did bank distress stifle innovation during the great depression we find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level quality and trajectory of firm level innovation during the great depression particularly for r d firms operating in capital intensive industries however we also show that because a sufficient number of r d intensive firms were located in counties with lower levels of bank distress or were operating in less capital intensive industries the negative effects were mitigated in aggregate although depression era bank distress was associated with the stifling of innovation our results also help to explain why technological development was still robust following one of the largest shocks in the history of the u s banking system

global factors and emerging market spreads this paper shows that a large fraction of the variability of emerging market bond spreads is explained by the evolution of global factors such as risk appetite as reflected in the spread of high yield corporate bonds in developed markets global liquidity measured by the international interest rates and contagion from systemic events like the russian default this link has remained relatively stable over the history of the emerging market class is robust to the inclusion of country specific factors and helps provide accurate long run predictions overall the results highlight the critical role played by exogenous factors in the evolution of the borrowing cost faced by emerging economies

bank runs and institutions the perils of intervention we study ex post efficient policy responses to a run on the banking system and the ex ante incentives these responses create we show that the efficient response to a run is typically not to freeze all remaining deposits since doing so imposes heavy costs on some individuals instead once a run is underway benevolent government institutions would allow additional deposit withdrawals placing further strain on the banking system when depositors anticipate these extra withdrawals their incentive to participate in the run increases in fact ex post efficient interventions can generate the conditions necessary for a self fulfilling run to occur jel g21 g8

too many to fail evidence of regulatory forbearance when the banking sector is weak this paper studies bank failures in 21 emerging market countries in the 1990s by using a competing risk hazard model for bank survival we show that a government is less likely to take over or close a failing bank if the banking system is weak this too many to fail effect is robust to controlling for macroeconomic factors financial crises the too big to fail effect domestic financial development and concerns due to systemic risk and information spillovers the paper also shows that the too many to fail effect is stronger for larger banks and when there is a large government budget deficit

why do bank runs look like panic a new explanation this paper demonstrates that even if depositors are fully rational and always choose the pareto dominant equilibrium when there are multiple equilibria a bank run may still occur when depositors expectations on the bank s fundamentals do not change more specifically a bank run may occur when depositors learn that noisy bank specific information will be revealed or when they learn that precise bank specific information will not be revealed the results in this paper are consistent with the empirical evidence about bank runs it also implies that suspension of convertibility can improve the efficiency of bank runs

sovereign debt as a contingent claim a quantitative approach abstract we construct a dynamic equilibrium model with contingent service and adverse selection to quantitatively study sovereign debt in the model benefits of defaulting are tempered by higher future interest rates for a wide set of parameters the only equilibrium is one in which the sovereign defaults in all states additional output losses however sustain equilibria that resemble the data we show that due to the adverse selection problem some countries choose to delay default to reduce loss of reputation moreover although equilibria with no default imply greater welfare levels they are not sustainable in highly indebted and volatile countries

news sovereign debt maturity and default risk abstract leading into a debt crisis interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes an empirical var estimation shows that a news shock has a larger contemporaneous impact on sovereign credit spreads than a comparable shock to labor productivity a quantitative model of news and sovereign debt default with endogenous maturity choice generates impulse responses and a variance decomposition similar to the empirical var estimates the dynamics of the economy after a bad news shock share some features of a productivity shock and some features of sudden stop events however unlike during sudden stop episodes long term debt does not shield the country from bad news shocks and it may even exacerbate default risk finally an increase in the precision of news allows the government to improve its debt maturity management especially during periods of high stress in credit markets and thus face lower yield spreads while increasing the amount of debt

why does household investment lead business investment over the business cycle household investment leads nonresidential business fixed investment over the u s business cycle because real business cycle theory has not been able to account for this observation it represents a potent challenge to the view that transitory productivity disturbances are the main source of aggregate fluctuations this paper reconciles rbc theory with the investment dynamics by extending the traditional home production model to make household capital complementary to business capital and labor in market production empirical evidence suggesting that household capital is a complementary input in market production is also presented

the behavior of the currency deposit ratio during the great depression comment in the coefficient of assets from 1 14 or 1 22 to 0 66 is not entirely due to economies of scale or a change in the mix of activities our results agree with revell 1980 in identifying the source of efficiency improvement as productivity gains proper second the sample group uses its offices more intensively than do the top 150 in either 1967 or 1979 this sample group has 14 29 employees per office versus 9 81 in 1967 and 7 69 in 1979 for the top 150 banks finally it is noteworthy that the smaller banks used fewer branches and employees relative to their assets than did the 1979 top 150 this is consistent with some recent evidence in tschoegl 1982 suggesting the possible existence of diseconomies of scale it is also consistent with the findings of benston et al 1982 for a sample of united states banks that where possible the banks expanded output by opening more offices as well as through output growth in each office and that this results in operating cost scale diseconomies

not just the great contraction friedman and schwartz s a monetary history of the united states 1867 to 1960 milton friedman and anna j schwartz published a monetary history of the united states 1867 to 1960 with princeton university press in 1963 to critical acclaim since then the book s reputation has grown and it clearly has become one of the most influential volumes in economics in the twentieth century in this paper we document the extraordinary impact of a monetary history and argue that the key to this success was the use of the narrative approach to the problem of identifying the effects of monetary policy on economic activity

