limited liability and incentive contracting with ex ante action choices abstract this article examines a principal agent model of financial contracting in which a risk neutral entrepreneur agent makes an unobservable ex ante effort choice while employing the investment funds of a risk neutral investor principal the key innovation is that the investment contract is subject to statutory liability limits given these liability limits two settings are considered one in which the investor payoff function is also constrained to be monotonically nondecreasing in firm profit and another in which no such monotonic contract constraint is imposed in the former case a standard debt contract is shown to emerge and a first best effort choice is not achieved in the latter setting the optimum is characterized by a live or die payoff function and a first best effort level may or may not be realized

a statistical approach to economic forecasting a recently developed statistical model called bayesian vector autoregression has proven to be a useful tool for economic forecasting such a model today forecasts a strong resurgence of growth in the second half of 1985 and in 1986

macroeconomic forecasting using pooled international data it has long been recognized that national economies are economically interdependent see e g burns and mitchell 1946 for evidence of comovements of business activity in several countries and zarnowitz 1985 for a summary of recent evidence recognition of such interdependence raises the question can such interdependence be exploited econometrically to produce improved forecasts of countries macroeconomic variables such as rates of growth of output and so forth this is the problem that we address in this article using annual and quarterly data for a sample of european economic community eec countries and the united states

symmetrical information and credit rationing graphical demonstrations as this article shows the pro debtor u s bankruptcy code alone can cause credit rationing even without asymmetrical information in the market because the code entails substantial costs to lenders if borrowers file for bankruptcy in the absence of bankruptcy cost lenders are always justified in raising interest rates and clearing markets if the bankruptcy cost is nontrivial however lenders profits are concave in the relevant range of interest rates thus lenders cannot always clear the market by using higher rates the study reported here also found that the use of collateral in debt contracts can reduce rationing but that even 100 percent collateral does not eliminate all rationing possibilities a positive relationship was found between credit risk and the amount of pledged collateral which is not necessarily true with models based on asymmetrical information

bank lending policy credit scoring and the survival of loans to evaluate loan applicants banks increasingly use credit scoring models the objective of such models typically is to minimize default rates or the number of incorrectly classified loans thereby they fail to take into account that loans are multiperiod contracts for which reason it is important for banks not only to know if but also when a loan will default in this paper a bivariate tobit model with a variable censoring threshold and sample selection effects is estimated for 1 the decision to provide a loan or not and 2 the survival time of granted loans the model proves to be an effective tool to separate applicants with short and with long survival times the bank s loan provision process is shown to be inefficient loans are granted in a way that conflicts with both default risk minimization and survival time maximization there is thus no trade off between higher default risk and higher return in the lending policy

how good are standard debt contracts stochastic versus nonstochastic monitoring in a costly state verification environment the authors investigate ex ante efficient contracts in an environment in which implementation is costless in this environment standard debt contracts will typically not be optimal optimal contracts may involve defaults even in states in which the borrower is fully able to repay the authors then examine the welfare costs of arbitrarily restricting the set of feasible contracts to standard debt contracts when model parameters are calibrated to realistic values the welfare loss from exogenously imposing this restriction is extremely small thus if implementation costs are actually nontrivial as seems likely standard debt contracts will be very close to optimal copyright 1994 by university of chicago press

credit rationing and the demand for owner occupied housing abstract this study applies cross sectional data to test whether default risk induced credit constraints affect the demand for owner occupied housing credit constrained households are argued to exhibit different elasticities of demand for housing than less constrained households housing demand elasticities are then estimated separately for households obtaining va insured and non va loans the government guarantee on va loans insures lenders against default enabling lenders to apply easier nonprice terms of credit results indicate that observed demand elasticities differ significantly across va and conventional mortgage holders that marginal changes in credit constraints affect housing demand and that fha financing mitigates the effect of mortgage constraints

costly monitoring financial intermediation and equilibrium credit rationing abstract this paper establishes a link between equilibrium credit rationing and financial intermediation in a model with asymmetrically informed lenders and borrowers costly monitoring and investment project indivisibilities intermediation is shown to dominate borrowing and lending between individuals and these financial intermediaries exhibit several of the important features of intermediaries as we know them equilibrium interest rates and the aggregate quantity of loans respond quite differently to changes in taste and technology parameters depending on whether or not there is rationing in equilibrium

effective use of survey information in estimating the evolution of expected inflation the evolution of the term structure of expected u s inflation is modeled using survey data to provide timely information on structural change not contained in lagged inflation data to capture shifts in subjective perceptions the model is adaptive to long horizon survey expectations however even short horizon survey expectations inform shifting endpoint estimates that capture the lag between inflation and the perceived inflation target which anchors inflation expectations results show movements of the perceived target are an important source of inflation persistence and suggest historical u s monetary policy was not fully credible for much of the postwar sample

an empirical investigation of u s firms in reorganization the purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of chapter 11 from an empirical examination of thirty firms that have emerged from reorganization we find the recontracting framework of chapter 11 to be complex lengthy and costly violations of absolute priority in favor of stockholders are frequently encountered these deviations may result from the bargaining process of chapter 11 or from a recontracting process between creditors and stockholders which recognizes the ability of stockholder oriented management to preserve firm value an example of such recontracting addresses myers underinvestment problem an investigation of the effects of chapter 11 on the pricing of risky debt is also provided the purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of chapter

