. We find that incorporating these political regime shifts yield results that support the expectations hypothesis.     

Two early Swedish debates about Wicksell's cumulative process

The paper contains a survey and analysis of two debates between Wicksell and a number of Swedish economists concerning the cumulative process. The debates illustrate various problems with the analytical formulation of the cumulative process and how these problems were dealt with by the participants. Inter alia the institutional framework (inside versus outside money), excess demand or interest gap as an engine of inflation, the natural and the normal rate of interest, the relationship between the real and the monetary parts of the economy and price expectations are discussed in the paper.     

Financial innovations and the future of monetary policy in Nigeria

This paper examines the implications of financial innovations on Nigeria’s monetary policy, using: trend analysis, error correction mechanism, and a structural model estimated with generalized method of moments. The study found that financial innovation improves the interest rate channel of monetary policy transmission, and the efficiency of the financial system. However, it increases the output gap and adds an element of uncertainty in the monetary policy environment as it increases the cost of implementing monetary policy and impinges on the potency of the operating target through its impact on the stability of the money multiplier, money velocity, and demand for money.     

当代金融结构理论综述与最优金融结构

金融在经济增长中的作用一直是一个重要的话题,近年来均在承认金融在经济增长中重要作用的前提下更加深入地研究金融结构.本文对西方金融结构理论进行了综述,认为没有最优的金融结构,只是任何一种金融结构只要能很好地实现金融体系功能,促进经济增长和企业发展,就是一种好的金融结构.     

Inflation Dynamics in the Euro Area and the Role of Expectations

This paper examines the empirical performance of the New Keynesian Phillips curve and its hybrid specification in the euro area. Instead of imposing rational expectations, direct measures, i.e. OECD forecasts, are used as empirical proxies for economic agents’ inflation expectations. Real marginal costs are proxied by three alternative measures. The results suggest that once the rational expectations hypothesis is relaxed and directly measured expectations are used, the European inflation process can be modeled using the forward-looking New Keynesian Phillips curve. However, when allowing for possible non-rationalities in expectations, inflation can be modeled more accurately by the hybrid Phillips curve with the additional lagged inflation term. In this approach, output gap turns out to be at least as good as labor income share as a proxy for real marginal cost. Moreover, the inflation process seems to have become more forward-looking in the recent years of low and stable inflation.The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Bank of Finland. Special thanks are due to the editor, two anonymous referees, Juha Tarkka, Jouko Vilmunen and Matti Virén for useful comments. I am also grateful to David Mayes and Geoffrey Wood for helpful suggestions and to Heli Tikkunen for excellent research assistance. For their constructive comments, I would also thank participants in the conference on the Eurosystem Inflation Persistence Network at the ECB, which was held in Frankfurt in December 2003.     

论金融制度与金融体制及经济制度的关系

目前,中国有部分学者在谈到金融制度时,将其与金融体制混为一谈,还有的学者甚至把金融制度与经济制度割裂开来进行分析,这些观点的存在,都是由于没有准确地界定和理解金融制度的含义。金融制度是指有关金融交易的规则、惯例和组织安排,它与金融体制既有联系又有区别,而与经济制度更是紧密相连。     

Behaviour of the Liverpool model with weight given to alternative public forecasts

From an a priori consideration of the marginal costs and benefits, public forecasts appear to be strong candidates to condition the expectation of agents. Our purpose is to examine the implications for the forecasting and simulation properties of the Liverpool macroeconomic model if expectations in the behavioural equations of the model are replaced by a simple average of the Liverpool and Cambridge Economic Policy Groups forecasts. The exercise produces large differences in the forecasts and simulations of the Liverpool model.     

Confident expectations, rational expectations and the optimal conduct of monetary policy

Under what conditions central banks can afford to deviate from announced targets without losing their reputation is analyzed. For this, the public must have something like ‘confident expectations' vis-a-vis monetary policy and central banks have to behave accordingly. The paper shows that it can be rational for the public and welfare-increasing for the society to retain ‘confident expectations' instead of switching to rational expectations, when central banks have gained long-run reputation. At the end of the paper, alternative optimal money supply rules are compared in a dynamic optimization framework. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.     

农村金融服务问题探析

农村金融作为为农村经济发展服务的金融部门,直接影响农村经济发展,而目前农村金融在为农村服务中存在着诸如服务功能弱化、信贷管理制度存在缺陷、服务环境差等问题,因此,为了使农村金融适应新农村建设多样化、多层次金融需求,必须为农村金融构筑良好的金融生态环境,制定法律法规,深化农村信用社改革,完善风险分散和补偿机制.     

Expectations, the business cycle and the Mexican peso crisis

The 1994–95 ‘peso’ crisis did not displaycharacteristics which allow it to be easily captured by traditionalcrisis models. Models based on Minsky's financial fragilityhypothesis offer more persuasive accounts but have been supportedby relatively little direct empirical evidence. This paper providessuch evidence, with particular attention being paid to the roleof domestic financial liberalisation in the process. Minsky'shypotheses about the evolution of expectations over the businesscycle are tracked using business survey data. In addition, crisisindicators are constructed, reflecting the changing vulnerabilityof the economy to shocks. The findings support a Minskyian interpretationof the crisis.     