a real options approach to bankruptcy costs evidence from failed commercial banks during the 1990s literature identifies three main aspects of liquidation costs firm size asset specificity and industry concentration this paper unifies the theory behind these aspects of bankruptcy costs by treating them as components of a broader option valuation problem faced by the liquidating trustee testing the hypothesized asset price relationships on fdic failed bank liquidation data yields the appropriate results furthermore it appears that liquidation time alone can be used as an effective second order proxy for asset value growth where market value estimates are unavailable

the case for gdp indexed bonds gds indexed bonds this paper seeks to revive the case for countries to insure against economic growth slowdowns by issuing bonds indexed to the rate of growth of gdp we show that gdp indexed bonds could provide substantial benefits in reducing the likelihood of default crises and allowing countries to avoid pro cyclical fiscal policies we simulate the effects of gdp indexed bonds under different assumptions about fiscal policy reaction functions and their output effects and find that they could substantially reduce the likelihood of debt gdp paths becoming explosive the insurance premium would likely be small because cross country comovement of gdp growth rates is low and cross country gdp growth risk is thus largely diversifiable for an investor holding a portfolio of gdp indexed bonds potential obstacles to the emergence of a market for these bonds include the verifiability of gdp data the trade off between insurance and moral hazard and the need for liquidity theory and past experience suggest that financial innovation often requires official intervention and its timing and form are difficult to predict we discuss institutional fixes and suggest an approach for attempting to start up a market eduardo borensztein and paolo mauro

discretionary monetary and fiscal policy with endogenous sovereign risk abstract how does the presence of sovereign risk affect the conduct of public policy to answer this question this paper studies optimal monetary and fiscal policy without commitment for a model economy with nominal public debt and strategic sovereign default compared to an economy without the possibility of default economies with sovereign risk experience more volatile interest rates which impedes the government s ability to smooth tax rates across states risk of default also limits public debt accumulation reducing the government s incentive to use surprise inflation on average when calibrated to the united states the model predicts that a counterfactual increase in the average annual default probability from 0 to 1 lowers average inflation by 33 raises the standard deviation of inflation by 18 and increases the standard deviation of the labor income tax by 73 the transmission of exogenous shocks to real aggregate quantities is however almost unaffected by the possibility of default for example the presence of sovereign risk would increase the standard deviation of log real gdp by less than 1 in the experiment above similarly the welfare consequences of sovereign risk are found to be of negligible size as well

debt dilution and sovereign default risk we measure the effects of debt dilution on sovereign default risk and study debt covenants that could mitigate these effects we calibrate a baseline model with endogenous debt duration and default risk in which debt can be diluted using data from spain we find that debt dilution accounts for 78 percent of the default risk in the baseline economy and that eliminating dilution increases the optimal duration of sovereign debt by almost 2 years eliminating dilution also increases consumption volatility but still produces welfare gains the debt covenants we study could help enforcing fiscal rules

fundamentals panics and bank distress during the depression we assemble bank level and other data for fed member banks to model determinants of bank failure fundamentals explain bank failure risk well the first two friedman schwartz crises are not associated with positive unexplained residual failure risk or increased importance of bank illiquidity for forecasting failure the third friedman schwartz crisis is more ambiguous but increased residual failure risk is small in the aggregate the final crisis early 1933 saw a large unexplained increase in bank failure risk local contagion and illiquidity may have played a role in pre 1933 bank failures even though those effects were not large in their aggregate impact

evaluating theories of bank runs with heterogeneity restrictions this paper empirically tests theories of bank runs we use a structural panel var to extract runs from deposit market data identification exploits cross sectional heterogeneity in deposit insurance we identify bank runs as adverse deposit market supply shocks hitting uninsured banks harder compared to insured conditional on a run we study the behavior of uninsured banks with bad and good fundamentals we find that both experience runs but deposit outflows at the former are more severe panic effects which affect all uninsured deposits alike irrespective of fundamentals dominate in the aggregate insured banks partially absorb the outflow of uninsured deposits

consumer bankruptcy a fresh start consumer bankruptcy provides partial insurance against bad luck but by driving up interest rates makes life cycle smoothing more difficult we argue that to assess this trade off one needs a quantitative model of consumer bankruptcy with three key features life cycle component idiosyncratic earnings uncertainty and expense uncertainty exogenous negative shocks to household balance sheets we find that transitory and persistent earnings shocks have very different implications for evaluating bankruptcy rules more persistent shocks make the bankruptcy option more desirable larger transitory shocks have the opposite effect our findings suggest the current us bankruptcy system may be desirable for reasonable parameter values jel d14 d91 k35

the evolution of a financial crisis collapse of the asset backed commercial paper market this paper documents runs on asset backed commercial paper abcp programs in 2007 we find that one third of programs experienced a run within weeks of the onset of the abcp crisis and that runs as well as yields and maturities for new issues were related to program level and macro financial risks these findings are consistent with the asymmetric information framework used to explain banking panics have implications for commercial paper investors degree of risk intolerance and inform empirical predictions of recent papers on dynamic coordination failures

welfare implications of the bankruptcy reform act of 1999 abstract in recent years personal bankruptcy has become an important issue to consumers creditors and legislators alike over 40 billion dollars of unsecured debt were discharged in 1998 by 1 44 million households these losses have led legislators to propose a variety of changes in bankruptcy law the most important and recent of which is the bankruptcy reform act of 1999 ba99 i develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of personal bankruptcy to investigate the trade off between the consumption smoothing role of bankruptcy and the interest rate and deadweight costs it imposes i find that stringent means tests would reduce filing rates only slightly and would have only modest welfare consequences on the other hand the elimination of bankruptcy altogether is found to have substantial benefits this result is robust to income shock persistence and to stringency in the application of means tests