rent seeking bureaucracies and oversight in a simple growth model abstract following recent cross country empirical work research on public policy and growth has come to examine the impact of inefficient or corrupt bureaucracies most of this work has emphasized the interactions of bureaucracies with private markets by contrast this paper focuses on the relationship between rent seeking bureaucracies and their political authority we show that when oversight is relatively costly as in many developing economies the political authority exercises little monitoring of its agencies which reduces the effectiveness of productive government spending moreover when the technology used to provide public services is poor bureaus better succeed in requesting overly large budgets before triggering any monitoring both of these characteristics contribute to reducing the growth rate of already poor economies

imperfect information and the theory of government intervention in farm credit markets this paper describes some possible economic motivations for government intervention in farm credit markets these motivations are made possible by explicit departures from the perfect information and complete market assumptions that underlie both the neoclassical competitive paradigm and the fundamental theorems of welfare economics to be more precise the analysis focuses on three types of asymmetric information between farmers and prospective outside investors both of whom are assumed to be risk neutral arguably the three informational asymmetries examined here represent natural departures from perfect markets in that unlike the unencumbered neoclassical model each elicits farmers optimal use of debt contracts rather than equity instruments or other contractual forms to raise investment capital despite their consistency with observed contractual choices all three of the models analyzed below yield free market equilibria that diverge from first best perfect information outcomes given the inefficiency of these market equilibria the key question raised and discussed here is can government improve upon the derived competitive outcomes and if so how despite the enormity of the credit rationing literature only a few extant studies address this question in models that are consistent with debt contracts among them are demeza and webb 1987 1988 1989 and innes 1988 which focus on the third type of informational asymmetry considered below the other two information structures posited in this paper have been studied in several analyses of credit markets but with attention focused on positive attributes of the unfettered competitive equilibrium rather than on prospective implications for welfare enhancing government intervention in what follows th s literature is surveyed and for the first two information structures some new policy results a e presented a critical discussion of the paper s limitations concludes the article

personal bankruptcy and credit supply and demand this paper examines how personal bankruptcy and bankruptcy exemptions affect the supply and demand for credit while generous state level bankruptcy exemptions are probably viewed by most policy makers as benefiting less well off borrowers our results using data from the 1983 survey of consumer finances suggest that they increase the amount of credit held by high asset households and reduce the availability and amount of credit to low asset households conditioning on observable characteristics thus bankruptcy exemptions redistribute credit toward borrowers with high assets interest rates on automobile loans for low asset households also appear to be higher in high exemption states

asymmetric information in the credit market and discount rates for public investment abstract with asymmetric information in the credit market the optimal discount rate for public investment differs from the market interest rate this paper obtains the optimal discount rate for the two state case where returns on private projects can take only two values depending on the magnitudes of collateral costs screening through collateral requirements may or may not occur it is shown that the optimal discount rate is higher than the market interest rate in either case

a theory of corporate capital structure and investment this article uses a general equilibrium framework to explore the origins and limitations of financial intermediaries in the model investors have a generic lending technology that they can improve at a cost those who upgrade become intermediaries to exploit their advantage however conflicts with depositors will limit the banks market presence and they will only lend to moderately endowed firms while bondholders will finance cash rich corporations the article also analyzes the extent to which investors adopt the superior lending technique the nature of bank competition and how corporate and bank conditions affect interest rates and investment copyright 2004 oxford university press

collateral loan quality and bank risk abstract most commercial loans are made on a secured basis yet little is known about the relationship between collateral and credit risk several theoretical studies find that when borrowers have private information about risk the lowest risk borrowers tend to pledge collateral in contrast conventional wisdom holds that when risk is observable the highest risk borrowers tend to pledge collateral an additional issue is whether secured loans as opposed to secured borrowers tend to be safer or riskier than unsecured loans empirical evidence presented here strongly suggests that collateral is most often associated with riskier borrowers riskier loans and riskier banks

the availability doctrine abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model in which monetary disturbances have effects reminiscent of roosa s classic description of the availability doctrine the model is a marriage of the modern credit rationing literature and the recent sluggish cash flow models of monetary transmission both elements are crucial the credit rationing aspect leads to a focus upon the quantity or availability of credit however the rationing model in and of itself is a real model and there is no reason for fluctuations in the nominal quantity of fiat money to have any effect on the availability of real credit this is where the sluggish cash flow assumption enters into the analysis under this assumption changes in the nominal supply of fiat money do affect the real supply of credit because a subset of the economy absorbs a disproportionate share of the monetary injection

monetary policy bank leverage and financial stability abstract this paper shows that with limited liability banks lever up excessively to finance new loans lower monetary policy rates can worsen or reduce these incentives depending on the size of the shock when equity financing is ruled out when this constrained is relaxed but the bank faces costly dividend adjustment lower monetary policy rates always worsen risk taking incentives and the effect is persistent the reason is that costly dividend adjustment lowers the opportunity cost of lending in this model capital requirements are closer to the source of the distortion and thus work better than loan to value caps in reducing excessive risk taking

