assessing long term fiscal developments a new approach abstract we use a new approach to assess long term fiscal developments by analyzing the time varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue responsiveness and persistence a feature not captured by automatic stabilisers we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal deterioration improvement drawing on quarterly data we estimate recursively these components within a system of government revenue and spending equations using a three stage least square method for eight european union countries plus the us the results suggest that significant changes in the fiscal stance including those related to the current crisis are reflected in the estimates of persistence and responsiveness

pricing default swaps empirical evidence in this paper we compare market prices of credit default swaps with model prices we show that a simple reduced form model outperforms directly comparing bonds credit spreads to default swap premiums we find that the model yields unbiased premium estimates for default swaps on investment grade issuers but only if we use swap or repo rates as proxy for default free interest rates this indicates that the government curve is no longer seen as the reference default free curve we also show that the model is relatively insensitive to the value of the assumed recovery rate

how forward looking is optimal monetary policy we calculate optimal monetary policy rules for several variants of a simple optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism with sticky prices and or wages we show that robustly optimal rules can be represented by interest rate feedback rules that generalize the celebrated proposal of taylor 1993 optimal rules however require that the current interest rate operating target depend positively on the recent past level of the operating target and its recent rate of increase in a way that is characteristic of estimated central bank reaction functions but not of taylor s proposal we furthermore find that a robustly optimal policy rule is almost inevitably an implicit rule that requires the central bank to use a structural model to project the economy s evolution under the contemplated policy action however calibrated examples suggest that optimal rules place less weight on projections of inflation or output many quarters in the future than do rules often discussed in the literature on inflation targeting or in the current practice of inflation forecast targeting central banks

pricing credit derivatives with rating transitions we present a model for pricing risky debt and valuing credit derivatives that is easily calibrated to existing variables our approach expands a classical term structure model to allow for multiple rating classes of debt the framework has two salient features 1 it uses a rating transition matrix as the driver for the default process and 2 the entire set of rating categories is calibrated jointly which allows arbitrage free restrictions across rating classes as a bond migrates among them we illustrate the approach by applying it to price credit sensitive notes that have coupon payments linked to the rating of the underlying credit

how connected is the global sovereign credit risk network abstract this paper estimates the global network structure of sovereign credit risk by applying the diebold yilmaz connectedness methodology on sovereign credit default swaps scdss the level of credit risk connectedness among sovereigns which is quite high is comparable to the connectedness among stock markets and foreign exchange markets in the aftermath of the recent financial crises that originated in developed countries emerging market countries have played a crucial role in the transmission of sovereign credit risk while developed countries and debt ridden developing countries have played marginal roles secondary regressions show that both trade and capital flows are important determinants of pairwise connectedness across countries the capital flows became increasingly important after 2013 while the effect of trade flows decreased during the crisis and did not recover afterwards

how do global investors differentiate between sovereign risks the new normal versus the old abstract when global investors go into emerging markets or get out of them how do they differentiate between economies has this behavior changed since the crisis of 2008 to reflect a new normal we consider these questions by focusing on sovereign risk as reflected in monthly returns on credit default swaps cds for 18 emerging markets and 10 developed countries tests for breaks in the time series of such returns suggest a new normal that ensued around october 2008 or soon afterwards dividing the sample into two periods and extracting risk factors from cds returns we find an old normal in which a single global risk factor drives half of the variation in returns and a new normal in which that risk factor becomes even more dominant surprisingly in both the old and new normal the way countries load on this factor depends not so much on economic fundamentals as on whether they are designated an emerging market

a discrete time approach to arbitrage free pricing of credit derivatives this paper develops a framework for modelling risky debt and valuing credit derivatives that is flexible and simple to implement and that is to the maximum extent possible based on observables our approach is based on expanding the heath jarrow morton term structure model to allow for defaultable debt rather than follow the procedure of implying out the behavior of spreads from assumptions concerning the default process we work directly with the evolution of spreads the risk neutral drifts in the resulting model possess a recursive representation that facilitates implementation and makes it possible to handle path dependence and early exercise features without difficulty the framework permits embedding a variety of specifications for default we present an empirical example of a default structure which provides promising calibration results