is financial globalization beneficial this lecture examines whether financial globalization is beneficial to developing countries by first examining the evidence on financial development and economic growth and concludes that financial development is indeed a key element in promoting economic growth it then asks why if financial development is so beneficial it often does not occur it then goes on to examine whether globalization particularly of the financial kind can help encourage financial and economic development and argues that it can however financial globalization does not always work to encourage economic development because it often leads to devastating financial crises the issue is thus not whether financial globalization is inherently good or bad but whether it can be done right

the effects of business models on bank risk before during and after financial crisis evidence from china using chinese data from 2004 to 2016 we investigate the effects of business models on bank risk before during and after financial crisis three main results emerge first insolvency risk and roa

determinacy of equilibria in dynamic models with finitely many consumers abstract we consider a production economy with a finite number of heterogeneous infinitely lived consumers we show that if the economy is smooth enough equilibria are locally unique for almost all endowments we do so by converting the infinite dimensional fixed point problem stated in terms of prices and commodities into a finite dimensional negishi problem involving individual weights in a social value function by adding artificial fixed factors to utility and production functions we can write the equilibrium conditions equating spending and income for each consumer entirely in terms of time zero factor endowments and derivatives of the social value function

dynamic debt runs and financial fragility evidence from the 2007 abcp crisis we use the 2007 asset backed commercial paper abcp crisis as a laboratory to study the determinants of debt runs our model features dilution risk maturing short term lenders demand higher yields in compensation for being diluted by future lenders making runs more likely the model explains the observed tenfold increase in yield spreads leading to runs and the positive relation between yield spreads and future runs results from structural estimation show that runs are very sensitive to leverage asset values and asset liquidity but less sensitive to the degree of maturity mismatch the strength of guarantees and asset volatility

lessons from the 1930s great depression this paper provides a survey of the great depression comprising both a narrative account and a detailed review of the empirical evidence focusing especially on the experience of the united states we examine the reasons for and flawed resolution of the american banking crisis as well as the conduct of fiscal and monetary policy we also consider the pivotal role of the gold standard in the international transmission of the slump and leaving gold as a route to recovery policy lessons for today from the great depression are discussed as are some implications for macroeconomics

sample selection and treatment effect estimation of lender of last resort policies this article develops a framework for estimating multivariate treatment effect models in the presence of sample selection the methodology deals with several important issues prevalent in policy and program evaluation including application and approval stages nonrandom treatment assignment endogeneity and discrete outcomes this article presents a computationally efficient estimation algorithm and techniques for model comparison and treatment effects the framework is applied to evaluate the effectiveness of bank recapitalization programs and their ability to resuscitate the financial system the analysis of lender of last resort lolr policies is not only complicated due to econometric challenges but also because regulator data are not easily obtainable motivated by these difficulties this article constructs a novel bank level dataset and employs the new methodology to jointly model a bank s decision to apply for assistance the lolr s decision to approve or decline the assistance and the bank s

bank capital firm liquidity and project quality abstract we construct an economy where a two way interaction between bank capital and project quality propagates negative shocks to technology or regulation by shrinking the available liquidity and the scale of their activity a contraction in bank loans discourages entrepreneurs from sustaining the set up effort of high quality projects inducing them to shift to low quality ones the deterioration in project quality erodes the value of bank assets and hence banks capitalization and loanable funds lack of information in the secondary market for bank assets amplifies the propagation

payoff complementarities and financial fragility evidence from mutual fund outflows the paper provides empirical evidence that strategic complementarities among investors generate fragility in financial markets analyzing mutual fund data we find that consistent with a theoretical model funds with illiquid assets where complementarities are stronger exhibit stronger sensitivity of outflows to bad past performance than funds with liquid assets we also find that this pattern disappears in funds where the shareholder base is composed mostly of large investors we present further evidence that these results are not attributable to alternative explanations based on the informativeness of past performance or on clientele effects we analyze the implications for funds performance and policies

house prices borrowing constraints and monetary policy in the business cycle i develop a general equilibrium model with sticky prices credit constraints nominal loans and asset prices changes in asset prices modify agents borrowing capacity through collateral value changes in nominal prices affect real repayments through debt deflation monetary policy shocks move asset and nominal prices in the same direction and are amplified and propagated over time the financial accelerator is not constant across shocks nominal debt stabilises supply shocks making the economy less volatile when the central bank controls the interest rate i discuss the role of equity debt indexation and household and firm leverage in the propagation mechanism finally i find that monetary policy should not target asset prices as a means of reducing output and inflation volatility

performance pricing in bank debt contracts abstract performance pricing links bank debt interest rate spreads to a borrower s performance via two options interest decreasing performance pricing reduces spreads if credit quality improves it is more common when prepayment is more likely or costly and when adverse selection costs are higher and is less common when multiple performance measures better predict credit quality interest increasing performance pricing increases spreads if credit quality deteriorates it is more common when lenders reduce interest rates to add this provision when downgrades are more likely and when moral hazard costs are higher we find lower spreads for contracts with interest increasing performance pricing

