Legal Restrictions in Personal Loan Markets

This study examines the pricing of personal loans in the form of second mortgages to determine whether state-specific default laws have an effect on the availability and cost of that debt. We examine the pricing of loans to higher risk borrowers and whether borrowers in states that limit lender ability to seek default remedies pay higher credit costs. Our results indicate that, for the most part, lenders rationally price loans to higher risk borrowers. However, when we focus on borrowers with low credit scores, the results indicate that mean actual loan rates are higher than those predicted by our model. The results also indicate that state-specific default laws have an effect on the price of credit. Finally, the results show that there is a greater degree of error in the pricing of second mortgage loans to borrowers with low credit scores than to borrowers with high credit scores.     

Deposit Insurance and Risk Management of the U.S. Banking System: What is the Loss Distribution Faced by the FDIC?

We examine the question of deposit insurance through the lens of risk management by constructing the loss distribution faced by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). We take a novel approach by arguing that the risk management problem faced by the FDIC is similar to that of a bank managing a loan portfolio, only in the FDIC’s case the risk arises from the potential for loss of the individual banks in its portfolio. We explicitly estimate the cumulative loss distribution of FDIC insured banks using two variations of the Merton model and find that reserves are sufficient to cover roughly 99.85% of the loss distribution, corresponding to about a BBB+ rating. However, under different stress scenarios (higher correlations, fat-tailed bank returns, increased loss severity) that level can be much lower: approximately 96% corresponding to about a B+ rating.JEL classification: G210, G280.Any views expressed represent those of the author only and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.     

Determinants of stock market volatility and risk premia

Summary. We show the dynamics of diverse beliefs is the primary propagation mechanism of volatility in asset markets. Hence, we treat the characteristics of the market beliefs as a primary, primitive, explanation of market volatility. We study an economy with stock and riskless bond markets and formulate a financial equilibrium model with diverse and time varying beliefs. Agents states of belief play a key role in the market, requiring an endogenous expansion of the state space. To forecast prices agents must forecast market states of belief which are beliefs of others hence our equilibrium embodies the Keynes Beauty Contest. A market state of belief is a vector which uniquely identifies the distribution of conditional probabilities of agents. Restricting beliefs to satisfy the rationality principle of Rational Belief (see Kurz, 1994, 1997) our economy replicates well the empirical record of the (i) moments of the price/dividend ratio, risky stock return, riskless interest rate and the equity premium; (ii) Sharpe ratio and the correlation between risky returns and consumption growth; (iii) predictability of stock returns and price/dividend ratio as expressed by: (I) Variance Ratio statistic for long lags, (II) autocorrelation of these variables, and (III) mean reversion of the risky returns and the predictive power of the price/dividend ratio. Also, our model explains the presence of stochastic volatility in asset prices and returns. Two properties of beliefs drive market volatility: (i) rationalizable over confidence implying belief densities with fat tails, and (ii) rationalizable asymmetry in frequencies of bull or bear states.This research was supported by a grant of the Smith Richardson Foundation to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). We thank Kenneth Judd for constant advice which was crucial at several points in the development of this work. We also thank Kenneth Arrow, Min Fan, Michael Magill, Carsten Nielsen, Manuel Santos, Nicholas Yannelis, Ho-Mou Wu and Woody Brock for comments on earlier drafts. The RBE model developed in this paper and the associated programs used to compute it are available to the public on Mordecai Kurzs web page at http://www.stanford.edu/ mordecai.This revised version was published online in January 2005 with corrections to the Cover date.     

American options: the EPV pricing model

Summary We explicitly solve the pricing problem for perpetual American puts and calls, and provide an efficient semi-explicit pricing procedure for options with finite time horizon. Contrary to the standard approach, which uses the price process as a primitive, we model the price process as the expected present value of a stream, which is a monotone function of a Lévy process. Certain processes exhibiting mean-reverting, stochastic volatility and/or switching features can be modeled this way. This specification allows us to consider assets that pay no dividends at all when the level of the underlying stochastic factor is too low, assets that pay dividends at a fixed rate when the underlying stochastic process remains in some range, or capped dividends.The authors are grateful to the anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions.     

