Liquidity risk and policy options

On the basis of a liquidity management model, liquidity risks, defined as the probability of payment failures in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system, may either stem from liquidity management inefficiencies or insufficient cash balances. I will show that penalties charged on the amount of payment failures minimise liquidity risks without interfering with the bank’s technology preferences. I will instead show that liquidity requirements, although as effective as penalties to contain the risk of liquidity shortage, may distort the bank’s technology preferences and cannot stem liquidity management inefficiencies. I will also show that liquidity risks within RTGS payment systems are potentially smaller because they depend more on the liquidity management efficiency than on the randomness of cash inflows and outflows.     

商业银行的流动性转换职能

利用Diamond的两个模型说明商业银行流动性转换职能的性质及其发展趋势.在信息技术不发达、人们的市场参与程度比较低时,传统商业银行的流动性转换是有效的,然而它有内在的不稳定性,容易受到挤兑的冲击.随着信息技术的改善、人们的市场参与度提高,金融市场的流动性转换职能将逐渐变得重要.     

流动性导流——中国货币需求及现阶段流动性过剩问题研究

近年来,流动性过剩成为了我国宏观经济的要害性问题.所谓"流动性导流",就是将目前过剩的流动性通过若干可能的渠道疏导到实体经济之外,使之基本不对实体经济产生负面影响.我国流动性过剩是由外向型经济结构引起的外汇过多流人造成的,在经济结构短期内难以根本改变且人民币升值预期难以根本逆转的情况下,只能从疏导过多流动性的角度来寻找防治通胀之道.具体的疏导渠道包括将一部分流动性导向境外和在境内扩大虚拟经济以吸收一部分流动性.后者是解决当前通胀压力和股市扩容压力的一箭双雕之策,也是本文的新观点所在.     

全球流动性过剩、对冲基金发展与中国金融稳定

全球流动性过剩导致全球金融资产激增,推动对冲基金业规模迅速膨胀,也使得对冲基金业在结构和投资动向上也出现了新的变化。对冲基金在全球寻找套利和投机机会,对全球的金融稳定产生一定的影响,在此背景下,中国需要审慎资本项目开放和加强对冲基金的监管。     

Forecasting financial market volatility: Sample frequency vis-à-vis forecast horizon

This paper explores the return volatility predictability inherent in high-frequency speculative returns. Our analysis focuses on a refinement of the more traditional volatility measures, the integrated volatility, which links the notion of volatility more directly to the return variance over the relevant horizon. In our empirical analysis of the foreign exchange market the integrated volatility is conveniently approximated by a cumulative sum of the squared intraday returns. Forecast horizons ranging from short intraday to 1-month intervals are investigated. We document that standard volatility models generally provide good forecasts of this economically relevant volatility measure. Moreover, the use of high-frequency returns significantly improves the longer run interdaily volatility forecasts, both in theory and practice. The results are thus directly relevant for general research methodology as well as industry applications.     

Liquidity and market incompleteness

This note shows that according to Lippman and McCall’s (Am Econ Rev 76, 43–55, 1986) operational definition of liquidity, incomplete markets are a necessary condition for illiquidity. This note is a revised subset of a larger paper that circulated under the name of “Liquidity as an Insurance Problem” (Zurita 2001). I am grateful to Luis Ahumada, David K. Levine, Raimundo Soto, Gert Wagner, Federico Weinschelbaum and seminar participants at UCLA, Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society, Banco Central de Chile, LACEA, Jornadas de Economía del Banco Central del Uruguay, and ILADES, for their helpful comments, as well as the feedback of an anonymous referee. Financial support from Vicerrectoría Académica de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile is gratefully acknowledged.     

The real effects of financial constraints: Evidence from a financial crisis

We survey 1,050 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in the U.S., Europe, and Asia to directly assess whether their firms are credit constrained during the global financial crisis of 2008. We study whether corporate spending plans differ conditional on this survey-based measure of financial constraint. Our evidence indicates that constrained firms planned deeper cuts in tech spending, employment, and capital spending. Constrained firms also burned through more cash, drew more heavily on lines of credit for fear banks would restrict access in the future, and sold more assets to fund their operations. We also find that the inability to borrow externally caused many firms to bypass attractive investment opportunities, with 86% of constrained U.S. CFOs saying their investment in attractive projects was restricted during the credit crisis of 2008. More than half of the respondents said they canceled or postponed their planned investments. Our results also hold in Europe and Asia, and in many cases are stronger in those economies. Our analysis adds to the portfolio of approaches and knowledge about the impact of credit constraints on real firm behavior.     

我国金融市场与流动性关联研究——基于VAR模型的实证分析

本文运用结构型多向量自回归模型SVAR揭示了M2的变动对金融子市场的整体影响,结果显示M2的变动能在约7个月后对各金融子市场达到影响最大化。脉冲模拟则显示M2的变动容易造成股票市场短期波动而长期影响却不明显,对银行间债券市场的流动性则影响显著,其预测误差贡献率达到28%,从侧面证明银行间债券市场流动性风险易集聚。进一步的模型检验证明：银行间债券市场存在正反馈交易情况最为强烈,发生流动性黑洞可能性大于其它市场。最后,本文对实证结果作了原因分析并提出建议。     

我国化解流动性过剩的财税政策研究

流动性过剩已经成为当前宏观经济运行中亟待解决的问题。2007年6月13日召开的国务院常务会议首次明确提出,要综合运用金融、财税政策等手段引导资金流动,缓解流动性过剩,可见财税政策在抑制流动性过剩中的重要作用。本文以财税政策作为基点,从贸易顺差、资本流入、外汇占款、进入房市和股市的沉淀资金等方面,分析当前流动性过剩的成因并探讨缓解流动性过剩的财税政策。     

Liquidity and capital structure

We examine the relation between equity market liquidity and capital structure. We find that firms with more liquid equity have lower leverage and prefer equity financing when raising capital. For example, after sorting firms into size quintiles and then into liquidity quintiles, the average debt-to-asset ratio of the most liquid quintiles is about 38% while the average for the least liquid quintiles is 55%. Similar results are observed in panel analyses with clustered errors and using instrumental variables. Our results are consistent with equity market liquidity lowering the cost of equity and, therefore, inducing a greater reliance on equity financing.     