liquidity risk bank networks and the value of joining the federal reserve system reducing systemic liquidity risk related to seasonal swings in loan demand was one reason for the founding of the federal reserve system existing evidence on the post federal reserve increase in the seasonal volatility of aggregate lending and the decrease in seasonal interest rate swings suggests that it succeeded in that mission nevertheless less than 8 percent of state chartered banks joined the federal reserve in its first decade some have speculated that nonmembers could avoid higher costs of the federal reserve s reserve requirements while still obtaining access indirectly to the federal reserve discount window through contacts with federal reserve members we find that individual bank attributes related to the extent of banks ability to mitigate seasonal loan demand variation predict banks decisions to join the federal reserve consistent with the notion that banks could obtain indirect access to the discount window through interbank transfers we find that a bank s position within the interbank network as a user or provider of liquidity predicts the timing of its entry into the federal reserve system and the effect of federal reserve membership on its lending behavior we also find that indirect access to the federal reserve was not as good as direct access federal reserve member banks saw a greater increase in lending than nonmember banks

quadratic concavity and determinacy of equilibrium one of the central features of classical models of competitive markets is the generic determinacy of competitive equilibria for smooth economies with a finite number of commodities and a finite number of consumers almost all initial endowments admit only a finite number of competitive equilibria and these equilibria vary locally smoothly with endowments thus equilibrium comparative statics are locally determinate this paper establishes parallel results for economies with finitely many consumers and infinitely many commodities the most important new condition we introduce quadratic concavity rules out preferences in which goods are perfect substitutes globally locally or asymptotically our framework is sufficiently general to encompass many of the models that have proved important in the study of continuous time trading in financial markets trading over an infinite time horizon and trading of finely differentiated commodities

comparative statics and perfect foresight in infinite horizon economies does a pure exchange economy with an infinite time horizon have determinate perfect foresight equilibria when there is a finite number of infinitely lived agents equilibria are generically determinate this is not true with overlapping generations of finitely lived agents we ask whether the initial conditions together with the requirement of convergence to a steady state locally determine an equilibrium price path in this framework there are many economies with isolated equilibria many with continua of equilibria and many with no equilibria at all with two or more goods in every period not only can the price level be indeterminate but relative prices as well furthermore such indeterminacy can occur whether or not there is fiat money and whether or not the equilibria are pareto efficient this paper considers whether infinite horizon economies have determinate perfect foresight equilibria this question is of crucial importance if instead equilibria are locally indeterminate not only are we unable to make comparative static predictions but the agents in the model are unable to determine the consequences of unanticipated shocks the idea underlying perfect foresight is that agents expectations should be the actual future sequence predicted by the model if the model does not make determinate predictions the concept of perfect foresight is meaningless we consider two extreme cases the first with a finite number of infinitely lived consumers and the second with an infinite number of finitely lived consumers an overlapping generations model both are models of stationary pure exchange economies no production including the storage of goods between periods can occur these models are unrealistic but are the easiest to study extensions of the results of this paper to models with production infinitely lived assets and mixtures of the two types of consumers are presented by muller and woodford 29 when there is a finite number of infinitely lived consumers we argue that equilibria are generically determinate this is because the effective number of equations determining equilibria is not infinite but equal to the number of agents minus one and must determine the marginal utility of income for all but one agent generically near an equilibrium these equations are independent and exactly determine the unknowns when there are infinitely many overlapping generations this reasoning breaks down an infinite number of equations is not necessarily sufficient to determine

labor market distortions under sovereign debt default crises risk of sovereign debt default has frequently affected emerging market and developed economies such financial crisis are often accompanied with severe declines of employment that are hard to justify using a standard dynamic stochastic model in this paper i document that a labor wedge deteriorates substantially around swift reversals of current accounts or default episodes i propose and evaluate two different explanations for these movements by linking the wedges to changes in labor taxes and in the cost of working capital with these two features included a dynamic model of equilibrium default is able to replicate the behavior of the labor wedge observed in the data around financial crisis in the model higher interest rates are propagated into larger costs of hiring labor through the presence of working capital as an economy is hit with a stream of bad productivity shocks the incentives to default become stronger thus increasing the cost of debt this reduces firm demand for labor and generates a labor wedge a similar effect is obtained with a counter cyclical tax rate policy the model is used to shed light on the recent events of the euro area debt crisis and in particular of the greek default event

the information sensitivity of debt in good and bad times abstract we empirically show the dynamics of information production and information sensitivity of bank debt around the great recession as more precise information is produced at the onset of the crisis bank debt becomes informationally sensitive along two separate dimensions first precise information amplifies the effect of market expectations on default risk second for banks that are already expected to perform poorly more precise information further increases default risk both effects are muted in good times overall our findings are consistent with information based models of financial crises

equilibrium analysis of the infinite horizon model with smooth discounted utility functions abstract the equilibrium set and the natural projection are studied within the setup of the pure exchange infinite horizon model with a finite number of infinitely lived agents utility functions belonging to the smooth discounted variety and individual endowments being variable we show that the equilibrium set has convex fibers which implies arc connectedness and more generally contractibility we also show that the sets of regular equilibria and of regular economies are open and dense for the product topology therefore it is generically true that the equilibria of infinite horizon economies with smooth discounted utility functions can be approximated by those of finite horizon truncated economies

deposit competition and financial fragility evidence from the us banking sector preliminary and incomplete please do not cite without permission we develop and estimate an empirical model of the u s banking sector using a new data set covering the largest u s banks over the period 2002 2013 our model incorporates insured depositors and run prone uninsured depositors who have rich preferences over dierentiated banks banks compete for deposits in the spirit of matutes and vives 1996 and can endogenously default we estimate demand for uninsured

