Systemic financial risk indicators and securitised assets: an agent-based framework

The paper presents an agent-based model of a credit economy which includes a securitisation process and a bailout mechanism for bank bankruptcies. Within this framework, banks are able to sell mortgages to a financial vehicle corporation, which finances its activity by creating mortgage-backed securities and selling them to a mutual fund. In turn, the mutual fund collects liquidity by selling shares to households and remunerates them with a monthly interest. The impact of this mechanism is analysed by means of computational experiments for different levels of banks’ securitisation propensity. Furthermore, we study a set of systemic risk indicators which have the aim of assessing the imbalances in the financial system. Two of them are the mortgage-to-GDP ratio and the capital adequacy ratio, which are constructed to detect only the on-balance sheet changes in banks’ credit exposure. We consider two additional indicators, similar to the previous ones with the only difference that they are also able to account for the off-balance sheet items. Moreover, we adopt an indicator, the so-called “virtuous–unvirtuous cycle” indicator, which, besides off-balance assets, targets also the GDP. The results show that higher securitisation propensity weakens the financial stability of banks with relevant effects on different sectors of the economy. Most importantly, the analysis of systemic risk reveals the important issue of designing suitable systemic risk indicators for predicting incoming financial crises, finding that an essential feature of these indicators should be to integrate banks’ off-balance sheet assets.

     

Macroeconomic implications of mortgage loan requirements: an agent-based approach

It is a well-known fact that the housing market, with its associated mortgage securities, plays a crucial role in modern economies. The recent crisis of 2007, triggered by the U.S. real estate bubble, confirms this key role and suggests the importance of regulating mortgage lending. This paper investigates these issues by designing a housing market with a linked mortgage lending instrument in the Eurace agent-based model. Our results show that the presence of a housing market in the model has relevant macroeconomic implications, driven mainly by the additional amount of endogenous money injected into the economy by new mortgages. This additional money generally helps to support and stabilize aggregated demand, thus improving the main economic indicators. However, if the regulation of mortgage lending is too lax, involving an increase in the debt-service-to-income ratio (DSTI), then the additional supply of mortgages no longer enhances macroeconomic performance, and the stability of the economic system is undermined. Based on a number of recent discussions, a regulation of stock control that targets households’ net wealth (a stock), rather than income (a flow) is designed and analyzed. The results show that regulation of stock control can be combined effectively with DSTI to increase the stability of the housing market and the economy as a whole. Interestingly, the regulation based on stock control also directly affects mortgage distribution among households, avoiding excessive concentration. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that the use of a mild flow control regulation, coupled with a stricter stock control measure, fosters sustainable growth and eases first-time buyers access to the housing market, encouraging homeownership.

     

Crowdfunding as a tool to support sustainability‐oriented initiatives: Preliminary insights into the role of product/service attributes

A common goal of current research seems to uncover whether crowdfunding (CF) could be considered an effective way to support sustainability‐oriented initiatives in securing funding, due to diverging results emerging from literature. We claim that the objective of proving whether CF may benefit sustainability‐oriented initiatives could be misplaced; rather, we deem more fruitful to understand how critical are some attributes of products/services pursued within CF campaigns to benefiting sustainability‐oriented initiatives and increasing their odds of success in CF. We focus on food‐related projects as in this sector, sustainability issues apply more than to any other human activities and construct a unique sample of food CF campaigns launched and ended in the European Economic Area countries on the world's most popular reward‐based CF platform, that is, Kickstarter. We identify campaigns with a sustainability orientation and perform an in‐depth qualitative analysis, which allows us to classify them into meaningful clusters and subclusters. Our research suggests that the emphasis on egoistic/self‐centered product attributes, rather than on altruistic/society‐centered attributes, is generally more crucial to facilitate CF support to sustainability‐oriented projects. However, the emphasis on altruistic/society‐centered attributes emerges to be more beneficial for initiatives specifically supporting local products. Our results also suggest that reward‐based CF is not suitable for sustainability‐oriented projects targeting disadvantaged individuals/groups. These results offer both theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature as well as practical implications.