canadian monetary policy will the checklist approach ever get us to price stability the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the checklist approach that the bank of canada has followed in one way or another over the last two decades is likely to lead us to the stated objective of price stability the analysis of canadian monetary policy is performed through the estimation of a bayesian var model of a set of important canadian macroeconomic variables in their international context to estimate the model the authors borrowed form c sims 1989 but they also transposed his methodology to take into account canadian features the results suggest that the exchange rate has been high on the checklist of the bank of canada over the years and that rather the bank should concentrate its attention on broad monetary aggregates if it really wants to deliver price stability

atheoretical macroeconometrics a critique abstract the spurious nature of the restrictions used to identify many macroeconometric models has led some researchers to advocate a style of econometric inquiry that is less dependent on prior theoretical restrictions of the sort that were central to the approach of the cowles commission this development which we call atheoretical macroeconometrics is summarized and evaluated in the current paper it is contrasted with an updated version of the cowles commission approach we conclude that while some of the exercises of atheoretical macroeconometrics are valid those that have attracted the most attention and appear the most innovative exogeneity testing impulse response analysis and policy analysis using estimated vector autoregressions are based on incorrect analysis

credit rationing concessionary lending and debt maturity abstract a firm raises capital for a two period investment while creditors observe the project status midstream unobservable managerial perks may consume capital each period when the firm is unfortunate early on short term financing results in either concessionary lending or costly liquidation rolling over short term debt may be problematic because the high risk premium creditors demand when asset value is low relative to debt impares managerial motivation precisely when the incentive to defer perk consumption is weakest long term financing may reduce total agency costs be enabling lenders to charge higher initial premia in effect shifting loan repayments to states in which incentive constraints are non binding

macroeconomic adjustment under regime change from social contract to arab spring abstract against the backdrop of the arab spring protests we examine macroeconomic stabilization under regime shift we model this as a dynamic interaction between a government and a profit maximizing firm the former imposes the state of technology some value of rent extraction labor market rigidities and time preference the firm conditional on these factors and the optimally determined inflation rate sets labor demand given its extractive nature there is a continuous probability of a political regime shift characterized by a hazard function we compare state and non state contingent forms the model is able to rationalize the early growth and developmental gains of many arab economies and their subsequent reversal as well as the later stalling of economic reforms the model provides a novel analysis of the evolution of the arab economies the shifting time preferences of policy makers and their interaction with economic reforms

moral hazard under commercial and universal banking many claims have been made about the potential benefits and the potential costs of adopting a system of universal banlcing in the united states we evaluate these claims using a model where there is a moral hazard problem between banks and borrowers a moral hazard problem between banks and a deposit insurer and a costly state verification problem under conditions we describe allowing banks to take equity positions in firms strengthens their ability to extract surplus and exacerbates problems of moral hazard the incentives of universal banks to take equity positions will often be strongest when these problems are most severe for many decades commercial banks in the united states have been prohibited from making equity investments in the firms they serve rather they are restricted to providing them with loans in the form essentially of debt contracts this longstanding regulatory restriction1 results in distinctly different roles for bank lenders and equity investors and has had important implications for the entire financial sector the american system of commercial banking presents a sharp contrast with the banking systems of some other countries most notably germany in which banks are permitted to take equity positions under such universal banking arrangements banks can make equity investments as well as loans vote their equity shares and even hold seats on the boards of directors of nonfinancial firms in general they can be actively involved in all aspects of firm decision malqing in germany the control rights the authors have benefitted from the helpful comments of doug diamond joe haubrich ross levine stan longhofer joao santos and an anonymous referee the views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the federal reserve bank of minneapolis or the federal reserve system 1 the key legislation which constrains u s banks equity investments is the glass steagall act of 1933 however a number of other laws also pertain to this issue particularly the bank holding company act of 1956 and its 1970 amendments incidentally there are some important exceptions to the equity investment prohibition in default situations banks are perrnitted to restructure loans into equity positions with the requirement of divestiture after a few years see james 1993 also bank holding companies are permitted to form separately capitalized venture capital subsidiaries for the expressed purpose of investing in start up enterprises john h boyd is a professor of finance in the carlson school of management at the university of minnesota and an adjunct consultant with the federal reserve bank of minneapolis chun chang is an associate professor of finance in the carlson school of management at the university of minnesota bruce d smith is a professor of economics at the university of texas ataustin

forecasting accuracy of alternative techniques a comparison of u s macroeconomic forecasts 1986 forecasting accuracy of alternative techniques a comparison of u s macroeconomic forecasts journal of business economic statistics vol 4 no 1 pp 5 15

public private entanglement entrepreneurship in lebanon s hybrid political order while the literature is clear that political influence and clientelism characterises the investment decisions of entrepreneurs and the performance of their firms when governance is weak it is less understood how governance systems and entrepreneurs interact particularly when governance is of a hybrid nature we address this issue in this paper by studying how entrepreneurs obtain access to electricity in lebanon showing that the hybrid political order imposes a high cost on electricity we furthermore find that a hybrid political order channels entrepreneurial talent into lobbying and bribery the key constraint that emerges from the hybrid political order in this case is the corrupt organisation of governance of the electricity sector this results in higher prices because bribes for contracts have to be earned back in entrenchment of oligopolies because contracts often come with political protection