financial frictions and employment during the great depression abstract we provide new evidence that a disruption in credit supply played a quantitatively significant role in the unprecedented contraction of employment during the great depression using a novel hand collected dataset of large industrial firms our identification strategy exploits preexisting variation in the need to raise external funds at a time when public bond markets essentially froze local bank failures inhibited firms ability to substitute public debt for private debt which exacerbated financial constraints we estimate a large and negative causal effect of financing frictions on firm employment we find that the lack of access to credit likely accounted for a substantial fraction of the aggregate decline in employment of large firms between 1928 and 1933

real estate prices and bank stability abstract real estate prices can deviate from their fundamental value due to rigid supply heterogeneity in quality and various market imperfections which have two contrasting effects on bank stability higher prices increase the value of collateral and net wealth of borrowers and thus reduce the likelihood of credit defaults in contrast persistent deviations from fundamentals may foster the adverse selection of increasingly risky creditors by banks seeking to expand their loan portfolios which increases bank distress probabilities we test these hypotheses using unique data on real estate markets and banks in germany house price deviations contribute to bank instability but nominal house price developments do not this finding corroborates the importance of deviations from the fundamental value of real estate rather than just price levels or changes alone when assessing bank stability

monetary intervention mitigated banking panics during the great depression quasi experimental evidence from a federal reserve district border 1929 1933 the federal reserve act divided mississippi between the 6th atlanta and 8th st louis districts during the great depression these districts policies differed atlanta championed monetary activism and the extension of aid to ailing banks st louis eschewed expansionary initiatives during a banking crisis in 1930 atlanta expedited lending to banks in need st louis did not outcomes differed across districts in atlanta banks survived at higher rates lending continued at higher levels commerce contracted less and recovery began earlier these patterns indicate that central bank intervention influenced bank health credit availability and business activity

market participation and sunspot equilibria we investigate the structure of competitive equilibria in an exchange economy parametrized by i endowments and ii restrictions on market participation for arbitrary regular endowments if few consumers are restricted there are no sunspot equilibria if endowments are allowed to vary while restrictions on market participation are fixed there is a generic set of preferences such that sunspot equilibria exist for a non empty subset of endowments our analysis extends to the general case of an arbitrary number of restricted consumers the results of cass and shell for the polar cases in which either i no consumers are restricted or ii all consumers are restricted

us monetary and fiscal policy in the 1930s the paper provides a survey of fiscal and monetary policies during the 1930s under the hoover and roosevelt administrations and how they influenced the policies during the recent great recession the discussion of the causal impacts of monetary policy focuses on papers written in the last decade and the findings of scholars using dynamic structural general equilibrium modelling the discussion of fiscal policy shows why economists do not see the new deal as a keynesian stimulus describes the significant shift toward excise taxation during the 1930s and surveys estimates of the impact of federal spending on local economies the paper concludes with discussion of the lessons for the present from 1930s monetary and fiscal policy

bank net worth asset prices and economic activity abstract a dynamic general equilibrium model is proposed to study the interactions between the banking sector asset prices and aggregate economic activity a durable asset serves as a productive input and as a collateral for loans the propagation mechanism of a negative productivity shock is enhanced and prolonged through the interaction of credit constraints and asset prices where the bank loan and the investment are squeezed by a higher bank capital asset ratio for lending and at the same time a stricter collateral requirement for borrowing the model explains why banking crises often coincide with depression in the asset markets the results also bear policy implications for the debates over regulatory bank capital adequacy and credit control policies

sovereign default interest rates and political uncertainty in emerging markets abstract a large body of the empirical literature shows that high turnover rates length of tenure of policymakers and the degree of conflict within a country affects sovereign spreads debt and default rates we help to rationalize such claims by including these political features in a dynamic stochastic small open economy model of sovereign debt and default in this way we offer a complementary approach to the econometric analyses in the literature consistent with the data the quantitative analysis shows that politically unstable and more polarized economies experience higher default rates and larger level and volatility of sovereign interest rate spreads

macroeconomic volatility and welfare in developing countries an introduction macroeconomic volatility both a source and a reflection of underdevelopment is a fundamental concern for developing countries their high aggregate instability results from a combination of large external shocks volatile macroeconomic policies microeconomic rigidities and weak institutions volatility entails a direct welfare cost for risk averse individuals as well as an indirect one through its adverse effect on income growth and development this article provides a brief overview of the recent literature on macroeconomic volatility in developing countries highlighting its causes consequences and possible remedies it then introduces the contributions of a recent conference on the subject sponsored by the world bank and pompeu fabra university barcelona

credit crises money and contractions an historical view abstract the relatively infrequent nature of major credit distress events makes an historical approach particularly useful using a combination of historical narrative and econometric techniques we identify major periods of credit distress from 1875 to 2007 examine the extent to which credit distress arises as part of the transmission of monetary policy and document the subsequent effect on output using turning points defined by the harding pagan algorithm we identify and compare the timing duration amplitude and co movement of cycles in money credit and output regressions show that financial distress events exacerbate business cycle downturns both in the 19th and 20th centuries and that a confluence of such events makes recessions even worse

correlated default risks and bank regulations bank regulatory design relies critically on bank risk modeling traditionally the bank s aggregate value is assumed to obey an exogenously specified process e g a lognormal diffusion we demonstrate that this assumption is generally invalid given the truncated and correlated payoff structure of individual bank loans instead the bank s aggregate terminal payoff is significantly left fat tailed this skewness remains even when the bank holds an infinitely large number of loans in its portfolio unless they are uncorrelated by ignoring skewness in bank payoffs deposit insurance premia and capital requirements have traditionally been significantly mis calculated