Regime shifts in the Danish term structure of interest rates

Within a bivariate VAR model allowing for two-state Markov regime switching we test and evaluate the Expectations Theory (ET) of the term structure using Danish 1- and 3-months interest rates covering the period 1976–1997. A regime-shift approach is used in order to account for the change in monetary policy and the 1992–93 exchange rate crises that occured during this period. The basic findings are that these episodes did change the term structure, and, although we do find departures from the ET, several of the implications of the theory are consistent with the data, especially in the later part of the sample. First version received: June 1997/Final version received: March 1998     

论金融生态系统提出的理论渊源及其假设条件

频频爆发的全球性金融危机和我国一系列的金融风险揭示出了各国金融交易主体与其生存的内外环境之间存在严重不协调问题,引发人们开始从仿生学视角研究金融系统与环境系统如何协调发展的问题.笔者在系统梳理国内外有关金融生态系统研究相关文献的基础上,把金融生态系统理论的演进划分为金融发展理论、金融资源理论、金融协调理论以及金融生态系统理论等四个阶段,并在此基础上,从生态学角度阐述了金融生态系统概念提出的基本假设条件.     

Intertemporal consumption with directly measured welfare functions and subjective expectations

Euler equation estimation of intertemporal consumption models requires many, often unverifiable assumptions. These include assumptions on expectations and preferences. We aim at reducing some of these requirements by using direct subjective information on respondents’ preferences and expectations. The results suggest that individually measured welfare functions and expectations have predictive power for the variation in consumption across households. Furthermore, estimates of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution based on the estimated welfare functions are plausible and of a similar order of magnitude as other estimates found in the literature. The model favored by the data only requires cross-section data for estimation.     

Optimal information acquisition and monetary policy

I study optimal monetary policy with an expectational AS curve and private agents who optimally choose their amount of information pertinent to predicting policy. Shocks with time-varying variance (ARCH) induce interesting information acquisition (IA) dynamics; optimal IA affects optimal policy and vice versa. Under discretion, IA dynamics cause time-varying effectiveness of policy because of the expectational AS curve; policy may be rendered completely ineffective. In policy game equilibrium, a fall in the shock’s variance typically induces less IA and raises welfare. In one exceptional case the opposite occurs, a result which does not require implausible unstable equilibria. An agent becoming informed increases the endogenous component of economic volatility; IA therefore has a negative externality. Under commitment policy’s effectiveness is again time-varying, but policy is never completely ineffective: commitment enables the central bank to credibly limit policy’s volatility; this limits private agents’ incentive to become informed, so limits expectation-induced policy neutrality.     

Technology shocks around the world

This article investigates the effects of a permanent technology shock on labor input in the major seven developed countries. The recent empirical literature which uses Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) with long-run restrictions has argued that technology shocks lead to a persistent and significant decline in employment in most of the G7 countries. We claim that the international transmission of shocks prevents the use of existing SVAR models, but also suggests alternative specifications to properly uncover their effects. We show in a quantitative two-country model that a measure of labor productivity aggregated across countries is more immune to persistent, if not permanent, shocks and allows to accurately identify the responses of the labor input to a technology shock. Using labor productivity at the G7 aggregate level, we find that the response of employment changes critically in most of the major seven developed countries.     

Using Romer and Romer's new measure of monetary policy shocks to identify the AD and AS shocks

This article re-examines the series of (exogenous) Federal Funds Rate (FFR) shocks created by Romer and Romer (2004) for the period 1969:01–1996:12. We hypothesize that if Romer and Romer have constructed a reasonable set of monetary policy shocks, then including them in a small Vector Autoregression (VAR) should help to identify other structural shocks that affected the United States economy during their sample period. Using a sample period of 1971:01–1996:12 we are easily able to identify both an Aggregate Demand (AD) shock and an Aggregate Supply (AS) shock without imposing any sign or long-run restrictions. We present historical decompositions that allow us to compare the relative importance of these shocks with that of the exogenous monetary policy shocks in explaining output fluctuations during the 1973–1975, 1980–1984 and 1990–1991 business cycle episodes.     

试论金融危机下我国的金融生态及其优化

金融作为一国经济的核心,对于社会的持续健康发展具有极其重要的作用。近年来,我国金融市场快速发展,为我国经济发展起到了积极的推动作用。但随着世界经济形势的不断变化以及金融市场风险的不断加剧,特别是本轮金融危机对全球金融市场的重大影响,使得我国金融生态环境受到多方面的冲击。文章在分析金融危机对我国金融生态环境造成的冲击的基础上,通过构建评价我国金融生态环境的指标模型,提出了恢复和优化当前我国金融生态环境的政策建议。