the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy we investigate the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy using a bayesian structural vector autoregression b svar approach we identify fiscal policy shocks via a partial identification scheme but also i include the feedback from government debt ii look at the impact on the composition of output iii assess the effects on asset markets iv use quarterly data and v analyse empirical evidence from the us the uk germany and italy the results show that government spending shocks in general have a small effect on gross domestic product gdp lead to important crowding out effects have a varied impact on housing prices and generate a quick fall in stock prices government revenue shocks generate a mixed effect on housing prices and a small and positive effect on stock prices the empirical evidence also suggests that it is important to explicitly consider the government debt dynamics in the model

spatial competition and the core models of spatial competition have proven useful in describing differentiated product markets a serious problem is the nonexistence of nash equilibria this problem is resolved by modelling the price formation process using the core the equilibrium is the outcome of a two stage process in the first stage two firms choose locations simultaneously the second stage has prices determined by an allocation in the core of a cooperative subgame allowing for coalitions of buyers and sellers these prices approach the competitive level as the distance between the firms goes to zero thus capturing the essence of duopoly rivalry this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

price discovery in euro area sovereign credit markets and the ban on naked cds abstract the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area saw credit spreads on sovereign bonds and credit default swaps cds surge for a number of member states the rise in sovereign yields was accompanied by a significant increase in sovereign cds market activity this pattern raised concerns that destabilising speculation via outright short selling of cds so called naked cds was behind the increase in bond yields in response policy makers introduced a ban on naked cds trading we investigate the effect of the ban on the price discovery process of sovereign credit risk contrasting results for the post ban period with those obtained prior to the ban we use intraday data on sovereign cds and bonds across a number of euro area countries our first main finding is that the cds market dominates the bond market in terms of price discovery that is cds premia in most cases adjust quicker to reflect new information than bond spreads this result holds also when taking into account transaction costs our second main finding is that the ban on short selling did not alter price discovery dynamics or reduce the efficiency of the market finally we find that prior to the ban cds spreads were persistently higher than bond credit spreads even after controlling for transaction costs this points to the presence of market frictions that limit the ability of arbitrage forces to fully close pricing gaps between the two markets however these pricing discrepancies were in many cases largely eliminated following the introduction of the ban

a theoretical foundation for the undercut proof equilibrium abstract this paper develops a theoretical foundation for the undercut proof equilibrium see shy 1996 shy 2002 morgan and shy 2015 in a general spatial setting the set of undercut proof prices is equivalent to the core of a non transferable utility coalitional game played on the set of outcomes that are feasible in bertrand competition the result depends critically on two conditions first firms must have unlimited capacity and constant marginal costs second the goods produced by firms must only be differentiated by the spatial characteristics of the market an application to network markets shows how the undercut proof equilibrium can be used to describe stable price dispersion and persistent performance differences

trading strategies with implied forward credit default swap spreads credit default risk for an obligor can be hedged with either a credit default swap cds or a constant maturity credit default swap cmcds we find strong evidence of persistent differences in the hedging cost associated with the two comparable contracts between 2001 and 2006 it would have been more profitable to sell cds and buy cmcds while after the crisis between 2008 and 2013 the opposite strategy was profitable panel data tests indicate that for our sample period the implied forward cds rates are unbiased estimates of future spot cds rates the changes in the company implied volatility is the main determinant of trading inefficiencies followed by the changes in gdp and in the interest rates before the crisis and the changes in sentiment index and in the vix after the crisis

special repo rates this article provides the causes and symptoms of special repo rates in a competitive market for repurchase agreements a repo rate is in effect an interest rate on loans collateralized by a specific instrument a special is a repo rate significantly below prevailing market riskless interest rates this article shows that specials can occur when those owning the collateral are inhibited whether from legal or institutional requirements or from frictional costs from supplying collateral into repurchase agreements specialness increases the equilibrium price for the underlying instrument by the present value of savings in borrowing costs associated with the repo specials this article characterizes competitive repurchase or repo markets and the equilibrium relationship between repo rates and the underlying cash market prices repurchase markets are often called financing markets since they are effectively vehicles for collateralized borrowing that are often used to finance the purchase of the underlying collateral this article provides causes and effects of specials meaning specific repo rates significantly below prevailing market interest rates for loans of similar maturity and credit risk the example of united states treasury instruments is emphasized because of the extensive use of the treasury repo market as a means of hedging against or speculating on changes in u s interest rates and because of the high incidence of specials in treasury repo rates numerous specific instru