capital requirements monetary policy and aggregate bank lending theory and empirical evidence capital requirements linked solely to credit risk are shown to increase equilibrium credit rationing and lower aggregate lending the model predicts that the bank s decision to lend will cause an abnormal runup in the borrower s stock price and that this reaction will be greater the more capital constrained the bank i provide empirical support for this prediction the model explains the recent inability of the federal reserve to stimulate bank lending by increasing the money supply i show that increasing the money supply can either raise or lower lending when capital requirements are linked only to credit risk the motivation of this article is first to examine the impact of risk based capital requirements namely those that link mandatory capital to asset ratios for banks to their loans on aggregate bank lending these requirements called the basle capital rules or bis guidelines went into effect in march 1989 for banks in the leading industrialized nations these rules initially required banks to maintain capital equal to 7 25 percent of business and most consumer loans with the requirement increasing to 8 percent by the end of 1992 secondly i wish to understand the link between monetary policy and aggregate bank credit in the presence of risk based capital requirements my curiosity is sparked in part by two recent phenomena one is the experience of the u s economy which displayed sluggish growth during 1989 93 despite a monetary policy that attempted to spur bank lending and economic activity and the other is the striking decline in loans relative to security holdings mostly government bonds in the asset portfolios of u s

credit rationing race and the mortgage market abstract this study applies microdata from the 1983 survey of consumer finances to evaluate the effects of borrower race and default risk in mortgage lending the empirical analysis is based on a probit model of whether borrowers obtain fha or conventional mortgages the former are fully insured and are characterized by easier downpayment constraints but are typically more expensive hence households borrowing through the fha will tend to be credit constrained in the conventional market results of the analysis indicate that variables which proxy lender concerns about default risk and cost have an important effect on the type of loan borrowers obtain empirical estimates also suggest that minority households are significantly less likely to obtain conventional financing than whites even after controlling for various proxies of default risk these results suggest that race effects in mortgage lending may persist for reasons unrelated to borrower default risk

the nature of credit market failure abstract hidden knowledge gives rise to over lending if as evidence suggests the returns distributions preferred by borrowers are also favoured by lenders even the stiglitz weiss model yields over lending when entrepreneurs are sufficiently risk averse

the long term effects of africa s slave trades can part of africa s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades to explore this question i use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during africa s slave trades i find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance to better understand if the relationship is causal i examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades and use instrumental variables together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development

financial market frictions monetary policy and capital accumulation in a small open economy abstract we consider a small open economy with a costly state verification problem and binding reserve requirements the presence of these frictions leads to the existence of two steady states with credit rationing an increase in the money growth rate the world interest rate or reserve requirements raises lowers gdp in the high low activity steady state however sufficiently large increases in money growth or the world interest rate can transform the high activity steady state from a sink to a source the model also delivers prescriptions for restoring the stability of this steady state in such an eventuality journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e5 f4

the effect of the bankruptcy reform act of 1978 on small business loan pricing abstract the bankruptcy reform act of 1978 contains several provisions that can affect the cost of producing loans for financial intermediaries in a competitive lending market the additional monitoring and expected foreclosure costs imposed by the change in the bankruptcy law should be passed on to the borrower using survey data from a sample of small business loans from commercial banks evidence is presented that the enactment of the new law resulted in higher contract rates of interest

asymmetric valuations and the role of collateral in loan agreements loan contracts with provision for collateral are of two general types in one the collateral may be an existing asset of the borrowing firm which is pledged to a lender in the event of default in this case collateral does not increase the assets that the borrower would lose if there is default since all the borrower s assets are attachable therefore the expected marginal cost to the borrower of providing an additional unit of collateral includes principally transactions costs associated with the collateral l this describes the usual type of commercial loan arrangement with the collateral being either equipment real estate accounts receivable or inventories in the other type of loan contract the collateral is an additional asset that is given up by the borrower if there is default that is in addition to the usual assets that are available to its lenders the borrower assigns as collateral to a creditor an asset that would normally not be legally attachable this arrangement is more common in small business loans that are secured by a personal asset e g a house of the entrepreneur likewise debt issued by a legally separate subsidiary may be secured by an asset of the parent firrn in these cases the expected marginal cost to the borrower the owner manager of the small firm or the parent corporation in the latter example of providing an additional unit of collateral

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

information as a substitute for inventories abstract in recent years the ratio of inventories to sales in north american manufacturing has fallen without the offsetting increases in unfilled orders or price variation that are predicted by some theoretical models the explanation offered here is that in the face of falling relative costs of communications firms will substitute information for inventories thereby allowing their production systems to absorb a greater part of demand shocks the implicit hypothesis that the demands for communications and inventories are therefore determined simultaneously is tested with data on canadian inventories and on telecommunications between canada and europe and is not rejected

the beliefs of borrowers and lenders and investment decisions abstract this paper examines the role of beliefs in the determination of equilibrium in a standard model of credit markets and investment project choice with asymmetric information it is shown that with ex ante asymmetric information the beliefs of entrepreneurs are important for the equilibrium level of aggregate investment and with ex post asymmetric information the beliefs of creditors are important for the types of projects selected by entrepreneurs