consumption savings decisions with quasi geometric discounting we study the consumption savings problem of an infinitely lived rational consumer who has time inconsistent preferences in the form of quasi geometric discounting the consumer operates a weakly concave production function and must simply divide current resources into current consumption and savings there is no uncertainty a solution to the consumer s problem is a subgame perfect equilibrium of a dynamic game between the consumer s successive selves we show that this game has a continuum of equilibria in stationary markov strategies not only is the stationary point of the consumer s asset holdings indeterminate but each stationary point has a continuum of dynamic paths converging to it the savings policy rules underlying these dynamic paths are step functions

political influence and declarations of bank insolvency in japan this paper investigates how politics affects bank supervision by examining determinants of bank failures in japan during 1999 2002 a period during which bank regulators were called upon to resolve insolvent banks in preparation for the lifting of a blanket deposit guarantee the empirical results suggest that japan s bank regulators had tendency to delay declarations of insolvency in prefectures that supported senior politicians of the ruling liberal democratic party ldp this result which is robust to a host of bank level and prefecture level controls suggests that bank supervision is prone to political influence that delays efficient resolution of insolvency

the failure of the bank of united states a defense of joseph lucia note in a recent article in an economic history journal joseph l lucia 1985 reappraised the analysis by milton friedman and anna j schwartz 1963 of the failure of the bank of united states in december 1930 in their extraordinary reply friedman and schwartz 1986 question lucia s scientific integrity as well as the scientific standards of the journal in which lucia s article appeared their opening paragraph states

depositor behavior under macroeconomic risk evidence from bank runs in emerging economies depositor behavior has been associated with bank specific characteristics random runs or contagion episodes using evidence on the 2000 02 bank runs in argentina and uruguay this paper shows that macroeconomic risk is also important few macroeconomic shocks can quickly cause large runs macroeconomic risk affects deposits regardless of traditional bank specific characteristics furthermore bank exposure to macroeconomic factors can explain differences in deposit withdrawals during crises the evolution of bank specific characteristics is mainly driven by macroeconomic factors while the informational content of bank specific variables declines overall depositors seem responsive to risk in a broader sense than that often considered by the literature

financial development and the instability of open economies this paper introduces a framework for analyzing the role of financial factors as a source of instability in small open economies our basic model is a dynamic open economy model with a tradeable good produced with capital and a country specific factor we also assume that firms face credit constraints with the constraint being tighter at a lower level of financial development a basic implication of this model is that economies at an intermediate level of financial development are more unstable than either very developed or very underdeveloped economies this is true both in the sense that temporary shocks have large and persistent effects and also in the sense that these economies can exhibit cycles thus countries that are going through a phase of financial development may become more unstable in the short run similarly full capital account liberalization may destabilize the economy in economies at an intermediate level of financial development phases of growth with capital inflows are followed by collapse with capital outflows on the other hand foreign direct investment does not destabilize

on measuring the welfare cost of business cycles lucas 1987 argues that the gain from eliminating aggregate fluctuations is trivial following lucas a number of researchers have altered assumptions on preferences and found that the gain from eliminating business cycles are potentially very large however in these exercises little discipline is placed on preference parameters this paper estimates the welfare cost of business cycles allowing for potential time non separabilities in preferences where discipline is placed on the choice of preference parameters by requiring that the preferences be consistent with observed fluctuations in a model of business cycles that is a theoretical real business cycle world is constructed and the representative agent is then placed in this world the agent responds optimally to exogenous shocks given the frictions in the economy the agent s preference parameters along with other structural parameters are estimated using a bayesian procedure involving markov chain monte carlo methods two main results emerge from the paper first the form for the time non separability estimated in this paper is very different than the forms suggested and used elsewhere in the literature second the welfare cost of business cycles is close to lucas s estimate

barriers to investment in polarized societies i present a tractable dynamic model of political economy where disagreements about the composition of public spending result in implementation of short sighted policies the relative price of investment to consumption is excessively large in equilibrium due to over taxation investment rates are too low which slows down growth along the transition in the long run this results in output consumption and welfare being inefficiently low the larger is the degree of polarization the greater is the inefficiency political stability mitigates the effects of polarization by making the incumbent internalize the dynamic inefficiencies introduced by the choice of growth retarding policies

pricing growth indexed bonds abstract growth indexed bonds have been suggested as a way of reducing the procyclicality of emerging market countries fiscal policies and the likelihood of costly debt crises investor attitude surveys suggest that pricing difficulties are seen as a considerable obstacle in an effort to reduce such concerns this article presents a simple way of pricing growth indexed bonds as a pleasant by product the analysis tracks the quantitative implications of an increase in the share of growth indexed bonds in total debt measuring the ensuing decline in the probability of default and the reduction in the spreads at which standard bonds can be issued

pareto optima welfare weights and smooth equilibrium analysis abstract the first part of this paper deals with the parameterization of the set of pareto optima by utility levels and by the welfare weights in the second part the parameterization by the welfare weights is used to establish properties of the negishi equation system associated with the finite general equilibrium model this approach yields proofs of the regularity of the no trade equilibria and of the existence of equilibria by a degree argument that are new the formulation and the proof of these properties within the setup of the negishi equation system plays a crucial role in extending these properties to the infinite horizon model with discounted utility functions