municipal bond liquidity and default risk this paper examines the pricing of municipal bonds i use three distinct complementary approaches to decompose municipal bond spreads into default and liquidity components and find that default risk accounts for 74 to 84 of the average spread after adjusting for tax exempt status the first approach estimates the liquidity component using transaction data the second measures the default component with credit default swap data and the third is a quasi natural experiment that estimates changes in default risk around pre refunding events the price of default risk is high given the rare incidence of municipal default and implies a high risk premium

defaulted bonds demand supply and performance 1987 1992 estimates of the market value of total private and public defaulted and distressed debt are as high as 200 billion in 1990 with a slight decline to about 175 billion in 1992 the supply can be expected to shrink in the nearfuture as defaults and bankruptcies by large us companies appear to have peaked at the same time the demand for such securities is likely to remain fairly constant as long as they can offer competitive returns

systemic risk measures the simpler the better abstract this paper estimates and compares two groups of high frequency market based systemic risk measures using european and us interbank rates stock prices and credit derivatives data from 2004 to 2009 measures belonging to the macro group gauge the overall tension in the financial sector and micro group measures rely on individual institution information to extract joint distress we rank the measures using three criteria i granger causality tests ii gonzalo and granger metric and iii correlation with an index of systemic events and policy actions we find that the best systemic measure in the macro group is the first principal component of a portfolio of credit default swap cds spreads whereas the best measure in the micro group is the multivariate densities computed from cds spreads these results suggest that the measures based on cdss outperform measures based on interbank rates or stock market prices

synthetic or real the equilibrium effects of credit default swaps on bond markets we provide a model of nonredundant credit default swaps cdss building on the observation that cdss have lower trading costs than bonds cds introduction involves a trade off it crowds out existing demand for the bond but improves the bond allocation by allowing long term investors to become levered basis traders and absorb more of the bond supply we characterize conditions under which cds introduction raises bond prices the model predicts a negative cds bond basis as well as turnover and price impact patterns that are consistent with empirical evidence we also show that a ban on naked cdss can raise borrowing costs

aig in hindsight the near failure on september 16 2008 of american international group aig was an iconic moment in the financial crisis two large bets on real estate made with funding vulnerable to bank run like dynamics pushed aig to the brink of bankruptcy aig used securities lending to transform insurance company assets into residential mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations ultimately losing at least 21 billion and threatening the solvency of the life insurance companies aig also sold insurance on multisector collateralized debt obligations backed by real estate assets ultimately losing more than 30 billion these activities were apparently motivated by a belief that aig s real estate bets would not suffer defaults and were money good we find that these securities have in fact suffered write downs and that the stark money good claim can be rejected ultimately both liquidity and solvency were issues for aig

optimal horizons for inflation targeting abstract in this paper we investigate the problem of selecting an optimal horizon for inflation targeting in the united kingdom since there are two key ways of thinking about an optimal horizon we look at optimal horizons for both of these interpretations in addition to see whether our results are robust in the face of model uncertainty we compute optimal horizons for two different models with divergent structural and dynamic characteristics

the valuation of default triggered credit derivatives credit derivatives are among the fastest growing contracts in the derivatives market we present a simple easily implementable model to study the pricing and hedging of two widely traded default triggered claims default swaps and default baskets in particular we demonstrate how default correlation the correlation between two default processes impacts the prices of these claims when we extend our model to continuous time we find that once default correlation has been taken into consideration the spread dynamics have very little explanatory power

oligopolistic competition product variety entry deterrence and technology transfer this article develops a model of product variety to examine how competition among actual and potential market participants determines product characteristics the model is used to consider the effects of market size barriers to entry and differences in tastes between different groups of consumers on the configuration of product types produced welfare and distribution of income the incentive for a firm with a superior technology to sell that technology to other actual and potential producers is also analyzed equilibrium is the outcome of a two stage process in the first stage firms commit themselves to producing a particular model of a commodity they do so sequentially in the second stage firms that have entered determine prices and outputs given the set of firms that entered initially and the models they established we assume perfection in the sense that actual and potential producers make their entry and model choice decisions by calculating correctly the effects of their actions on the second stage outcome in characterizing equilibrium as the outcome of a two stage process with sequential entry at the first stage we follow prescott and visscher 1977 eaton and lipsey 1978 and lane 1980 the first two articles do not provide a complete characterization of the second stage of

