From me to you: Measuring connectedness between Eurozone financial institutions

This paper aims to analyse the tail risk spillover between banks, insurance companies and the shadow banking system in the Eurozone contest. These intra-sectoral interdependencies between financial market participants have contributed to the spread of instability in the financial system. Therefore mapping these links is important for policy-makers to provide supervisory tools and can be a key input into the design of macroprudential policies. For this purpose, we adopt the Tail-Event driven NETwork (TENET) risk model. The TENET is a useful method to map the tail interconnection between the three sectors and to provide systemic risk measures that take into account the “too big to fail” and “too big to interconnected” concepts. The results suggest that each financial sector has a significant impact on the other. By comparing the contribution of each sector, we show that banks are the largest emitters of risk. However, also shadow banking firms are systemic important, given their high level of connection. The work provides a clear view of risk spillovers and interconnection dynamics during the crisis providing a meaningful ranking of the systemic important financial institutions.     

Crisis, Adjustment, and Reform in Thailand's Industrial Firms

New data on Thailand's industrial firms shed light on the originsof the East Asian financial crisis and on the response of themanufacturing sector to the structural adjust-ment program supportedby the international financial institutions. Before the crisis,Thai firms had declining profitability, but they neverthelessmaintained high levels of investment, often in domesticallyoriented areas (notably the auto sector). Thai firms financedthese investments with short-term borrowing from financial institutions,which in turn borrowed short term on foreign markets. That only40 percent of firms provided audited financial statements totheir banks meant that the financial sector had poor informationfor assessing the true riskiness of these investments. The financialstructure was thus vulnerable even to small shocks. How well did the adjustment program deal with the crisis? Thaifirms had difficulty increasing their exports quickly becauseof investment in the wrong sectors, a decline in regional demand,and bottlenecks that included red tape and poor customs administration.Because of the poor export response, the brunt of adjustmenthad to come through compression of demand and of imports. Inretrospect, the macroeconomic program— which assumed quickexport recovery— was too tight.      

Financial liberalization,insurance market,and the likelihood of financial crises

This paper provides empirical evidence to investigate the direct impact of financial liberalization on the likelihood of currency/systemic banking crises, and examines the roles of insurance market, country risk, and economic conditional variables on the relationship between financial liberalization and financial crises in 39 countries. Our empirical results support that financial liberalization does have a significantly negative impact on the likelihood of currency/systemic banking crises, and that the indirect effects of insurance development and lower country risk decrease the probability of crises, but the indirect effect of economic conditional proxies is enhanced with the likelihood of a financial crisis. The policy implication is that the government or authority should strengthen the positive role of the insurance sector in order to combat financial crises.     

微观层面系统性金融风险指标的比较与适用性分析——基于中国金融系统的研究

准确测度金融机构对整体系统性金融风险的边际贡献是加强宏观审慎监管的基本前提。本文对常用的系统性金融风险指标进行了比较分析,并以“能否涵盖规模、高杠杆率和互联紧密性三方面信息”、“排序结果是否与银保监会认定的系统重要性银行名单相吻合”、“是否具有宏观经济活动预测力”三方面对上述指标在我国金融体系的适用性进行了综合评价。结果显示,SRISK更适于作为我国微观层面系统性金融风险的测度。同时,本文发现,“LRMES约等于1-exp(-18*MES)”的经验关系不具有普适性,不适用于我国金融体系。     

次贷危机的成因、影响及对金融监管的启示

美国次贷危机愈演愈烈已造成了全球金融危机,究其根源在于次级房屋贷款发放环节。由于包括美国政府、美联储、投资银行、评级机构、保险公司在内的各个市场参与者的共同作用,次级房屋贷款市场迅速膨胀。通过房贷-评级-卖出的证券化过程,次级贷款的风险被散播到了全球的各类投资者。金融监管机构对此次危机负有不可推卸的责任,其传统的最佳标准式的监管理念通过巴塞尔新协议等方式导致了市场行为趋同从而流动性缺失、系统性风险发生、亲周期问题显现。此外,监管机构对于高杠杆率和负债与资产错配的金融机构监管明显不足,也在一定程度上加剧了危机。     