financial crises and recapitalizations we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with financial frictions on both financial intermediaries and goods producing firms since financial intermediaries are highly leveraged we show that the welfare gains from their recapitalization in response to large but rare net worth losses are as large as those from eliminating typical business cycle fluctuations we also find that these gains are increasing in the size of the net worth loss are larger when recapitalization funds are raised from the household rather than the real sector and can be larger when lower idiosyncratic risk leads to higher leverage

political connections and tariff evasion evidence from tunisia are politically connected firms more likely to evade taxes this paper presents evidence suggesting firms owned by president ben ali and his family were more prone to evade import tariffs during ben ali s reign evasion gaps defined as the difference between the value of exports to tunisia reported by partner countries and the value of imports reported at tunisian customs were correlated with the import share of connected firms this association was especially strong for goods subject to high tariffs and driven by underreporting of unit prices which diminished after the revolution consistent with these product level patterns unit prices reported by connected firms were lower than those reported by other firms and declined faster with tariffs than those of other firms moreover privatization to the ben ali family was associated with a reduction in reported unit prices whereas privatization per se was not

development growth and policy reform in the middle east and north africa since 1950 prior to 1950 the countries of the middle east exhibited some of the lowest levels of socioeconomic development in the world for many of these countries not even approximate economic statistics are available for the first half of the twentieth century but the state of underdevelopment can be illustrated by looking at egypt the most modernized and populous country in the arab world at the time egyptian per capita income stagnated in the first half of the twentieth century the country lacked modern industries and relied largely on the cotton sector for export and government revenues but agricultural productivity had been on a steady decline since the end of the nineteenth century owen and pamuk 1998 prior to land reforms in 1952 three quarters of peasants in this agrarian country owned less than an acre or no land at all the neglect of human services allowed periodic epidemics and malnutrition to keep mortality rates high until the late 1940s education levels were well below other developing regions with adult illiteracy estimated at 85 percent in 1939 and only 23 percent of children ages 5 19 enrolled in school but in the 1960s and 1970s egypt and other countries of the middle east experienced robust economic growth based largely on high levels of investment in physical capital that facilitated substantial increases in per capita income it might seem obvious that the higher oil prices of the 1970s should have sustained the growth cycle in this oil exporting region but gdp growth per worker in the middle east decelerated in that decade and factor productivity growth actually turned negative in the 1980s and 1990s gdp growth per worker in the region was less than 1 percent per year and modest gains in human capital were largely offset by

costly monitoring loan contracts and equilibrium credit rationing this paper develops a model with asymmetrically informed agents and costly monitoring of loan contracts where an equilibrium can exhibit credit rationing borrowers are identical ex ante but some receive loans and others do not in contrast to existing credit rationing theories rationing does not occur here due to inflexible prices adverse selection or moral hazard optimizing behaviour produces a standard debt contract in equilibrium the aggregate quantity of loans and equilibrium interest rates respond differently depending on whether there is rationing in equilibrium

collateral and rationing sorting equilibria in monopolistic and competitive credit markets the authors examine how market structure affects credit allocation under universal risk neutrality and asymmetric information about borrowers they consider both monopolistic and perf ectly competitive banks and examine the role of collateral in each ca se when a bank is a monopolist on the loan side they find collatera l is never used and asymmetric information results in reduced bank le nding under perfect competition collateral has a useful sorting rol e moreover rationing is possible even with collateral availability and perfectly elastic deposit supply in this setting the authors sh ow co signers are valuable social welfare properties of the monopoly and competitive equilibria are also compared copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

are daily financial data useful for forecasting gdp evidence from mexico this article evaluates the use of financial data sampled at high frequencies to improve short term forecasts of quarterly gdp for mexico the model uses both quarterly and daily sampling frequencies while remaining parsimonious in particular the mixed data sampling midas regression model is employed to deal with the multi frequency problem to preserve parsimony factor analysis and forecast combination techniques are used to summarize the information contained in a data set containing 392 daily financial series our findings suggest that the midas model incorporating daily financial data leads to improvements in quarterly forecasts of gdp growth over traditional models that either rely only on quarterly macroeconomic data or average daily frequency data the evidence suggests that this methodology improves the forecasts for the mexican gdp notwithstanding its higher volatility relative to that of developed countries furthermore we explore the ability of the midas model to provide forecast updates for gdp growth nowcasting

financial structure and aggregate economic activity an overview this paper surveys literature that explores the possible links between the financial system and aggregate economic behavior the survey is in two parts the first reviews the traditional work and the second discusses new research copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

liquidity provision interest rates and unemployment abstract the effective liquidity supply of the economy the weighted sum of all assets that serve as media of exchange matters for interest rates and unemployment we formalize this idea by adding an over the counter market with collateralized trades to the mortensen pissarides model an increase in public liquidity through a higher supply of real government bonds raises the real interest rate crowding out private liquidity and increasing unemployment if unemployment is inefficiently high keeping liquidity scarce can be socially optimal a liquidity crisis affecting the acceptability of private assets as collateral widens the rate of return difference between private and public liquidity also increasing unemployment