limited investment capital and credit spreads using proprietary credit default swap cds data i investigate how capital shocks at protection sellers impact pricing in the cds market seller capital shocks measured as cds portfolio margin payments account for 12 of the time series variation in weekly spread changes a significant amount given that standard credit factors account for 18 during my sample in addition seller shocks possess information for spreads that is independent of institution wide measures of constraints these findings imply a high degree of market segmentation and suggest that frictions within specialized financial institutions prevent capital from flowing into the market at shorter horizons

has the cds market influenced the borrowing cost of european countries during the sovereign crisis this paper assesses the potential influence of the growing cds market on the borrowing cost of sovereign states during the european sovereign crisis we analyze the sovereign debt market to ascertain the pattern of information transmission between the cds and corresponding bond markets our methodological innovation is the use of a non linear specification rather than the linear vecm specification customarily employed using a panel smooth transition model during the 2008 2010 period we find that 1 linearity tests clearly reject the null hypothesis of a linear transmission mechanisms between the bond and the cds markets 2 market distress alters the mutual influence and 3 the higher the distress the more the cds market dominates the information transmission between cds and bond markets

monetary policy rules based on real time data this paper examines the magnitude of informational problems associated with the implementation and interpretation of simple monetary policy rules using taylor s rule as an example i demonstrate that real time policy recommendations differ considerably from those obtained with ex post revised data further estimated policy reaction functions based on ex post revised data provide misleading descriptions of historical policy and obscure the behavior suggested by information available to the federal reserve in real time these results indicate that reliance on the information actually available to policy makers in real time is essential for the analysis of monetary policy rules

real output of bank services what counts is what banks do not what they own the measurement of bank output a difficult and contentious issue has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years in this paper we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank service output based on transaction counts instead of balances of loans and deposits compiling new and comparable output measures for the united states and a range of european countries we show that our counts based output series exhibit significantly different growth patterns from those of our balances based output series over the years 1997 to 2009 since the u s official statistics rely on counts while european statistics rely on balances this implies a potentially considerable bias in the estimate of bank output growth in europe vis avis that in the united states

how forward looking is the fed direct estimates from a calvo type rule we estimate an alternative type of monetary policy rule according to which the central bank targets a discounted infinite sum of expected inflation and output gaps empirical results suggest that the fed has a mean forward horizon of 4 to 8 quarters

an integrated model for hybrid securities we develop a model for pricing securities whose value may depend simultaneously on equity interest rate and default risks the framework may also be used to extract probabilities of default pd functions from market data our approach is entirely based on observables such as equity prices and interest rates rather than on unobservable processes such as firm value the model stitches together in an arbitrage free setting a constant elasticity of variance cev equity model to represent the behavior of equity prices prior to default a default intensity process and a heath jarrow morton hjm model for the evolution of riskless interest rates the model captures several stylized features such as a negative relation between equity prices and equity volatility a negative relation between default intensity and equity prices and a positive relationship between default intensity and equity volatility we embed the model on a discrete time recombining lattice making implementation feasible with polynomial complexity we demonstrate the simplicity of calibrating the model to market data and of using it to extract default information the framework is extensible to handling correlated default risk and may be used to value distressed convertible bonds debt equity swaps and credit portfolio products such as collateralized debt obligations cdos applied to the cdx indu credit default index industrials index we find the s p 500 index explains credit premia

financial indicators signaling correlation changes in sovereign bond markets abstract we use a smooth transition conditional correlation garch stcc garch model applied to the euro area monetary policy rates and sovereign yields of italy spain and germany at 5 year maturity to estimate the threshold level of the signals above which the sovereign bond market moves to a crisis regime we show that the threshold to a crisis regime for italy and spain is reached when i their 5 year sovereign yield spreads amount to about 90 basis points ii their 5 year cds spreads amount to about 155 basis points or iii the 5 year spread between the kreditanstalt fur wiederaufbau kfw bond and the german bund amounts to about 30 40 basis points using impulse responses we find that the stcc garch with the kfw bund spread has leading properties a feature corroborated by the fact that this indicator suggested a shift to a crisis regime already in august 2007 and has been signaling an improvement of the situation already in the autumn of 2012 an out of sample forecast of the stcc garch model is also provided which is both a novelty and a further robustness check for the stability of the model

