Optimal reserve composition in the presence of sudden stops

We analytically derive optimal central bank portfolios in a minimum variance framework with two assets and transaction demands caused by sudden stops in capital inflows. In this model, transaction demands become less important relative to traditional portfolio objectives as debt to reserve ratios decrease. We empirically estimate optimal dollar and euro shares for 23 emerging market countries and find that optimal reserve portfolios are dominated by anchor currencies and, at current debt-to-reserve ratios, introducing transaction demand has a relatively modest effect for most countries. We find that, in general, the dollar acts as a safe haven currency during sudden stops for country specific and global sudden stops, increasing the optimal share of dollar bonds in central bank portfolios. Correspondingly, our model predicts that dollar shares should decline as debt-to-reserve ratios fall, as observed in recent data. We also find that the denomination of foreign currency debt has little importance for optimal reserve portfolios.     

Fiscal and monetary policies and the cost of sudden stops

This article investigates the effects of monetary and fiscal policies on output growth during sudden-stop balance of payments crisis in emerging markets and developing countries. Sudden stops in capital flows, and subsequent deep recessions, are a frequent occurrence in these countries but there is no professional consensus, and little systematic empirical evidence, shedding light on the macroeconomic policy mix most likely to limit output losses during these episodes. To address this issue, we investigate 83 sudden-stop crisis in 66 countries using a baseline empirical model to control for the various determinants of output losses during sudden stops. We measure the marginal effects of policy on output losses, and find strong evidence that monetary tightening (rise in the discount rate or unsterilized rise in international reserves) and discretionary fiscal contraction are significantly correlated with larger output losses following a sudden stop. Fiscal expansion is associated with smaller output losses following a sudden stop, but monetary expansion has no discernable effect. The macroeconomic policy mix associated with the least output loss during a sudden-stop financial crisis is a discretionary fiscal expansion combined with a neutral monetary policy.     

Anticipatory policymaking in global venues: Policy change,adaptation, and the UNFCCC

The subfield of public policy depicts policymaking as reactive process wherein public officials respond to existing social problems. While this depiction holds true in many cases, it fails to account for instances where policy change occurs in anticipation of emerging threats or hazards. “Anticipatory problems” are projected to occur in the future, and it is the prospect of their occurring that generates policy debate. This paper examines the policymaking pattern engendered by anticipatory policy problems, highlighting the ways in which they challenge and support existing assumptions about the process of policy change. To illustrate this distinctive dynamic, this paper will present a case study examining the evolving debate over climate change adaptation policy within United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).     

A case study of Federal Reserve policymaking: Regulation Q in 1966

This paper evaluates the Federal Reserve's efficiency by seeing if in 1966, when it decided to make the Regulation Q ceiling much more binding, it took account of the factors that economic theory suggests are relevant, such as the stimulus provided to non-price competition. The sources used are confidential Minutes of the Board of Governors and internal memos. They show that the Fed's analysis was seriously deficient. Some probable reasons are suggested.     

银信合作叫停之后

就在信托公司等待股指期货放行之际,监管层叫停2万亿元银信合作业务的哨声,给市场增添了许多紧张气息。     

Politics and Fed policymaking: The more things change the more they remain the same

This paper seeks to explain why the Fed's professed monetarist control strategy tends to break down at politically critical moments. It identifies strong political forces that constrain the Fed to dampen the size of short-run increases in nominal interest rates. Because interest increases impose heavy burdens on economically vulnerable but politically powerful sectors, Fed officials are compelled to give increasing weight to interest-rate targets whenever accelerating inflation or other forces threaten sharp cumulative movements in the level of nominal interest rates. The paper argues further that the Fed's ultimate political function is to be a policy scapegoat for incumbent politicians, showing how well this hypothesis can explain the perennial incompleteness of Fed control strategies and the Fed's principal bureaucratic features.     

Rating agencies in the face of regulation

This paper develops a theoretical framework to shed light on variation in credit rating standards over time and across asset classes. Ratings issued by credit rating agencies serve a dual role: they provide information to investors and are used to regulate institutional investors. We show that introducing rating-contingent regulation that favors highly rated securities may increase or decrease rating informativeness, but unambiguously increases the volume of highly rated securities. If the regulatory advantage of highly rated securities is sufficiently large, delegated information acquisition is unsustainable, since the rating agency prefers to facilitate regulatory arbitrage by inflating ratings. Our model relates rating informativeness to the quality distribution of issuers, the complexity of assets, and issuers' outside options. We reconcile our results with the existing empirical literature and highlight new, testable implications, such as repercussions of the Dodd-Frank Act.     

Investor efficiency in the face of takings

Governmental entities at all levels are empowered to acquire private property for the public's benefit, provided that just compensation is paid. The level of compensation typically viewed by courts as just is market value, but questions arise as to whether market value compensation motivates the private owner of land, potentially subject to a taking, to improve the property to a degree that is socially efficient. Earlier works have found market value to be a compensation level too high to promote efficiency. The present paper offers an analysis, based on a simple model of investor profit maximization, that provides a unified view of models presented in some important earlier works. In a special application of the general case, it is shown that market value can be too low a level of compensation to promote efficient behavior by the land owner.     

