Financial Globalization and the Increase in the Size of Government: Are They Related?

Open Economies Review - We employ a stochastic growth model to study the impact of international financial liberalization and changes in volatility on the share of government consumption in GDP....     

Safety for Whom? The Scattered Global Financial Safety Net and the Role of Regional Financial Arrangements

The global financial safety net has undergone fundamental changes since the global financial crisis. The IMF introduced new facilities at the global level, new regional financial arrangements (RFAs) were created, and bilateral swap agreements emerged as a new element. In this paper, we ask how these changes influence the use of RFAs. We create a database with all the cases in which a RFA member drew on one of the elements of the global safety net. This allows us to analyze which other options the country had at hand and how their respective volume, timeliness, and policy conditionality affected their use. We find today’s global financial safety net to be not a global but a geographically and structurally scattered net with unequal access for three different groups of countries. Small countries can draw on their RFA. Only few countries can count on a bilateral swap line. The majority of the countries in our sample do not have several options to choose from. They have the IMF as their only source. We find that volume alone does not explain why countries choose a certain source of emergency liquidity. Even if “the big new” voluminous swap arrangements replaced RFAs in some cases, we find a complex pattern of complementary and substitutive use of the regional and other elements of the global safety net.     

Are Risk Factor Disclosures Still Relevant? Evidence from Market Reactions to Risk Factor Disclosures Before and After the Financial Crisis

The SEC's Disclosure Effectiveness Initiative (December 2013) highlights a difference between accounting regulators and academics in their perceptions of Item 1A risk factor disclosure effectiveness. Because most academic evidence relies on pre‐financial crisis data, we compare changes in risk factor disclosure informativeness before and after the crisis as a possible explanation for this disconnect. We further explore this discrepancy by considering (i) three classes of market participants, (ii) new, discontinued, and repeated disclosures, and (iii) nonmarket outcomes. Our results confirm previous findings but indicate that those results no longer hold in the subsequent period. Specifically, we find that although equity, option, and bond markets react to unexpected risk factor disclosures in the period leading up to the financial crisis (2006–2008), the market reactions decline significantly in the post‐crisis period (2009–2014). Perhaps surprisingly, the documented changes in informativeness are not driven by disclosures repeated from one year to the next but instead result from new disclosures initiated in the current year and, in the option and debt markets, also from disclosures discontinued from the previous year. Finally, using the Altman Z‐score as an objective bankruptcy risk measure, we find that the association between risk factor disclosures and companies’ future bankruptcy risk declines significantly in the post financial crisis period. Taken together, these findings contribute to the current disclosure effectiveness debate by highlighting that risk factor disclosures, which were informative in the preceding period, become less reflective of the underlying economic risks and thus less informative to investors in the post‐crisis period. La déclaration des facteurs de risque est‐elle toujours pertinente ? Données tirées des réactions du marché à la déclaration des facteurs de risque avant et après la crise financière     

Did the Recent Housing Boom Signal the Global Financial Crisis?

2005 prediction of the current global crisis followed from two key observations: (i) the recent housing booms in the United States and other advanced countries were not explained by economic fundamentals; and (ii) historically similar financial booms eventually collapsed, leading to recession. This article provides an empirical framework linking 2005 observations and crisis prediction. We utilize vector error correction models and panel probit and logit models to show that tracking a single variable, real house prices, was sufficient to predict the current global crisis.     

Role of China in Global Carbon Market

I. Introduction The international response to climate change is governed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992, and its Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, which entered into force in 2005. A basic principle has been to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions1 cost-effectively. Because GHGs mix uniformly in the atmosphere, a given emission reduction is equivalent from an environmental standpoint wherever the action is taken. This property of “substitut…     

An Inquiry into the Feasibility of a Catastrophe Risk Bond Market

Catastrophe risk bond is the product of financial integration and financial innovation, which have been attached great importance by both academic circle and business circle since it was invented. After describing the theories of demand and supply for catastrophic risk bond, the paper continues to test these theories with models, and then makes a conclusion that the demand of investors for catastrophic risk bond is increasing, but the reinsurance companies have not collected the expected benefits by issuing such kind of bonds.     

China： Unscathed through the Global Financial Tsunami

This paper investigates the reasons behind the resilience of China＇s economy to the global financial tsunami. China ＇s economy is lowly leveraged in its banking, household, public and external sectors and, therefore, is less plagued by the global deleveraging than most developed economies. Chinese domestic sectors have improved significantly over the past decade, giving them larger capacity to cope with external shocks than during the Asian financial crisis a decade ago. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that China＇s economic growth is highly dependent on exports, we find that the main growth engine for China is domestic demand. Destocking, rather than falling exports, was the main cause of the sharp economic slowdown in China in late 2008 and early 2009. Therefore, the global economic slowdown should have limited impact on China＇s economy. We forecast a sustained eeonomic recovery in China in 2009-2011, with real GDP growth exceeding 10 percent in 2010.     

Do Export Promotion Agencies Increase Exports?