bank liquidity providing in a real synergy management under a cap based valuation since banks often lend via commitments their lending and deposit taking may be two manifestations of one primitive function the provision of liquidity on demand we explore this function under a cap based valuation we find that i the strike price of the cap based valuation increases the bank s liquid asset holdings by increasing its loan rate and loan commitment rate with the strategic rate adjustment complements and decreases the bank s external finance need by increasing its deposit rate when the bank realizes a less risky state of the world and ii the number of caplet days decreases the bank s liquid asset holdings by decreasing its loan rate and loan commitment rate with the strategic rate adjustment complements and the strategic timing substitutes and increases the bank s external finance need by decreasing its deposit rate with the strategic timing substitutes when the bank realizes a more risky state our findings provide alternative explanations concerning the bank s liquidity funct

the value of creditor control in corporate bonds this paper introduces a measure that captures the premium in bond prices that is due to the value of creditor control we estimate the premium as the difference in the bond price and an equivalent synthetic bond without control rights that is constructed using credit default swap cds contracts we find empirically that this premium increases as firm credit quality decreases and around important credit events such as defaults bankruptcies and covenant violations the increase is greatest for bonds most pivotal to changes in control changes in bond and cds liquidity do not appear to drive increases in the premium

the intersection of market and credit risk abstract economic theory tells us that market and credit risks are intrinsically related to each other and not separable we describe the two main approaches to pricing credit risky instruments the structural approach and the reduced form approach it is argued that the standard approaches to credit risk management creditmetrics creditrisk and kmv are of limited value when applied to portfolios of interest rate sensitive instruments and in measuring market and credit risk empirically returns on high yield bonds have a higher correlation with equity index returns and a lower correlation with treasury bond index returns than do low yield bonds also macro economic variables appear to influence the aggregate rate of business failures the creditmetrics creditrisk and kmv methodologies cannot reproduce these empirical observations given their constant interest rate assumption however we can incorporate these empirical observations into the reduced form of jarrow and turnbull 1995b drawing the analogy risk 5 63 70 model here default probabilities are correlated due to their dependence on common economic factors default risk and recovery rate uncertainty may not be the sole determinants of the credit spread we show how to incorporate a convenience yield as one of the determinants of the credit spread for credit risk management the time horizon is typically one year or longer this has two important implications since the standard approximations do not apply over a one year horizon first we must use pricing models for risk management some practitioners have taken a different approach than academics in the pricing of credit risky bonds in the event of default a bond holder is legally entitled to accrued interest plus principal we discuss the implications of this fact for pricing second it is necessary to keep track of two probability measures the martingale probability for pricing and the natural probability for value at risk we discuss the benefits of keeping track of these two measures

an integrated pricing model for defaultable loans and bonds abstract in recent years credit risk has played a key role in risk management issues practitioners academics and regulators have been fully involved in the process of developing studying and analysing credit risk models in order to find the elements which characterize a sound risk management system in this paper we present an integrated model based on a reduced pricing approach for market and credit risk its main features are those of being mark to market and that the spread term structure by rating class is contingent on the seniority of debt within an arbitrage free framework we introduce issues such as the integration of market and credit risk the use of stochastic recovery rates and recovery by seniority moreover we will characterize default risk by estimating migration risk through a mortality rate actuarial based approach the resultant probabilities will be the base for determining multi period risk neutral transition probability that allow pricing of risky debt in the trading and banking book

market frictions and the pricing of sovereign credit default swaps abstract this paper contributes to the general understanding of how sovereign cds prices are formed by studying the information content of pricing errors generated by a non arbitrage model we implement a price discrepancy measure in the spirit of the noise measure introduced by hu et al 2013 in the treasury bond market and analyze its main determinants in panel data analysis the main results show that sovereign cds pricing errors are systematically related to higher bid ask spreads the evidence in this paper also suggests that exits of capital arbitrage during distressed periods as measured by changes in net offsetting can be associated to larger pricing errors in sovereign cds from advanced economies thereby supporting the main claims of the limit to arbitrage theories these findings are robust for the most common cds pricing models employed in the industry and different estimation techniques

robust inflation forecast based rules to shield against indeterminacy abstract this paper provides a first attempt to quantify and at the same time utilize estimated measures of uncertainty for the design of robust interest rate rules we estimate several variants of a linearized form of a new keynesian model using quarterly us data both our theoretical and numerical results indicate that inflation forecast based ifb rules are increasingly prone to the problem of indeterminacy as the forward horizon increases as a consequence the stabilization performance of optimized rules of this type worsens too robust ifb rules can be designed to avoid indeterminacy in an uncertain environment but at an increasing utility loss as rules become more forward looking

