Regulating a manager whose empire-building preferences are private information

We obtain the optimal contract for the government (principal) to regulate a manager (agent) who has a taste for empire-building that is his/her private information. This taste for empire-building is modeled as a utility premium that is proportional to the difference between the contracted output and a reference output. We find that output is distorted upward when the manager’s taste for running large firms is weak, downward when it is strong, and equals a reference output when it is intermediate (in this case, the participation constraint is binding). We also obtain an endogenous reference output (equal to the expected output, which depends on the reference output), and find that the response of output to cost is null in the short-run (in which the reference output is fixed), whenever the manager’s type is in the intermediate range, and negative in the long-run (after the adjustment of the reference output to equal expected output).     

Gross capital flows: Dynamics and crises

This paper analyzes the behavior of international capital flows by foreign and domestic agents, dubbed gross capital flows, over the business cycle and during financial crises. We show that gross capital flows are very large and volatile, especially relative to net capital flows. When foreigners invest in a country, domestic agents invest abroad, and vice versa. Gross capital flows are also pro-cyclical. During expansions, foreigners invest more domestically and domestic agents invest more abroad. During crises, total gross flows collapse and there is a retrenchment in both inflows by foreigners and outflows by domestic agents. These patterns hold for different types of capital flows and crises. This evidence sheds light on the sources of fluctuations driving capital flows and helps discriminate among existing theories. Our findings seem consistent with crises affecting domestic and foreign agents asymmetrically, as would be the case under the presence of sovereign risk or asymmetric information.     

Tying the politicians’ hands: The optimal limits to representative democracy

The citizen candidate models of democracy assume that politicians have their own preferences that are not fully revealed at the time of elections. We study the optimal delegation problem which arises between the median voter (the writer of the constitution) and the (future) incumbent politician under the assumption that not only the state of the world but also the politician's type (preferred policy) are the policy‐maker's private information. We show that it is optimal to tie the hands of the politician by imposing both a policy floor and a policy cap and delegating him/her the policy choice only in between the cap and the floor. The delegation interval is shown to be the smaller the greater is the uncertainty about the politician's type. These results are also applicable to settings outside the specific problem that our model addresses.     

Has China replaced colonial trade?

Review of World Economics - China is often suspected of taking over the extraordinary trade relationships that former colonies had within colonial empires. Besides preferential bilateral...     

A Structural Analysis of Credit Risk With Risky Collateral: A Methodology for Haircut Determination

Although many credit risk pricing models exist in the academic literature, very little attention has been paid to the impact of risky collateral on credit risk. It is nonetheless well known that practitioners often mitigate credit risk with collateral, using so–called haircuts for collateral level determination. The presence of collateral has a complex effect that can not be analysed simply with existing models. We analyse the value of credit risk when there is collateral in a range of different situations, including dual–default in a simple setting, stochastic collateral, stochastic bond collateral with stochastic interest rates, continuous and discrete marking–to–market and margin calls. The models confirm many practical intuitions, such as the impact on the haircut level required of the risks of the collateral asset and of the underlying asset to the forward as well as the impact of their correlation. Moreover, the model supports the intuition that the frequency of marking–to–market and collateral are substitutes. The models also stress the possibly unexpected magnitude of these factors. More importantly, they give actual solutions to determining the value of the credit risk depending on the haircut chosen and the frequency of marking–to–markets, results not presented before in the literature. The models are also a good basis to understand the portfolio effect of collateral management. Finally, they illustrate how differences in prices may arise from pure differences of credit risk management, as illustrated here in the case of futures and forwards.
(J.E.L.: G13).     

Increasing returns,entrepreneurship and imperfect competition

We study a simple bilateral oligopoly model in which individual agents, who are initially endowed with capital, decide sequentially (1) whether they want to act as producers (entrepreneurs) or as capital lenders (rentiers) and, then (2) which quantity of capital they would like to borrow or lend, though exchange of capital units against units of the produced good. Production takes place under increasing returns to scale. We show the existence of “natural equilibria”, at which wealthier capital owners become entrepreneurs while the remaining ones decide to be rentiers. We also study the efficiency of equilibria which is shown to increase by replication of the economy, but sometimes to decrease as a consequence of wealth redistribution.We thank an anonymous referee for his insightful comments     

The Exchange Rate Macroeconomic Balance Approach: New Methodology and Results for the Euro,the Dollar,the Yen and the Pound Sterling

This paper presents an extension of the macroeconomic exchange rate balance approach. This extension comprises two new aspects. Firstly, it is based on a multinational framework which allows for macroeconomic linkages between countries. Secondly, it uses a procedure that does not require a full modeling of the world economy to derive a consistent set of equilibrium exchange rates. The findings reveal that, in 2001, the dollar was overvalued against the euro and the yen. The paper also shows that this result depends heavily on the chosen notion of current account sustainability.     

The current account as a dynamic portfolio choice problem

The current account can be understood as the outcome of investment decisions made by domestic and foreign investors. These decisions can be decomposed into portfolio rebalancing and portfolio growth components, as highlighted by theoretical models. The empirical literature draws attention to the relative importance of portfolio rebalancing to explain fluctuations in capital flows, although they do not shed light on the mechanisms behind these rebalancing effects. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence of the importance of portfolio rebalancing driven by changes in investment opportunities for the dynamics of the current account. In particular, we evaluate the predictions of a partial-equilibrium model of the current account with dynamic portfolio choices, in which portfolio rebalancing is driven by changes in expected asset returns. Focusing on the dynamics of the current account between Japan and the US, we find evidence supporting innovations in investment opportunities as an important mechanism to explain international capital flows.     

The US 2000‐2002 market descent: How much longer and deeper?

Abstract

A remarkable similarity in the behaviour of the US S&P500 index from 1996 to August 2002 and of the Japanese Nikkei index from 1985 to 1992 (11 year shift) is presented, with particular emphasis on the structure of the bearish phases. Extending a previous analysis of Johansen and Sornette on the Nikkei index ‘antibubble’ based on a theory of cooperative herding and imitation working both in bullish as well as in bearish regimes, we demonstrate the existence of a clear signature of herding in the decay of the S&P500 index since August 2000 with high statistical significance, in the form of strong log‐periodic components. In the next two years, we predict an overall continuation of the bearish phase, punctuated by local rallies; we predict an overall increasing market until the end of the year 2002 or until the first quarter of 2003; we predict a severe following descent (with maybe one or two severe ups and downs in the middle) which stops during the first semester of 2004. Beyond this, we cannot be very certain due to the possible effect of additional nonlinear collective effects and of a real departure from the antibubble regime. The similarities between the two stock market indices may reflect deeper similarities between the fundamentals of the two economies which both went through over‐valuation with strong speculative phases preceding the transition to bearish phases characterized by a surprising number of bad surprises (bad loans for Japan and accounting frauds for the US) sapping investors’ confidence.