Liquidity risk and syndicate structure

We decompose syndicated loan risk into credit, market, and liquidity risk and test how these shape syndicate structure. Commercial banks dominate relative to non-banks in loan syndicates that expose lenders to liquidity risk. This dominance is most pronounced when borrowers have high levels of credit or market risk. We then tie commercial banks’ advantage in liquidity risk to access to transactions deposits by comparing investments across banks. The results suggest that risk-management considerations matter most for participants relative to lead arrangers. Links from transactions deposits to liquidity exposure, for instance, are more than 50% larger at participants than at lead arrangers.     

影子银行体系与流动性管理

影子银行体系具有特殊的形成机理,是金融抑制制度背景下的博弈产物。目前,影子银行体系在金融市场上以证券化的方式创造流动性,容易在短期内出现从流动性过剩到流动性紧缩的转变,造成宏观经济的不稳定,需要作出必要的监管安排。     

Liquidity,assets and business cycles

The objective here is to evaluate the quantitative importance of financial frictions in business cycles. The analysis shows that a negative financial shock can cause aggregate investment, employment and consumption to fall with output. Despite this realistic comovement among macro quantities, a negative financial shock generates an equity price boom as the shock tightens firms׳ financing constraint. This counterfactual response of the equity price is robust to a wide range of variations in how financial frictions are modeled and whether financial shocks affect asset liquidity or firms׳ collateral constraints. Some possible resolutions to this puzzle are discussed.     

Illiquidity or credit deterioration: A study of liquidity in the US corporate bond market during financial crises

We investigate whether liquidity is an important price factor in the US corporate bond market. In particular, we focus on whether liquidity effects are more pronounced in periods of financial crises, especially for bonds with high credit risk, using a unique data set covering more than 20,000 bonds, between October 2004 and December 2008. We employ a wide range of liquidity measures and find that liquidity effects account for approximately 14% of the explained market-wide corporate yield spread changes. We conclude that the economic impact of the liquidity measures is significantly larger in periods of crisis, and for speculative grade bonds.     

现阶段我国商业银行流动性过剩问题及对策研究

流动性管理是商业银行的生命线。上个世纪末国内商业银行出现了持续性的流动性过剩,引起了理论界、实务界的普遍关注。本文考察了商业银行流动性管理理论的发展,分析了我国商业银行流动性问题发展阶段、特点,提出了商业银行改善流动性管理的政策建议。     

Financial globalization, financial crises and contagion

Two observations suggest that financial globalization played an important role in the recent financial crisis. First, more than half of the rise in net borrowing of the U.S. non-financial sectors since the mid-1980s has been financed by foreign lending. Second, the collapse of the U.S. housing and mortgage-backed-securities markets had worldwide effects on financial institutions and asset markets. Using an open-economy model where financial intermediaries play a central role, we show that financial integration leads to a sharp rise in net credit in the most financially developed country and to large asset price spillovers of country-specific shocks to bank capital. The impacts of these shocks on asset prices are amplified by bank capital requirements based on mark-to-market.     

Liquidity commonality and the intervalling effect

Past studies of liquidity commonality have reported conflicting findings regarding the relationship between market liquidity and firm size. The present paper provides empirical evidence that underlying estimation problems might be responsible for these results. We develop a model of information and spreads that provides some insights into the firm size–liquidity relationship. Our empirical evidence confirms the main testable implications of the model and presents evidence that the presence and strength of common covariability in liquidity depends upon the interval over which liquidity movements are measured. These intervalling effects are caused by delays in information being incorporated into bid and ask spreads.     

Financialisation,financial chains and uneven geographical development: Towards a research agenda

This paper examines a critical relationship between finance and uneven geographical development, using Europe as a point of reference. It argues that the existing economic geography literature fails to fully address the implications of financialisation for uneven geographical development. In particular, and despite recent renewed interest in geographies of finance, there does not seem to be a coherent theory of debt and its spatialities. The paper argues that the lack of a coherent theoretical framework on spatialities of credit–debt is a major shortcoming and highlights the need for a geographically-informed view of financialisation and its implications for uneven development. As a way forward, the paper proposes a new approach based on the concept of ‘financial chains’ understood both as channels of value transfer and as social relations that shape socio-economic processes over space and time.     

Liquidity provision,interest rates,and unemployment

The effective liquidity supply of the economy—the weighted-sum of all assets that serve as media of exchange—matters for interest rates and unemployment. We formalize this idea by adding an over-the-counter market with collateralized trades to the Mortensen–Pissarides model. An increase in public liquidity through a higher supply of real government bonds raises the real interest rate, crowding out private liquidity and increasing unemployment. If unemployment is inefficiently high, keeping liquidity scarce can be socially optimal. A liquidity crisis affecting the acceptability of private assets as collateral widens the rate-of-return difference between private and public liquidity, also increasing unemployment.