pricing derivatives on financial securities subject to credit risk this article provides a new methodology for pricing and hedging derivative securities involving credit risk two types of credit risks are considered the first is where the asset underlying the derivative security may default the second is where the writer of the derivative security may default we apply the foreign currency analogy of jarrow and turnbull 1991 to decompose the dollar payoff from a risky security into a certain payoff and a spot exchange rate arbitrage free valuation techniques are then employed this methodology can be applied to corporate debt and over the counter derivatives such as swaps and caps the purpose of this article is to provide a new theory for pricing and hedging derivative securities involving credit risk two sources of credit risk are identified and analyzed the first is where the asset underlying the derivative security may default paying off less than promised this is the case for example with imbedded options on corporate debt the second is the credit risk introduced by the writer of the derivative security who may also default examples include over the counter writers of options on eurodollar futures swaps and swaptions for pricing derivative securities involving credit risk there are currently two approaches the first views these derivatives as contingent claims not on the financial securities themselves but as compound options on the assets underlying the financial securities this is the case for example with the pricing of imbedded options on corporate debt see merton 1974 1977 black and cox 1976 ho and singer 1982 chance 1990 and kim ramaswamy and sundaresan 1993 or the pricing of vulnerable options see johnson and stulz 1987 in practice however this valuation methodology is difficult to use first the assets underlying the financial security are often not tradeable and therefore their values are not observable this makes application of the theory and estimation of the relevant parameters problematic second as in the case of corporate debt all of the other liabilities of the firm senior to the corporate debt must first and simultaneously be valued this generates significant computational difficulties as a result this approach has not

the delivery option in credit default swaps abstract under standard assumptions the reduced form credit risk model is not capable of accurately pricing the two fundamental credit risk instruments bonds and credit default swaps cds simultaneously using a data set of euro denominated corporate bonds and cds our paper quantifies this mispricing by calibrating such a model to bond data and subsequently using it to price cds resulting in model cds spreads up to 50 lower on average than observed in the market an extended model is presented which includes the delivery option implicit in cds contracts emerging since a basket of bonds is deliverable in default by using a constant recovery rate standard models assume equal recoveries for all bonds and hence zero value for the delivery option contradicting this common assumption case studies of chapter 11 filings presented in the paper show that corporate bonds do not necessarily trade at equal levels following default our extension models the implied expected recovery rate of the cheapest to deliver bond and applied to data largely eliminates the mispricing calibrated recovery values lie between 8 and 47 for different obligors exhibiting strong variation among rating classes and industries a cross sectional analysis reveals that the implied recovery parameter depends on proxies for the delivery option primarily the number of available bonds and bond pricing errors no evidence is found for a direct influence of the bid ask spread notional amount coupon or rating used as proxies for bond market liquidity

spatial competition with price taking firms we consider a price taking equilibrium in the spatial setting a unique pricing equilibrium is shown to exist for any set of firm locations this equilibrium is then used to examine locational incentives in the two stage process in whiclh firms first choose locations anticipating the subsequent price taking outcome the result is spatial agglomeration if demand is inelastic and there are only two firms agglomeration does not occur if demand is too elastic or if there are more than two firms this paper presents a two stage model of spatial competition in which the prices in the second stage constitute a competitive equilibrium rather than being chosen by firms the analysis applies to an industry in which firms prices are regulated by an authority whose concern is to maximize social surplus as we show the prices the regulator would choose are those that would arise in the price taking equilibrium of course the full social optimum could be attained if the authority were also to regulate locations however apart from coarse restrictions such as zoning location regulation does not seem common in practice thus we model firms as deciding on the locations non cooperatively and anticipating correctly the subsequent price regulation for example when airlines were regulated they could choose the quality of their service such as departure times but price was controlled 2 the price taking equilibrium is also relevant even in the absence of regula tion when there are several suppliers at each location then the marginal cost curve associated with each point occupied by firms is simply interpreted as the supply curve the points occupied by suppliers can be thought of as market places or as shopping malls and the rents earned owing to increasing marginal costs can be extracted by the developer of the market place or mall the developer s location decision aims to maximize rents earned in choosing a location each developer takes into account how the ensuing price competition among suppliers both in the mall and across different malls affects the rents that can be extracted in this way locations are determined as a non cooperative equilibrium whereas prices are subsequently determined by walrasian competition we first assume that demand is completely inelastic and we prove the existence of a unique price equilibrium and that an allocation is optimal if and only if it can be supported by a price equilibrium the proofs do not require fixed point theorems and are a direct application of an intuitively appealing result of dubins and spanier 1961 we then extend our existence uniqueness and optimality results to allow for price sensitive demands different demand

