Liquidity Risk and Banks' Asset Composition: Implications for Monetary Policy

Monetary growth models in which the government is a net debtor demonstrate that inflation adversely affects capital formation through the crowding out effect. Interestingly, the results are at odds with empirical evidence. In particular, recent studies point to an asymmetric relationship between inflation and the real economy across countries. Specifically, inflation and output are negatively correlated in poor countries. In contrast, inflation is associated with higher levels of economic activity in advanced economies. I present a monetary growth model with public debt, where the exposure to risk is inversely related to the level of income. In this setting, I demonstrate that the effects of monetary policy depend on the level of capital of the economy. In poor countries, banks' portfolios consist primarily of government liabilities. Therefore, a higher rate of money creation inhibits capital formation in these economies. In contrast, banks devote more resources toward productive uses in advanced countries. Consequently, monetary policy generates a Tobin effect.     

The Stock Market,Monetary Policy,and Economic Development

In this article, we examine the impact of financial market development on the level of economic development. In particular, we explore this issue in a setting where individuals face idiosyncratic risk. Incomplete information also provides a transaction role for money so that monetary policy can be studied. While an active banking sector promotes risk sharing, we incorporate a market for equity by allowing individuals to trade capital across generations. In this manner, each asset and financial market in our model fulfills a distinct economic function. Consistent with recent empirical work, we find that the impact of access to a stock market may be indeterminate—the economy may respond with significant gains in capital accumulation and risk sharing, or there may be relatively little impact. We also show that the effects of monetary policy vary across the level of financial development. In economies with small stock markets, increasing the amount of liquidity will cause capital accumulation to decline. By comparison, in advanced economies, capital accumulation improves.     

The role of financial sector competition for monetary policy

Abstract In this paper, we examine the impact of competition in the banking industry on financial market activity. In particular, we explore this issue in a setting where banks simultaneously insure individuals against liquidity risk and offer loans to promote intertemporal consumption smoothing. In addition, spatial separation and private information generate a transactions role for money. Interestingly, we demonstrate that the industrial organization of the financial system bears significant implications for the effects of monetary policy. Under perfect competition, higher rates of money growth lead to lower interest rates and a higher volume of lending activity. In contrast, in a monopoly banking sector, money growth restricts the availability of funds and raises the cost of borrowing.     

Liquidity risk and financial competition: Implications for asset prices and monetary policy

This paper studies the implications of banking competition for capital markets and monetary policy. In particular, I develop a two-sector monetary growth model in which a group of agents is exposed to liquidity shocks and money is essential. Banks insure depositors against such risk and invest in the economy's assets. In this setting, I compare an economy with a perfectly competitive banking sector to an economy with a fully concentrated financial sector. Unlike previous work, banks can have market power in both deposits and capital markets. Compared to a perfectly competitive financial sector, I demonstrate that a monopolistic banking system can have substantial adverse consequences on capital formation, assets prices, and the degree of risk sharing. Furthermore, multiple steady-states can emerge and the economy becomes subject to poverty traps. More importantly, market power in financial markets may overturn the Tobin effect present under a perfectly competitive financial sector. This necessarily happens in economies with high degrees of liquidity risk and low levels of capital formation.     

Arrow's Theorem of the Deductible with Heterogeneous Beliefs

In Arrow's classical problem of demand for insurance indemnity schedules, it is well-known that the optimal insurance indemnification for an insurance buyer—or decision maker (DM)—is a deductible contract when the insurer is a risk-neutral Expected-Utility (EU) maximizer and when the DM is a risk-averse EU maximizer. In Arrow's framework, however, both parties share the same probabilistic beliefs about the realizations of the underlying insurable loss. This article reexamines Arrow's problem in a setting where the DM and the insurer have different subjective beliefs. Under a requirement of compatibility between the insurer's and the DM's subjective beliefs, we show the existence and monotonicity of optimal indemnity schedules for the DM. The belief compatibility condition is shown to be a weakening of the assumption of a monotone likelihood ratio. In the latter case, we show that the optimal indemnity schedule is a variable deductible schedule, with a state-contingent deductible that depends on the state of the world only through the likelihood ratio. Arrow's classical result is then obtained as a special case.     

Liquidity risk, economic development, and the effects of monetary policy

Empirical evidence indicates that monetary policy is not super-neutral in many countries. In particular, in high inflation economies, inflation is negatively related to economic activity. By comparison, inflation may be positively correlated with output in low inflation countries. We present a neoclassical growth model with money in which the incidence of liquidity risk is inversely related to aggregate capital formation. Interestingly, there may be multiple monetary steady-states where the effects of monetary policy vary. In poor economies, the financial system is highly distorted and higher rates of money growth are associated with less capital formation. In contrast, in advanced economies, a Tobin effect is observed. Since inflation exacerbates distortions from a coordination failure in the low-capital steady-state, individuals become much more exposed to liquidity risk. Consequently, optimal monetary policy depends on the level of development.     

Optimal insurance under maxmin expected utility

We examine a problem of demand for insurance indemnification, when the insured is sensitive to ambiguity and behaves according to the maxmin expected utility model of Gilboa and Schmeidler (J. Math. Econ. 18:141–153, 1989), whereas the insurer is a (risk-averse or risk-neutral) expected-utility maximiser. We characterise optimal indemnity functions both with and without the customary ex ante no-sabotage requirement on feasible indemnities, and for both concave and linear utility functions for the two agents. This allows us to provide a unifying framework in which we examine the effects of the no-sabotage condition, of marginal utility of wealth, of belief heterogeneity, as well as of ambiguity (multiplicity of priors) on the structure of optimal indemnity functions. In particular, we show how a singularity in beliefs leads to an optimal indemnity function that involves full insurance on an event to which the insurer assigns zero probability, while the decision maker assigns a positive probability. We examine several illustrative examples, and we provide numerical studies for the case of a Wasserstein and a Rényi ambiguity set.