international and domestic collateral constraints in a model of emerging market crises abstract we build a model of emerging markets crises which features two types of collateral constraints firms in a domestic economy have limited borrowing capacity from international investors they also have limited borrowing capacity with respect to each other we study how the presence and changes in these collateral constraints affect financial and real variables a binding international constraint in the aggregate leads to a sharp rise in interest rates and fire sales of domestic assets while limited domestic collateral can lead to wasted international collateral these two collateral constraints can interact in important ways the first is disintermediation a fire sale of domestic assets causes banks to fail in their function of reallocating resources across the economy leading to wasted international collateral the second is a dynamic effect we show that firms in an economy with limited domestic collateral and a binding international collateral constraint will not adequately precaution against adverse shocks increasing the severity of these shocks

panic bank runs we provide experimental evidence that panic bank runs occur in the absence of problems with fundamentals and coordination failures among depositors the two main culprits identified in the literature depositors withdraw when they observe that others do so even when theoretically they should not our findings suggest that panic also manifests itself in the beliefs of depositors who overestimate the probability that a bank run is underway loss aversion has a predictive power on panic behavior while risk or ambiguity aversion do not

on the effects of deposit insurance and observability on bank runs an experimental study we study the effects of deposit insurance and observability of previous actions on the emergence of bank runs by means of a controlled laboratory experiment we consider three depositors in the line of a bank who decide between withdrawing or keeping their money deposited we have three treatments with different levels of deposit insurance which reflect the losses a depositor may incur in the case of a bank run we find that different levels of deposit insurance and the possibility of observing other depositors actions affect the likelihood of bank runs when decisions are not observable higher levels of deposit insurance decrease the probability of bank runs when decisions are observable this need not to be the case these results suggest that i observability might be considered as a partial substitute of deposit insurance and ii the optimal deposit insurance should take into account the degree of observability

financial liberalization credit constraints and collateral investment in the mexican manufacturing sector abstract we examine the impact of financial liberalization on fixed investment in mexico using establishment level data from the manufacturing sector in addition to analyzing changes in cash flow sensitivities an innovative approach explores the role of real estate as collateral and addresses a potential censoring problem the results suggest that financial constraints were eased for the smallest firms but not for larger ones however the importance of possessing real estate increased given banks reliance on collateral in their lending the results also provide microeconomic evidence consistent with the role attributed to financial accelerator mechanisms during lending booms and during post crisis recessions

the banking panics in the united states in the 1930s some lessons for today in this paper we discuss the lessons learned from the us banking panics in the 1930s for the response by the federal reserve to the crisis of 2008 we revisit the debate over illiquidity versus insolvency in the banking crises of the 1930s and provide empirical evidence that the banking crises largely reflected illiquidity shocks in the recent crisis the fed under bernanke had well learned the lesson from the banking panics of the 1930s of conducting expansionary monetary policy to meet demands for liquidity however unlike in the 1930s the deeper problem of the recent crisis was not illiquidity but insolvency and especially the fear of insolvency of counterparties a number of virtually insolvent us banks deemed too big and too interconnected to fail were rescued by fiscal bail outs

heterogeneous borrowers in quantitative models of sovereign default we extend the model used in recent quantitative studies of sovereign default allowing policymakers of different types to stochastically alternate in power we show that a default episode may be triggered by a change in the type of policymaker in office and that such a default is likely to occur only if there is enough political stability and if policymakers encounter poor economic conditions under high political stability political turnover enables the model to generate a weaker correlation between economic conditions and default decisions a higher and more volatile spread and lower borrowing levels after a default episode

arresting banking panics federal reserve liquidity provision and the forgotten panic of 1929 scholars differ on whether central bank intervention mitigates banking panics in april 1929 a fruit fly infestation in florida forced the u s government to quarantine fruit shipments from the state and destroy infested groves in july depositors panicked in tampa and surrounding cities the federal reserve bank of atlanta rushed currency to member banks beset by runs we show that this intervention arrested the panic and estimate that bank failures would have been twice as high without the federal reserve s intervention our results suggest that similar interventions may have reduced bank failures during the great depression

u s consumer bankruptcy choice the importance of general equilibrium effects abstract we study the implications of u s personal bankruptcy rules for resource allocation and welfare our analysis shows that general equilibrium considerations along with bankruptcy chapter choice and production matter crucially for the effects of policy reform contrary to previous work we find that completely eliminating bankruptcy provisions causes significant declines in output and welfare by reducing capital formation and labor input furthermore subjecting chapter 7 filers to means testing as suggested by recent legislative proposals would not improve upon current bankruptcy provisions and at best leave aggregate filings output and welfare unchanged however we do find that an alternative tightening of chapter 7 in the form of lower asset exemptions can increase economic efficiency

the political lessons of depression era banking reform ironically the primary motivations for the main bank regulatory reforms in the 1930s regulation q the separation of investment banking from commercial banking and the creation of federal deposit insurance were to preserve and enhance two of the most disastrous policies that contributed to the severity and depth of the great depression unit banking and the real bills doctrine other regulatory changes affecting the allocation of power between the fed and the treasury were intended to reduce the independence of the fed while giving the opposite impression the ill conceived banking legislation of the 1930s took very little time to pass but a great deal of time to disappear the overarching lesson is that the aftermath of crises are moments of high risk in public policy the great depression provoked banking reform legislation that was quick comprehensive and unusually responsive to popular opinion each of these three aspects increases the risk that regulation will have adverse consequences