the liquidity effects of official bond market intervention to ensure depth and liquidity the european central bank intervened in sovereign debt markets through its securities markets programme smp providing a unique opportunity to estimate the effects of large scale asset purchases on sovereign bond liquidity premia from reduced form estimates we find robust economically significant impact and lasting reductions in sovereign bonds liquidity premia in response to official purchases we develop a search based asset pricing model to understand our empirical results the theory implies that bond liquidity premia fall in response to both official purchases and rising sovereign default probabilities as seen in the data

credit risk in private debt portfolios default loss severity and average loss rates for a large sample of privately placed bonds are presented and compared with loss experience for publicly issued bonds the chance of very large portfolio losses is estimated and some determinants of such losses are analyzed results show ex ante riskier classes of private debt perform better on average than public debt both diversification and the riskiness of individual portfolio assets influence the bad tail of the portfolio loss distribution private placements are similar to corporate loans in that both are monitored private debt the results are thus relevant to management and securitization of private debt portfolios generally more than half of nonfinancial corporate debt finance is iss ued privately and decisions of the financial intermediaries that invest in such debt depend importantly on its credit risk regulators of such institutions are similarly attentive to portfolio credit risk and it is an important consideration in the design of securitizations of pools of private debt in spite of its importance little is known empirically about private debt credit risk especially ex ante risk as a function of portfolio characteristics many studies have examined the loan portfolio performance of banks thrifts and insurance companies but the ex ante risk characteristics of the portfo

term structures of credit spreads with incomplete accounting information we study the implications of imperfect information for term structures of credit spreads on corporate bonds we suppose that bond investors cannot observe the issuer s assets directly and receive instead only periodic and imperfect accounting reports for a setting in which the assets of the firm are a geometric brownian motion until informed equityholders optimally liquidate we derive the conditional distribution of the assets given accounting data and survivorship contrary to the perfect information case there exists a default arrival intensity process that intensity is calculated in terms of the conditional distribution of assets credit yield spreads are characterized in terms of accounting information generalizations are provided

local volatility and the recovery rate of credit default swaps abstract credit default swap cds spreads can only be decomposed into the probability of default and the loss given default by imposing some structure employing a hybrid binomial tree for equities and a recovery function das and hanouna 2009 obtain accurate estimates for cds spreads by fitting the model to historical equity volatilities we extend their approach by including the full implied volatility surface developing an implied binomial tree with a jump to default based on extending the derman and kani 1994 tree we then evaluate the effect of including the full volatility surface on the implied cds recovery rate

positive prices in capm some equilibrium prices in capm may be negative because of nonmonotonicity of preferences we identify several sets of sufficient conditions for prices to be positive the central conditions impose bounds on the investors risk aversion these bounds do not need to hold globally but only in a relevant range of portfolios or combinations of mean and standard deviation the relevant range is specified on the basis of exogenous parameters and variables and it must contain any endogenously determined equilibrium the bounds on risk aversion ensure that the preferences for assets are sufficiently well behaved within the relevant range the two period mean variance capital asset pricing model capm has the peculiar property that preferences may not be monotone the expected return to an investor s portfolio increases as he holds more and more shares of the assets but so does the variance of return it may be that at some point the additional expected return gained from adding more shares to the portfolio is not sufficient to compensate for the increase in variance if so then the induced preferences for assets are not monotone nonmonotonicity of preferences in the mean variance model is analyzed in nielsen 1987 because portfolio preferences are not necessarily monotone equilibrium asset prices may be negative or zero in fact it is possible that the value of the market portfolio of risky assets is negative this is demonstrated in nielsen 1985 1990a and in two examples in the present paper when the capm is used as a model of the prices of stocks which in reality have limited liability it is of course disturbing that it may predict negative prices it can be seen as a symptom of the fact that mean variance preferences are not always a good approximation to reality this paper analyzes various conditions on the exogenous parameters which ensure that the preferences are sufficiently realistic to yield positive prices the exogenous parameters in question are the expectations variances and covariances of total returns the initial allocations of the assets endowments and the investors utility functions for mean and variance of return the analysis applies to the classical version of the capm with a riskless asset as developed by sharpe 1964 lintner 1965 and mossin 1966 as well as the capm with risky assets only which was introduced by black 1972 and has been much used in empirical work under the name the zero beta or two factor capm