监测系统性金融风险——中国金融市场压力指数构建和状态识别

对系统性金融风险进行识别和评估,日益成为各国中央银行的核心关切。囿于数据频率,基于金融机构经营稳健性评估的金融系统性风险监测存在一定的滞后性,不利于中央银行及时进行风险应对,利用金融市场交易数据进行风险监测可极大程度克服滞后性问题。本文根据中国金融市场特点,选取债券市场、股票市场、货币市场和外汇市场17个有代表性的指标,运用经验累积分布函数法分别构造了各子市场的压力指数,以各子市场之间时变的相关关系刻画系统性金融风险的跨市场传染特征,合成金融市场压力指数,并通过建立马尔可夫区制转换模型,对金融市场压力状态进行识别。金融市场压力指数能有效反映样本域内的压力事件,并兼具稳健性、能逐日监测等优点,为监测评估系统性金融风险、选择政策实施窗口和评估政策实施效果等提供了有力工具。     

The Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: Accomplishments and Limitations*

The Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 is widely described as the most ambitious and far‐reaching overhaul of financial regulation in the United States since the 1930s. Together with other regulatory reforms introduced by regulatory agencies globally, the Act aims to put an end to the too‐big‐to‐fail problem and is expected to alter the structure of financial markets in profound ways. This article provides an overall assessment of the Act in three different ways: first, in light of first economic principles, or how theory suggests we should regulate the financial sector, given the systemic risk externality each financial firm imposes on other firms and the rest of the economy; second, from a comparative perspective that views the proposed reforms in relation to those undertaken in the 1930s following the Great Depression; and, finally, in the form of an assessment of how the proposed reforms would have fared in preventing and dealing with the crisis of 2007–2009 had they been in place at the time. The article also highlights key areas that are left wholly or partly unaddressed by the Dodd‐Frank Act—notably, the pricing of explicit and implicit government guarantees; dealing with inevitable opportunities for the financial sector to engage in regulatory arbitrage; and containing the systemic risk arising from collections of small institutions and markets such as money market funds and repo contracts.     

Stock market risk in the financial crisis

In this paper, we look at the effect of the financial crisis from an angle overlooked to date in the finance literature by investigating composition effects arising from the financial crisis. A composition effect is a change in the market risk of a sector that is caused not by a direct change in that sector but by a change in another sector that affects the composition of the stock market. In the paper we investigate the pre and during crisis market risk of the industrial, banking and utilities sectors. Amongst other results, we find a positive relationship across the G12 countries between the increase in the market risk of industrials during the crisis and both the pre-crisis market risk of the banking sector and the scale of the systemic crisis in a country. The six G12 countries that experienced a major systematic banking crisis are amongst the seven countries with the largest increases in the market risk for industrials. Results drawn from our detailed analysis using US data are consistent with these findings. Finally, we show how the results add to our understanding of the linkages between the financial and real sector and conclude that composition effects of the financial crisis could have a significant chilling effect on investment in industrials, which is in addition to the effect of other linkages already documented.     

Which are the SIFIs? A Component Expected Shortfall approach to systemic risk

This paper proposes a component approach to systemic risk which allows to decompose the risk of the aggregate financial system (measured by Expected Shortfall) while accounting for the firm characteristics. Developed by analogy with the Component Value-at-Risk concept, our new systemic risk measure, called Component ES, presents several advantages. It is a hybrid measure, which combines the Too Interconnected To Fail and the Too Big To Fail logics. CES relies only on publicly available daily data and encompasses the popular Marginal ES measure. CES can be used to assess the contribution of a firm to systemic risk at a precise date but also to forecast its contribution over a certain period. The empirical application verifies the ability of CES to identify the most systemically risky firms during the 2007–2009 financial crisis. We show that our measure identifies the institutions labeled as SIFIs by the Financial Stability Board.     

US government TARP bailout and bank lottery behavior

Considerable debate surrounds how the US government's TARP bailout intervention has affected the risk-taking and moral hazard behavior of U.S. banks around the global financial crisis. We examine this issue with a focus on lottery behavior introducing MAX/MIN as a new measure of lotteryness in banking to capture the loss protection from bank bailout guarantees. We find that the TARP bailout increased the likelihood of bank lotteryness and risk shifting. Lottery-like bank equities are riskier after TARP and exhibit fatter right to left tails. A consistent pattern of risk taking and lottery behavior extends both before and after the 2008–2009 crisis, engulfing the largest systemic banks (SIFIs). While confirming that lottery-like bank equities have lower short-term return, we find they exhibit better cumulative long-term return performance. Our findings have important policy implications regarding government intervention in banking crises.     