In this paper, we examine the role of export promotion agencies (EPAs) in promoting exports from Japan and Korea. Looking at two home countries enables us to tackle endogeneity issues by controlling for both country‐pair time‐invariant characteristics and importing‐country time‐varying characteristics. Our empirical results indicate that EPA has a positive and significant effect on exports even when we control for endogeneity. However, the size of the effect becomes substantially smaller, implying the importance of addressing endogeneity in accurately measuring the impact of EPA on exports. In addition, we find that EPA's (marginal) effects are larger in exporting to low‐income trade partners than in exporting to high‐income trade partners.     

Does Fair Value Accounting Contribute to Systemic Risk in the Banking Industry?

I investigate whether fair value accounting can contribute to the banking industry's systemic risk. I focus on the adoption of Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 115 (SFAS No. 115), which required available‐for‐sale (AFS) securities to be recognized at fair value with unrealized gains and losses included in equity through accumulated other comprehensive income. SFAS No. 115 increased banks' regulatory risk because, at the time, calculation of regulatory capital closely conformed with GAAP equity. I find that systemic risk increased following the adoption of SFAS No. 115. Furthermore, following a subsequent regulatory amendment—which excluded unrealized gains and losses on AFS securities from regulatory capital but did not change their GAAP treatment—systemic risk decreased. Taken together, the evidence suggests that fair value accounting has the potential to increase systemic risk through the explicit inclusion of volatile fair value estimates in regulatory bank capital adequacy assessments. I do not, however, find evidence of fair value accounting impacting systemic risk in its information role; that is, by providing information to a bank's external stakeholders about its financial position and performance. I also show that higher fair value volatility of investment securities, lower bank capital, and larger AFS security holdings increase banks' marginal contribution to systemic risk. My findings should interest regulators and policymakers, as recent regulatory changes in light of Basel III recommendations require unrealized gains and losses on AFS securities to be included in regulatory capital for advanced approaches banks.     

Why Has China's Current Account Balance Converged after the Global Financial Crisis?

China's current account surplus declined significantly from its peak of nearly 10 percent of GDP in 2007 to less than 1 percent in 2018. The new pattern offered fresh evidence for our understanding of China's current account dynamics. In this paper, we used flow of funds data to gauge its underlying driving forces. Specifically, by employing index decomposition analysis, we decomposed the current account from the perspective of savings and investment into three sectors: the household, corporate, and government sectors. We found that the decline in China's current account ratio was first driven by cyclical factors, i.e. weak corporate saving growth induced by the economic slump in 2009 as well as the following massive corporate investment bolstered by the government stimulus plan. However, such cyclical factors quickly subsided, and the subsequent current account balance reduction was later supported by structural factors, i.e. household savings declined enduringly and the Chinese government switched to a more expansionary fiscal policy. There are three possible explanations for the structural movement: reduced precautionary saving due to higher social security coverage ratio, lower corporate profits as a result of economic slowdown, and a twin deficit due to the government's more relaxed fiscal stance. The new facts, however, were not consistent with other current account theories focusing on long‐term aspects of the saving–investment account puzzle, especially those relating to China's special demographic characteristics.     

Impact of Global Financial Crises on the Indonesian Economy： An Input-Output Analysis

The debt crisis in the European Union （EU） and the U.S. has significant potential impact on the economy of Indonesia. U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008 has a strong impact on Indonesian economy, that Indonesia＇s gross domestic product （GDP） slowed down to below 5% during 2009. Until October 2012, Indonesia＇s export growth is starting to grow negatively on some sectors when the crises in the EU and the U.S. have started or overall grew by -6%. Although the slowdown does not occur in all sectors, the impact spreads to other sectors as the existence of industrial linkage among sectors. The objective of the study is to look at the impact on the sector level on various indicators such as GDP （value added） and employment. Input-output analysis will be used in the simulation. Indonesia input-output table of 2005 is applied as the data base. The simulation results show that if exports decline occurs in the U.S., the economic growth will be -0.20%. Meanwhile, if it occurs in the EU, the growth of GDP will be -0.24%. If some Asian countries face the fall of demand of Indonesian export, GDP growth declines by 0.61%. The fall of exports demand from some Asian countries, EU countries and the U.S. will cause the GDP growth by -1.06%. The crisis occurring in both the US and the EU has decreased export demand from those countries and region including some Asian countries. The impact to employment seemed to be minimal, only -0.47% of total labour force.     

Do Health Insurers Possess Market Power?

During the 2009–2010 health care reform debates, many policy makers presumed that a lack of competition in the U.S. health insurance industry had resulted in greater levels of uninsurance. However, such a presumption has no basis in current research. This study, with a panel data set of the 50 states and the District of Columbia over the years 2001–2007, examines how health‐insurer market concentration at the state level influences the percentage of the population with either individually purchased or employer‐sponsored private health insurance. Two‐stage least squares estimates are derived using a lagged measure of health‐insurer concentration as an instrument. Results suggest that health insurers exercise market power on the seller side of the health insurance marketplace, but the restriction of output is limited to the individually purchased insurance market segment.