Inflation Targeting as Constrained Discretion

This paper suggests a simple framework for modeling inflation targeting as constrained discretion. Although it is widely claimed that inflation targeting has been successful in maintaining low and stable inflation, an announcement of an inflation target does not by itself mean that central bankers are precommiting to how they conduct monetary policy. In comparison to the assumption of many theoretical studies, central banks conduct monetary policy in a discretionary fashion and rarely precommit to a rule in reality. Therefore, the central bank in this paper is modeled as discretionary, yet faced with a constraint, that an average of future inflation over a certain horizon should be kept on or near the preannounced target level. It is natural to add this constraint to the central banker’s optimization problem, since inflation targeting involves one way or another an evaluation of the performance over a certain horizon. So it is argued that the better outcome of inflation targeting does not come from a commitment but from “constrained discretion.” This paper also sheds some light on optimal targeting horizon.     

How Unsecured Credit Policies Influence Mortgage and Unsecured Loan Defaults

Before the global financial crisis, the proportion of households defaulting on the mortgage while remaining current on the unsecured loan was almost the same as the proportion of households current on the mortgage but defaulting on the unsecured loan. After the crisis, the former ratio became higher than the latter. By using a heterogeneous agent model with the mortgage and the unsecured loan, I examine how the order of defaults changed before and after the crisis. I then analyze the impacts of unsecured credit policies on households' mortgage and unsecured loan defaults. My quantitative exercise shows that both default rates can decrease as the cost for unsecured loan defaults increases.     

Can the U.S. Interbank Market Be Revived?

The U.S. interbank market essentially disappeared as the reserve supply dramatically increased after the 2007–2008 crisis. We build a model to study whether the interbank market can revive if the reserve supply decreases sufficiently. The market may not revive due to balance sheet costs associated with recent banking regulations. Although interbank volume may initially increase as reserves decline from abundant levels, the balance sheet costs may engender changes in market structure that completely replace interbank trading by nonbank lending to banks. This nonmonotonic response could lead to misleading forecasts about future interbank volumes.     

Politically Connected Governments

This paper examines the consequences of powerful political connections for local governments. We find that governments located within the constituencies of, and thus connected to, powerful congressional members reduce their stewardship over public resources. Using plausibly exogenous declines in the power of congressional representation, we show that the effect is causal. To better understand why connected local governments can reduce stewardship, we study electoral characteristics. Our findings suggest that the increased resources that come with powerful congressional representation allow local-government officials to reduce stewardship without material adverse effects on their reelection prospects. In sum, we provide evidence of a cost of political connections: they weaken local governments' incentives to act in a socially optimal manner.     

The Ability of Earnings to Predict Future Operating Cash Flows Has Been Increasing—Not Decreasing

We investigate the relationship between earnings and one‐year‐ahead operating cash flows from 1973 to 2000. Although the extant research indicates a weakening relationship between contemporaneous earnings and stock prices over time, we find that the relationship between current earnings and future operating cash flows has increased over time. This result holds for numerous divisions of our sample. Out‐of‐sample predictions of operating cash flows generally show increasing forecast accuracy over time. Increasing accounting conservatism appears to play a role in this phenomenon.     

Divergence of Cash Flow and Voting Rights,Opacity, and Stock Price Crash Risk: International Evidence

This study investigates whether and how the deviation of cash flow rights (ownership) from voting rights (control), or simply the ownership‐control wedge, influences the likelihood that extreme negative outliers occur in stock return distributions, which we refer to as stock price crash risk. We do so using a comprehensive panel data set of firms with a dual‐class share structure from 20 countries around the world for the period of 1995–2007. We predict and find that opaque firms with a large wedge are more crash prone than opaque firms with a small wedge. In addition, we predict and find that the positive relation between the wedge and crash risk is less pronounced for firms with more effective external monitoring and for firms with greater growth opportunities. The results of this study are broadly consistent with Jin and Myers’s theory that agency costs, combined with opacity, exacerbate stock price crash risk.