A perspective on the symptoms and causes of the financial crisis

Prior to the 2007–2008 financial crisis, banking sector profits were very high but the profitability of financial intermediation was poor. Using a novel model of banking, this article argues that the high profits were achieved through balance sheet expansion and growing default, liquidity, and term risk mismatches between assets and liabilities. As a result, large banks’ financial leverage rose as they became less liquid, setting the conditions for a systemic banking crisis. This article argues that the increase in financial leverage was possible due to misguided changes in the regulatory framework, specifically, the Basel I capital accord and reductions in reserve requirements. Finally, this article overviews and assesses the policy response in the aftermath of the crisis.     

经济结构转型与“双支柱”调控框架

理解经济运行环境的变化才能更有针对性地制定和实施货币政策和宏观审慎政策。中国经济在2012年前后迈过工业化的高峰期,家庭部门发生从制造到服务的消费升级,企业部门出现从资本密集型向人力资本密集型的产业结构转型,中国的经济结构转型进程与高收入国家类似发展阶段的经历高度一致。经济结构转型过程中,传统资本密集型行业信贷需求大幅下降,新兴人力资本密集型行业信贷需求相对较低且在债务主导的金融服务体系中面临融资供给制约。由于市场内生的企业信贷供给和需求双双下降,总需求不足问题凸显。宏观经济稳定方面,宏观经济运行特征由此前的“易热难冷” 转向“易冷难热”,“债务—通缩”风险加大。这要求货币政策在执行中更加注重温和通胀目标,充分运用各种政策工具确保总需求和总供给的平衡。金融稳定方面,防范系统性风险的重点要与时俱进地调整。时间轴上要特别关注经济周期和金融周期下行叠加带来的系统性风险;空间轴上不仅要关注“大而不能倒”的系统重要性机构,还须加强“小广散”金融机构的稳定性,注重与其相关的风险传染。     

The industry effect and the decision to integrate vertically in a crisis context

ABSTRACT

The objective of this work is twofold: firstly, to study if the characteristics of the industry affect certain financial and strategic decisions of manufacturing firms and, secondly, to determine if the strategy of diversifying the activity through vertical integration generates good financial results in times of crisis, depending on the industry. To this end, an analysis is carried out with panel data from 9,523 firms in the period between 2008 and 2013. The results show that there are different strategies that firms must follow, depending on the industry to which they belong. In sectors with lower operational risk, those firms characterized by greater specificity and better product quality obtained higher profitability. However, in riskier sectors, firms with more specific assets assumed too many risks and in times of crisis have seen their profitability fall. Likewise, it is observed that the decision to integrate vertically has mitigated the weak points of each sector, allowing firms to better weather the economic–financial crisis in which this research is framed.     

Collateral composition,diversification risk,and systemically important merchant banks

The impact of collateral diversification by non-financial firms on systemic risk is studied in a general equilibrium model with standard production functions and mixed debt-equity financing. Systemic risk comes about as soon as firms diversify their collateral by holding claims on a big wholesale (merchant) bank whose asset side includes claims on the same producer set. The merchant bank sector proves to be fragile (has a short distance to default) regardless of competition. In this setting, the policy response, consisting in official guarantees for the merchant bank's liabilities, entails considerable government loss risk. An alternative without the need for public sector involvement is to encourage systemically important merchant banks to introduce a simple bail-in mechanism by restricting their liabilities to contingent convertible bonds. This line of regulatory policy is particularly relevant to the containment of systemic events in globally leveraged economies serviced by big international banks outside host country regulatory control.     

系统重要性机构识别和监管研究综述

2008年国际金融危机与以往危机最大的不同在于危机肇始于著名跨国金融机构的倒闭。通过对危机进行反思,二十国集团要求确保所有具有系统重要性的金融机构、市场和工具受到适当的监管和监督。该文从国际监管组织提出的“系统重要性金融机构”的概念出发,介绍了系统重要性机构的识别方法,以及当前有关强化系统重要性机构监管的国际实践,并对降低我国系统重要性金融机构的风险提出了政策建议。     

How did enterprise risk management first appear in the Korean public sector?