presidential address asset price dynamics with slow moving capital i describe asset price dynamics caused by the slow movement of investment capital to trading opportunities the pattern of price responses to supply or demand shocks typically involves a sharp reaction to the shock and a subsequent and more extended reversal the amplitude of the immediate price impact and the pattern of the subsequent recovery can reflect institutional impediments to immediate trade such as search costs for trading counterparties or time to raise capital by intermediaries i discuss special impediments to capital formation during the recent financial crisis that caused asset price distortions which subsided afterward after presenting examples of price reactions to supply shocks in normal market settings i offer a simple illustrative model of price dynamics associated with slow moving capital due to the presence of inattentive investors i address the implications for asset price dynamics of the apparent slow movement of investment capital to trading opportunities the arrival of new capital to an investment opportunity can be delayed by fractions of a second in some markets for example an electronic limit order book market for equities or by months in other markets such as that for catastrophe risk insurance accordingly prices respond to supply or demand shocks with a sharp reaction because of the relatively small subset of capital and thus risk bearing capacity that is immediately available to absorb a shock on short notice such a price impact is substantially reversed over time as additional capital becomes available the amplitude of the immediate price impact and the pattern of the subsequent recovery can reflect many sorts of attention costs to trade as well as institutional impediments to capital movement such as search costs for trading

nonlinear price discrimination with a finite number of consumers and constrained recontracting abstract in the monopoly nonlinear pricing problem with unobservable consumer types we study mechanisms in which the firm makes the set of consumer options conditional on the aggregate reports of consumer types it receives previous mechanisms that exploit knowledge of the true type distribution often have multiple equilibria or use noncredible contracts off the equilibrium path when the monopolist can replace contracts after initial reports subject to the constraint that truthful consumers are not made worse off the outcome is essentially the same as when the monopolist has full information this holds whether or not the monopolist can make offers to consumers who reject all original contract offers when the monopolist must guarantee nonnegative surplus to all truthful consumers in all contingencies the equilibrium outcome has undistorted contracts but lower profits for the monopolist

telltale tails a new approach to estimating unique market information shares the trading of securities on multiple markets raises the question of each market s share in the discovery of the informationally efficient price we exploit salient distributional features of multivariate financial price processes to uniquely determine these contributions thereby resolving the main drawback of the widely used hasbrouck 1995 methodology which merely provides upper and lower bounds of a market s information share we show how tail dependence of price changes which may emerge as a result of differences in market design can be exploited to estimate unique information shares two empiricalapplications illustrate the practical use of the new methodology

credit swap valuation this review of the pricing of credit swaps a form of derivative security that can be viewed as default insurance on loans or bonds begins with a description of the credit swap contract turns to pricing by reference to spreads over the risk free rate of par floating rate bonds of the same quality and then considers model based pricing the role of asset swap spreads as a reference for pricing credit swaps is also considered

efficient spatial competition abstract game theoretic models of spatial competition usually assume that firms set prices after their choices of locations rather than make this assumption this paper uses the core to model the competition between the firms two conditions are shown to be sufficient for efficient spatial competition the first is that the firms location choices satisfy a no externalities condition the second is that the second stage game satisfy a separable value condition namely that the value gains from trade can be created on a buyer by buyer basis this approach yields two further benefits first efficient location can be stable in situations with arbitrary distributions of buyers arbitrary willingness to pay functions and completely general location spaces second efficiency in location games can be shown to be related to the second welfare theorem

the performance of forecast based monetary policy rules under model uncertainty we investigate the performance of forecast based monetary policy rules using five macroeconomic models that reflect a wide range of views on aggregate dynamics we identify the key characteristics of rules that are robust to model uncertainty such rules respond to the one year ahead inflation forecast and to the current output gap and incorporate a substantial degree of policy inertia in contrast rules with longer forecast horizons are less robust and are prone to generating indeterminacy in light of these results we identify a robust benchmark rule that performs very well in all five models over a wide range of policy preferences