与投资人面对面 2013《国际融资》企业精品项目路演实录之一

路演企业:深圳微润灌溉技术有限公司介绍人:深圳微润灌溉技术有限公司董事长杨庆理对话投资人:蓝石天使投资合伙人桂曙光以色列英飞尼迪股权基金管理集团董事总经理胡斌中国风险投资公司合伙人、高级副总裁李爱民扬子资本高级投资顾问周家鸣天素创业投资公司投资总监暴青松澳洲宝泽金融集团宝泽资本市场发展部董事许基云主持人:展腾投资基金合伙人高健智     

Fiscal policy in the face of long-term expenditure uncertainties

A number of uncertainties about long-term expenditure commitments in industrial countries are examined: (i) the assumptions underlying the projections, (ii) the potential to further reduce non-age-related expenditures, (iii) the implicitly assumed absence of “shocks,” and (iv) the potential for raising revenue. This paper concludes that (i) there is scope, but within narrow limits, to reduce non-age-related expenditures; (ii) fiscal policy frameworks tend to understate risks; and (iii) prevailing tax rates leave little room for increasing taxation in the countries facing the strongest aging pressures. In sum, governments will have to adopt a much more ambitious fiscal policy stance to cope with aging populations. JEL Code H5 · H6     

认真实施好稳健的货币政策

<正>2020年中央经济工作会议要求今年宏观政策要保持连续性、稳定性、可持续性,继续实施稳健的货币政策,并提出了"灵活精准、合理适度"的要求。今年政府工作报告就如何落实稳健的货币政策作出专门部署,强调稳健的货币政策要灵活精准、合理适度。认真实施好稳健的货币政策,需要把握好以下几个方面。     

Robust reinsurance contracts in continuous time

We investigate reinsurance contract problems in a continuous-time principal-agent framework, where the reinsurer (principal) is concerned about potential model ambiguity in the claims process, but the insurer (agent) trusts the claims process, or vice versa. The reinsurer designs a robust reinsurance contract that maximizes his exponential utility of terminal wealth under the worst-case distribution, subject to the insurer’s incentive constraint. Optimal reinsurance contracts are explicitly derived in different ambiguity situations. We first show that the reinsurer’s robustness preference makes him become more conservative, which induces him to raise the reinsurance price, which then decreases the demand for reinsurance. However, the insurer’s robustness preference increases both the reinsurance price and the demand. Furthermore, the reinsurer continuously adjusts the reinsurance price, leading the insurer to always purchase a constant proportion of reinsurance, no matter who faces ambiguity, or whether ambiguity exists. Finally, the economic implications of model ambiguity are illustrated using numerical examples.     

Analysis of the hysteresis of unemployment in Mexico in the face of macroeconomic shocks

This research presents the behavior of the Mexican unemployment rate and shows the dependence with own history and macro variables. The concept of hysteresis or persistence tries to separate this inertia in the unemployment rate and some macroeconomic and endogenous factors. The results show a high inertia in the Mexican labor market, justified by the monetary levels and the dependence of the investment levels, considering the shocks of exports that affect the unemployment in the long term.     

Robust bootstrap procedures for the chain-ladder method

Insurers are faced with the challenge of estimating the future reserves needed to handle historic and outstanding claims that are not fully settled. A well-known and widely used technique is the chain-ladder method, which is a deterministic algorithm. To include a stochastic component one may apply generalized linear models to the run-off triangles based on past claims data. Analytical expressions for the standard deviation of the resulting reserve estimates are typically difficult to derive. A popular alternative approach to obtain inference is to use the bootstrap technique. However, the standard procedures are very sensitive to the possible presence of outliers. These atypical observations, deviating from the pattern of the majority of the data, may both inflate or deflate traditional reserve estimates and corresponding inference such as their standard errors. Even when paired with a robust chain-ladder method, classical bootstrap inference may break down. Therefore, we discuss and implement several robust bootstrap procedures in the claims reserving framework and we investigate and compare their performance on both simulated and real data. We also illustrate their use for obtaining the distribution of one year risk measures.     

还中国国学以本来面目

中国国学是博大精深的,决不是被后代封建帝王剪裁过的儒家文化。我们要认清中国国学的真面目,如果说国学是一群高大的山峰,那么儒家只是其中的一座,而不能代表全貌。近年来国学大倡,中国人对自己的历史又发生了兴趣,社会出现了读经热、孔     

Robust Measures of Earnings Surprises

Event studies of market efficiency measure earnings surprises using the consensus error (CE), given as actual earnings minus the average professional forecast. If a subset of forecasts can be biased, the ideal but difficult to estimate parameter‐dependent alternative to CE is a nonlinear filter of individual errors that adjusts for bias. We show that CE is a poor parameter‐free approximation of this ideal measure. The fraction of misses on the same side (FOM), which discards the magnitude of misses, offers a far better approximation. FOM performs particularly well against CE in predicting the returns of U.S. stocks, where bias is potentially large.