This research addresses the rise and fall of the Crisis Management Guideline of Public Organizations (CMGPO) from a historical perspective. In the Korean public sector, as a form of enterprise risk management (ERM), CMGPO is not designed to be merely a tool of financial risk management but also to be a policy tool for crisis management. CMGPO emerged within the conflict between integrated crisis management and dispersed crisis management. The purpose of CMGPO is to bureaucratically integrate the crisis management of public organizations with the governmental crisis management system. ERM as a form of self-regulation is entangled with the pre-existing command and control of the Korean government over integrated crisis management. As a result, CMGPO is characterized as ‘enforced self-regulation’ rather than self-regulation; this is a fundamental idea in ERM.     

宏观审慎与货币政策双支柱框架研究——基于系统性风险视角

本轮国际金融危机之后,建立“宏观审慎政策专门盯住金融稳定目标,货币政策主要关注经济稳定目标”的双支柱成为国际社会的普遍共识。本文基于系统性风险视角,深入剖析系统性风险的累积和实现机制,从时间和空间两个维度梳理宏观审慎政策实现金融稳定的有效性,以及货币政策对系统性风险造成的潜在溢出性。目前从系统性风险的时间维度探讨双支柱政策的研究已较为丰富,可以总结为宏观审慎政策的“逆周期调节”机制和货币政策的“资本缺口”机制。从系统性风险的空间维度探讨双支柱政策的研究,也即对双支柱政策如何作用和改变金融机构内部关联网络的研究正成为研究热点。本文从政策工具和影响机制上对空间维度双支柱政策进行了系统梳理。基于以上分析,本文对双支柱政策的制定提出如下建议:时间维度宏观审慎政策要关注并消除货币政策对时间维度系统性风险的溢出性,同时要加强空间维度宏观审慎政策工具的创新力度。     

The Financial Crisis, Systemic Risk, and the Future of Insurance Regulation

This article considers the role of American International Group (AIG) and the insurance sector in the 2007–2009 financial crisis and the implications for insurance regulation. Following an overview of the causes of the crisis, I explore the events and policies that contributed to federal government intervention to prevent bankruptcy of AIG and the scope of federal assistance to AIG. I discuss the extent to which insurance in general poses systemic risk and whether a systemic risk regulator is desirable for insurers or other nonbank financial institutions. The last two sections of the article address the financial crisis's implications for proposed optional and/or mandatory federal chartering and regulation of insurers and for insurance regulation in general.     

Monetary Policy and Financial Markets

Monetary policy and financial markets are intrinsically linked. Central banks conduct monetary policy by influencing financial market prices. Financial market prices reflect the expectations of market participants about future economic and monetary developments. Monetary policy works primarily through expectations. Transparency and credibility render monetary policy more effective. However, they are no substitutes for action. If a credible central bank uses words with the explicit aim of substituting them for action, it will risk losing credibility. To avoid what has been described as “the dog chasing its tail” problem, central banks must exercise caution in basing their monetary policy decisions on financial market information. The information about expected future developments reflected in market prices must be continuously cross-checked against economic and monetary indicators in what amounts to a “checks and balances” approach to monetary policy.     

基于房地产市场的我国系统性金融风险测度与预警研究

本文阐释了基于房地产市场的系统性金融风险形成机制,据此建立了分阶段、跨部门的房地产市场的系统性金融风险网络模型,并运用2006-2017年16家上市银行数据,分析和测度了我国房价大幅下跌所引发的系统性金融风险水平和结构,构建了基于房地产市场的系统性金融风险预警指标并进行测算。研究发现:在房价下跌30%的压力情景下,我国金融体系的潜在总损失总体呈级数式上升,年均增长22.70%;基于房地产市场的系统性金融风险值(SR)呈现先上升后波动下降的总体趋势;系统性金融风险(SR)的脆弱性指标(FLI)整体呈现波浪式振荡变化,且与房地产贷款/权益整体呈反向变动,系统性金融风险(SR)的传染性指标(CTI)在2012-2017年呈持续下降趋势,且与金融市场压力指数、金融机构间资产占总资产比重呈现出高度的一致性变化趋势。最后,基于房地产市场的系统性金融风险预警指标(SRWI)值呈收敛式振荡走势,表明基于房地产市场的系统性金融风险总体可控且呈收敛式下降。