security pricing and deviations from the absolute priority rule in bankruptcy proceedings claims ultimately awarded to shareholders of firms in reorganization were examined for a sample of 30 filings under the 1978 bankruptcy reform act we measured the amount paid to shareholders in excess of that which they would have received under the absolute priority rule and found that this amount represents on average 7 6 of the total awarded to all claimants evidence is also reported that common share values reflect a significant proportion of value ultimately received in violation of absolute priority suggesting that deviations from the rule were expected by the equity markets the absolute priority rule hereafter apr states that a bankrupt firm s value is to be distributed to suppliers of capital such that senior creditors are fully satisfied before any distributions are made to junior creditors and junior creditors are paid in full before common shareholders bankruptcy reorganization proceedings however are leaving shareholders and junior creditors with valuable assets even when senior claimants receive only partial settlements as barrett and sullivan 1988 noted traditionally shareholders have been last in line their claims on a troubled company s assets have had the lowest priority and their impact on the course of bankruptcy code proceedings generally has been next to nil but lately the balance of power has been shifting warner 1977 provided one of the early discussions of the implications of deviations from the apr baldwin and mason 1983 pp 510 511 examined the resolution of claims in the massey ferguson reorganization and provided no support for the hypothesis that the market believes absolute priority rules will be enforced if the firm defaults on its financial obligations franks and torous 1989 analyzed a sample of bankruptcies that occurred during the period 1970 through 1984 and found that 21 of 27 sample cases exhibited departures from the apr more recently weiss 1990 examined 37 firms that filed for bankruptcy between 1980 and 1986 and reported that 27 of the cases involved apr violations

the macroeconomic implications of financial deregulation abstract this paper explores the possible macroeconomic consequences of financial deregulation in an institutional environment where deregulation raises risks in banking the central bank is supposed to maximize an objective function in which the probability of bank failure is an argument it is then shown that the usual tradeoffs between policy objectives imply that financial deregulation will lead to more interest rate smoothing than would otherwise take place and further that because of restricted entry into banking deregulation will call for some inflation the transition toward deregulation raises special problems which are likely to require a more gradual approach toward the stationary equilibrium

local versus international crises and bank stability does bank foreign expansion make a difference abstractwe investigate the impact of global and local crises on bank stability in the mena region and examine the effect of owning bank subsidiaries in other countries we consider banks that experienced both types of crises during our sample period our findings highlight a negative impact of the global financial crisis of 2007 2008 on bank stability but on the whole no negative impact of the local crisis a deeper investigation shows that owning bank subsidiaries outside the home country is a source of increased fragility during normal times yet a source of higher stability during the local crisis but not during the international crisis moreover owning foreign subsidiaries in one or two world regions is insufficient to neutralize both types of crises while being present in three or more regions is more stabilizing during a local crisis but also more destabilizing during an international crisis our findings contribute to the literature examining bank stability and have several policy implications

moneylenders and bankers price increasing subsidies in a monopolistically competitive market abstract in many areas of the world a significant part of the cost of obtaining a good or service is the cost of enforcing the contracts entailed in its provision we present models of markets with endogenous enforcement costs motivated by studies of rural credit markets we show that subsidies may have perverse effects under monopolistic competition increasing prices or inducing exit higher prices interest rates result from the loss of scale economies or from negative externalities among suppliers the models are consistent with the puzzling evidence that infusions of government subsidized formal credit have not improved the terms offered by moneylenders

optimal contracts under costly state falsification we examine an exchange economy with two agents one risk neutral with a certain endowment and a second risk averse with a random endowment the realization of the endowment is public but can be falsified by the second agent at a cost for a broad class of falsification cost functions the optimal no falsification contract is noncontingent on a left hand interval and strictly increasing with a slope strictly less than one on a right hand interval under a mild further restriction optimal no falsification contracts are in addition piece wise linear optimal contracts may in general require falsifying the state but for a set of the highest endowment realizations there is no falsification we find simple conditions under which the optimal contract is a no falsification contract the model has applications that include financial insurance and employment contracts and tax policy

should courts enforce credit contracts strictly the intimate linkages between law and nance are currently the centre of wide rangingempirical investigations this article presents a simple banking model with informationasymmetries concerning borrowers entrepreneurial talent it is shown that improvements inthe enforcement of contract by courts reduce agency problems but can also reduce the bank sincentive to screen borrowers adequately thus worsening credit allocation a stricterenforcement of credit contracts therefore may be socially harmful even if costlessly achieved improvements in accounting standards however always make bank screening of borrowers lesscostly and improve credit allocation and social welfare

investment and government intervention in credit markets when there is asymmetric information abstract this paper models private firm investment choices and government credit policy in an entrepreneurial firm financial market wherein firm owners have better information about the quality of their return distributions than do external financiers the analysis shows that despite the absence of an informational advantage the government can often increase social welfare by offering subsidized debt contracts however the paper also finds that some common credit subsidy policies including loan guarantees and government backing of targeted lending institutions yield constrained inefficient outcomes in general

the economics of the arab spring summary a singular failure of the arab world is the absence of a private sector that is independent competitive and integrated with global markets this paper argues that private sector development is both a political and regional challenge in so far as the private sector generates incomes that are independent of the rent streams controlled by the state it can pose a direct political challenge it is also a regional challenge since fragmented markets deny scale economies to firms and entrench the power of insiders we argue that overcoming regional economic barriers constitutes the single most important collective action problem facing the region since the fall of ottoman empire