long duration bonds and sovereign defaults abstract this paper extends the baseline framework used in recent quantitative studies of sovereign default by assuming that the government can borrow using long duration bonds this contrasts with previous studies which assume the government can borrow using bonds that mature after one quarter we show that when we assume that the government issues bonds with a duration similar to the average duration of sovereign bonds in emerging economies the model generates an interest rate that is substantially higher and more volatile than the one obtained assuming one quarter bonds this narrows the gap between the predictions of the model and the data which indicates that the introduction of long duration bonds may be a useful tool for future research about emerging economies our analysis is also relevant for the study of other credit markets

contagion and bank failures during the great depression the june 1932 chicago banking panic the authors examine the social costs of asymmetric information induced bank panics in an environment without government deposit insurance their case study is the chicago bank panic of june 1932 the authors compare the ex ante characteristics of panic failures and panic survivors despite temporary confusion about bank asset quality on the part of depositors during the panic which was associated with widespread depositor runs and bank stock price declines the panic did not produce significant social costs in terms of failures among solvent banks copyright 1997 by american economic association

alternatives for distressed banks during the great depression using data on individual banks during the great depression i find that institutions that failed during periods in which failures were especially numerous such as the banking panics appear to have been at least as financially sound as banks that were able to pursue alternative resolution strategies such as merging with another institution or suspending and recapitalizing during less extreme periods this result suggests that problems associated with having numerous banks in distress simultaneously during the depression may have exacerbated the number of banks closed and the economic downturn

lending constraints real estate prices and business cycles in emerging economies abstract we investigate a small open economy with constraints in both the domestic and the international credit market the informational opaqueness of the domestic market hinders foreign lenders activity so that entrepreneurs face looser borrowing constraints vis a vis domestic financiers however limited capitalization constrains domestic lenders calibrating the model to data from argentina we find that the interaction between lending and borrowing constraints is a channel through which real interest rate shocks generate fluctuations in output real estate prices and consumption external financial liberalization increases volatility and affects welfare more than domestic liberalization but also mitigates the destabilizing impact of domestic deregulation

macroeconomic effects of corporate default crisis a long term perspective abstract using an extensive data set on corporate bond defaults in the us from 1866 to 2010 we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises during the past 150 years the us has experienced many severe corporate default crises in which 20 50 of all corporate bonds defaulted although the total par amount of corporate bonds has at times rivaled the amount of bank loans outstanding we find that corporate default crises have far fewer real effects than do banking crises these results provide empirical support for current theories that emphasize the unique role that banks and the credit and collateral channels play in amplifying macroeconomic shocks

fiscal rules and government borrowing costs international evidence we find that the adoption of numerical fiscal rules reduces government borrowing costs in a sample of 101 advanced and developing countries for 1985 2010 we apply a variety of propensity score matching methods to address the self selection problem of policy adoption and find strong evidence that fiscal rules have large and significant treatment effects on lowering government borrowing costs in both international and domestic financial markets the results are robust to changes in country sample and alternative estimation methodology and are consistent with fiscal rules helping to build policy credibility by reducing the probability of default and the risk premium on government debt that compensates lenders for this possibility jel e43 g12 h60

interbank contagion at work evidence from a natural experiment this article tests financial contagion due to interbank linkages for identification we exploit an idiosyncratic sudden shock caused by a large bank failure in conjunction with detailed data on interbank exposures first we find robust evidence that higher interbank exposure to the failed bank leads to large deposit withdrawals second the magnitude of contagion is higher for banks with weaker fundamentals third interbank linkages among surviving banks further propagate the shock finally we find results suggesting that there are real economic effects these results suggest that interbank linkages act as an important channel of contagion and hold important policy implications jel g01 g21 g28 e58 since the onset of the financial turmoil increased uncertainty reflected particularly in counterparty risk has led banks to hoard liquidity this has resulted in a significant decline of trading in the interbank money markets jean claude trichet president of the european central bank december 2008

cross country evidence on the link between volatility and growth this paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations in a sample of ninety two countries as well as a sample of oecd countries the authors find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth the addition of standard control variables strengthens the negative relationship the authors also find that government spending induced volatility is negatively associated with growth even after controlling for both time and country fixed effects copyright 1995 by american economic association

bank asset liquidation and the propagation of the u s great depression we hypothesize that financial disintermediation during and after the great depression arose from the slow liquidation of failed bank deposits empirical results from incorporating the stock of failed national bank deposits for the period 1921 40 in vector autoregression var models suggest that the stock of deposits in closed banks undergoing liquidation is as important as money stock in terms of explaining output changes over forecast horizons from one to three years hence we infer that the dynamic effects of banking sector shocks were cumulative and pervasive during and after the depression

sovereign debt maturity structure under asymmetric information abstract this paper studies the optimal choice of sovereign debt maturity when investors are unaware of the government s willingness to repay under a pooling equilibrium there is a wedge between the borrower s true default risk and the default risk priced in debt and its size differs with the maturity of debt safe borrowers tilt their debt maturity towards short term relative to the optimal choice under perfect information since long term debt pools more default risk that is not inherent to them risky borrowers mimic their behavior of safe borrowers to preclude the market from identifying their type in times of financial distress spreads increase and the default risk wedge of long term debt relative to short term debt increases which makes borrowers shorten their debt maturity data on bond issuances for a panel of countries show that consistent with the model maturities co vary negatively with spreads and that this co movement is stronger in those situations in which informational asymmetries are larger