Shaking the tree: an agency-theoretic model of asset pricing

Summary. In this paper, we develop an agency-theoretic extension of the Lucas asset pricing model and examine the resulting asset price dynamics. In the model, an agent of the firm can expand or contract the firms output and dividend payments in response to exogenous shocks, although expansions become increasingly costly for the agent to maintain. Analysis of numerical simulations shows that the time-series of equilibrium asset prices exhibits both significant time-varying conditional heteroskedasticity, and longer memory persistence.We would like to thank Beth Shorish for her patience and guidance during this project, as well as conference participants at the 1998 North American Econometric Society Summer Meetings, Montreal, and the 53rd Econometric Society European Meetings, Berlin for their many useful comments.     

Time-Varying Betas of German Stock Returns

The market model assumes stock returns to be a linear function of the market return. However, there is considerable evidence that the beta stability assumption commonly used when estimating the market model is invalid. In this paper we account for beta instability in German stock returns by allowing the coefficients to vary over time in estimation. For time-varying beta estimation we rely on the Flexible Least Squares approach, the Random Walk Model and Moving Window Least Squares. Due to our results time-varying estimation fits the data considerably better than time-invariant estimation and, hence, increases the efficiency of beta based risk measurement.Acknowledgements: The authors thank Stefan Mittnik, Christian Pigorsch, an anonymous referee and the editor for constructive comments.     

Mutual Fund Growth in Standard and Specialist Market Segments

This paper is concerned with differences in the performance-flow relationship (PFR) between standard and specialist market segments of the mutual fund industry. We expect differences in this relationship because investor characteristics might vary across different segments. Our results show that the PFR is more convex in standard segments than in specialist segments. Furthermore, investors in standard segments are less risk-averse and invest more in high-load funds than investors in specialist segments. Our findings are consistent with investors in standard segments being less sophisticated than investors in specialist segments and relying more heavily on the advice of financial brokers, which is compensated for by load fees.     

The non-neutrality of debt in investment timing: a new NPV rule

Summary Limited liability debt financing of irreversible investments can affect investment timing through an entrepreneur’s option value, even after compensating a lender for expected default losses. This non-neutrality of debt arises from an entrepreneur’s unique investment opportunity, and it is shown in a standard model of irreversible investment that includes the equilibrium effect of a competitive lending sector. The analysis is partial, in that it takes as exogenously given an entrepreneur’s use of debt. Intuitively, limited liability lowers downside risk for the entrepreneur by truncating the lower tail of risks, and lowers the investment threshold. Compensating the lender for expected default losses reduces project profitability to the entrepreneur, and increases the investment threshold. The net effect is negative, because lower downside risk has an additional impact on the option value of delaying investment. The standard NPV rule in real options theory implicitly assumes debt to be neutral. With non-neutrality of debt, an investment threshold is higher than investment cost, but lower than the standard NPV rule. Comparisons with other standard investment thresholds show similar relationships.     

Productivity and Employment in the Information Economy: What Kaldor’s and Verdoorn’s Growth Laws Can Teach the US

During the last decade of the 20th century the US economy experienced the longest economic boom since World War II. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are seen as one of the main reasons for this development and it is still an open question how ICT will affect growth and employment in the future. To evaluate this process Kaldors growth laws, especially Verdoorns law are reconsidered. It will be discussed which changes in the Verdoorn-Coefficient (VC) and the employment threshold (ET) can be expected due to ICT. Induced technical progress and increasing returns to scale could make future economic growth to be less labor-intensive. A simple OLS estimation using data for the US non-farm sector indicates that the VC increased in the second half of the 1990s. Thus, more output growth is required to keep employment constant.The author gratefully acknowledges the most valuable comments from two anonymous referees and the participants of the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association (NOeG) at the Vienna University of Economics (WU), May 21–22, 2004. Any remaining errors are my own.