european monetary integration and the demand for money abstract this paper presents a cash in advance model of the demand for money money demand depends on the transaction services of money as well as on the risk and return properties of bonds in different currencies the paper shows how the money demand function changes with the adoption of fixed exchange rates and monetary union respectively the model is then calibrated for a monetary union between france and germany as well as between the netherlands and germany the numerical results indicate substantial shifts in the behavior of the demand for money in response to monetary integration

monetary policy in a dollarized economy where balance sheets matter abstract does the dollarization of liabilites and the resulting balance sheet vulnerability prevent monetary policy from serving its conventional countercyclical role we study this question in a model of a small open economy in which domestic firms face an imperfect capital market with risk premia depending on net worth as in bernanke and gertler am econ rev 79 1989 14 in spite of the financial fragility channels present in the model the conventional wisdom still holds under a floating exchange rate countercyclical monetary policy does help cushion the impact of foreign real shocks

capital accumulation in a politically unstable region we investigate the different channels by which political instability impacts capital accumulation using a unique data of firms from the middle east and north africa mena a region that has long suffered from political unrest and a novel empirical method we find that political stability shapes firm investment mainly via its influence on credit conditions political instability tightens borrowing constraints and impedes capital accumulation thereby adversely affecting economic growth

loan performance and race r carter hill recent studies find evidence of racial discrimination in mortgage markets although these studies explore loan approval rates for whites versus minorities they do not specifically consider loan performance either in the form of default rates or loan administration costs this study considers discrimination in the used car credit market where the collateral is not subject to location externalities collateral value and quality do not vary as much as in real estate and the loan terms are shorter we find administration costs and default rates are higher for minorities than for whites controlling for age income home ownership wealth occupation loan terms and geographic location jel k2 i introduction credit discrimination occurs whenever minorities are denied credit on the basis of race or are offered loans at terms different than the terms offered similarly situated whites 1 economists identify two types of discrimination preference taste based discrimination and information statistical based discrimination 2 the legal definition of discrimination makes no such distinction in their statistical studies munnell brown mceneaney and tootell 1996 carr and megbolugbe 1994 and gabriel and rosenthal 1991 find evidence of discrimination whereas most economic theorists such as becker 1993 and commentators such as brimelow 1993 and brimelow and spencer 1993 argue competition will greatly reduce if not eliminate discrimination in section iii we demonstrate why under regulation statistical discrimination may increase with increasing competition this anomalous result occurs because the legal definition does not distinguish between the two types of discrimination some economists implicitly assume credit markets are unregulated when considering the effect of competition on discrimination antidiscrimination regulation changes the effect of competition in unregulated markets taste based discrimination is unprofitable and increasing competition will reduce this form of discrimination if the industry s employees or white borrowers have a taste for discrimination competition will not necessarily eliminate taste based discrimination when regulation is binding and the economic foundation for statistical discrimination exists discrimination is profitable and increasing competition may increase discrimination the effect of regulation and competition on discrimination depends critically on the information basis for discrimination the relationship between loan performance and race therefore the appropriate empirical question is does a statistical basis for discrimination exist this question cannot be answered by loan approval studies rather it must be addressed by evaluating how loans perform after they are approved further the appropriate public policy issue is should society regulate statistical discrimination this article is an empirical inquiry into the relationship between race and loan performance we measure loan performance by estimating the same marginal default rates that lenders use to score credit applications and by the variables that have the most impact on loan administration costs we find that race matters regrettably in the fashion suggested by stereotypes in general minorities have higher default rates and contribute to higher administration costs in other words the foundation for statistical discrimination appears to exist section ii contains a review of the extant literature a theoretical model of credit scoring with both taste and statistical discrimination is contained in section iii the data are discussed in section iv and the empirical models are presented in section v ii literature as in arrow 1973 and becker 1957 an individual is said to have a preference or taste for discrimination if he is willing to pay a price or forgo income in order to practice discrimination

the growth effects of property rights the role of finance summary using a variety of statistical approaches we show that the relationship between property rights and growth is nonlinear stronger enforcement of property rights raises growth up to a point before growth begins to decline we provide a simple theoretical rationale for this conclusion using a model with informational asymmetries in the financial sector stronger property rights have two opposing effects on the one hand it increases capital formation and growth on the other hand it encourages bad borrowing practices thus there exists an optimal level of property rights which maximizes growth however as financial markets mature the negative effects associated with stronger property rights become weaker

on the possibility of credit rationing in the stiglitz weiss model contrary to what is consistently assumed in the literature the return function cannot be hump shaped in the stiglitz weiss 1981 model this has important consequences for the possible occurrence of credit rationing and redlining with a single class of borrowers banks offer credit in two stages demand possibly exceeds supply in stage one but not in stage two with several observationally distinguishable borrower classes the firms in a borrower class are redlined only under circumstances which imply that they would not get credit in a perfect capital market either die rendite funktion kann im stiglitz weiss 1981 modell nicht so wie das in der literatur durchgangig angenommen wird hugelformig sein das hat wichtige implikationen fur die moglichkeit von kreditrationierung einerseits und fur die moglichkeit des ausschlusses ganzer kreditnehmergruppen vom kapitalmarkt andererseits mit nur einer klasse von kreditnehmern erfolgt die kreditvergabe in zwei stufen wahrend auf der ersten stufe eine ubernachfrage vorliegen kann herrscht auf der zweiten stufe marktraumung bei mehreren unterscheidbaren kreditnehmerklassen wird eine klasse nur unter den bedingungen vom kreditmarkt ausgeschlossen bei deren vorliegen sie auch in einem vollkommenen kreditmarkt keinen kredit erhalten wurde

deposit insurance a reconsideration abstract this paper undertakes a simple general equilibrium analysis of the consequences of deposit insurance programs the way in which they are priced and the way in which they fund revenue shortfalls in our economy the central issue in analyzing deposit insurance is how the government will make up any fdic losses deposit insurance premia matter only in so far as they affect the level of implied fdic revenue shortfalls moreover local variations in the magnitude of fdic losses will generically be irrelevant for the determination of any equilibrium quantities that affect agent welfare however large enough changes in these losses can matter there is no presumption that keeping these shortfalls low is a good idea finally we show that multiple pareto ranked equilibria can be observed the potential for multiplicity of equilibria may depend on components of fdic policy our analysis provides counterexamples to the following propositions 1 actuarially fair pricing of deposit insurance is always desirable 2 implicit fdic subsidization of banks through deposit insurance is always undesirable 3 large fdic losses are necessarily symptomatic of a poorly designed deposit insurance system 4 risk based deposit insurance premia can easily be used to reduce moral hazard problems associated with deposit insurance provision

forecasting exchange rate for the australian dollar via a vis the us dollar using multivariate time series models the purpose of the paper is to forecast exchange rates by using restricted and unresticted vector autoregressive var models also introduced is an econometric model for the purpose of comparison a comparison of forecast stastistics shows that the restricted model bvar has better forecasting ability compared with the unrestricted var model however the econometric model outperforms both the study also indicates that the exchange rate relative price and three month forward rate are cointegrated thus an error correction model also is considered for the structural one and the forecasting performance improved further for this model

the persistence and change of institutions in the americas though many empirical and theoretical approaches to comparative development assume that institutions persist for long periods of time specific institutions vary a lot over periods as long as a century therefore a convincing theory of institutional persistence must explain how persistence of institutional equilibria and accompanying incentive environment is consistent with changes in specific institutions in this paper we propose a simple explanation of how economic institutions may persist even when political institutions change and illustrate it with the economic history of the u s south and some examples from latin american history

capital accumulation under different financial agreements abstract this paper develops a simple overlapping generations model where agents income is given both by a stochastic endowment and by the profits generated by a production activity the purpose is to analyze the consequences of different forms of financial agreements on capital accumulation in this model pareto optimality requires that the capital stock is a deterministic function of the previous level of capital agents can eliminate any randomness in the capital accumulation process when contingent claims markets are available when standard loan contracts prevail because of asymmetric information the economy incurs an efficiency loss due to capital stock fluctuations the expected level of capital under this last regime is always smaller than the one achieved when markets for contingent claims exist

some evidence on the empirical significance of credit rationing this paper examines the credit rationing debate using detailed contract information on over one million commercial bank loans from 1977 to 1988 while commercial loan rates are sticky consistent with rationing this stickiness varies with loan contract terms in ways that are not predicted by equilibrium credit rationing theory in addition the proportion of new loans issued under commitment does not increase significantly when credit markets are tight despite the fact that borrowers without commitments can be rationed whereas commitment borrowers are contractually insulated from rationing overall the data suggest that equilibrium rationing is not a significant macroeconomic phenomenon

credit and equity rationing in markets with adverse selection previous theories of financial market rationing focussed on a single market either the credit or the equity market an interesting question is whether credit and equity rationing are mutually compatible and how they interact we consider a model with two dimensional asymmetric information where entrepreneurs have private information about both the expected returns and the risk of their projects we show that credit and equity rationing may occur individually or simultaneously moreover competition between the two markets may generate the adverse selection that leads to rationing outcomes

equilibrium subprime lending this paper develops an equilibrium model of a subprime mortgage market our goal is to offer a benchmark with which the recent subprime boom and bust can be compared the model is tractable and delivers plausible orders of magnitude for borrowing capacities as well as default and trading intensities we offer simple explanations for several phenomena in the subprime market such as the prevalence of teaser rates and the clustering of defaults in our model both nondiversifiable and diversifiable income risks reduce debt capacities thus debt capacities need not be higher when a larger fraction of income risk is diversifiable

public private sector wage gap by gender in egypt evidence from quantile regression on panel data 1998 2018 abstract this paper estimates the public formal private wage gap in egypt using egypt labor market panel survey for the 20 year period of 1998 2018 for men and women separately we estimate the public formal private sector wage gap with wage equations including a public sector indicator both at the mean and at different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution using the panel feature of the data we also address the endogenous employment and the sector of employment selection issue and find a persistent public wage penalty for the males and public wage premium for the females except at the top even after controlling for the observable and the time invariant unobservable characteristics we further examine the public wage gap over time and in different sub samples by potential experience skill levels and regions generally the results are consistent with a decrease in the public wage gap for both men and women over the period considered we further provide evidence on the quality of workers we find that the public sector fails to attract better quality men throughout the conditional wage distribution while it manages to attract better quality women in the lower parts of the conditional wage distribution but not at the top all on the basis of time invariant unobservable attributes these results indicate concern for the efficient provision of public services