We establish a set of novel empirical facts concerning cross-section distributions of inflation expectations reported in surveys. Almost all the variation in expectations about their mean may be summarized via three factors we call disagreement, skew, and shape. We adopt a functional principal component regression approach to estimating forward-looking models of inflation that exploits the heterogeneity present in individual-level data. By using survey information more effectively, our approach reveals an enhanced role for expectations in inflation dynamics that is robust to lagged inflation, trend inflation, and supply factors. Our findings hold in similar form across two major economies.
{"title":"Heterogeneous Beliefs and the Phillips Curve","authors":"Roland Meeks, Francesca Monti","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3422817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3422817","url":null,"abstract":"We establish a set of novel empirical facts concerning cross-section distributions of inflation expectations reported in surveys. Almost all the variation in expectations about their mean may be summarized via three factors we call disagreement, skew, and shape. We adopt a functional principal component regression approach to estimating forward-looking models of inflation that exploits the heterogeneity present in individual-level data. By using survey information more effectively, our approach reveals an enhanced role for expectations in inflation dynamics that is robust to lagged inflation, trend inflation, and supply factors. Our findings hold in similar form across two major economies.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129057090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Richard D. F. Harris, Veselin Karadotchev, R. Sowerbutts, Evarist Stoja
We investigate the impact that the publication of the Bank of England’s Financial Stability Report (FSR) has on the stock returns and credit default swap spreads of UK financial institutions. Examining a sample of 73 UK-listed banks and other financial institutions, we find that publication of the FSR is, on average, associated with no abnormal returns. We extend our analysis to examine the extent to which policies and the sentiment in the FSR are predictable, which would explain the observed lack of abnormal returns. We find that both sentiment and announced policies are predictable. We also examine the extent to which the release of the FSR reduces information asymmetry in financial markets, but do not find strong evidence.
{"title":"Have FSRs Got News for You? Evidence from the Impact of Financial Stability Reports on Market Activity","authors":"Richard D. F. Harris, Veselin Karadotchev, R. Sowerbutts, Evarist Stoja","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3376524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3376524","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate the impact that the publication of the Bank of England’s Financial Stability Report (FSR) has on the stock returns and credit default swap spreads of UK financial institutions. Examining a sample of 73 UK-listed banks and other financial institutions, we find that publication of the FSR is, on average, associated with no abnormal returns. We extend our analysis to examine the extent to which policies and the sentiment in the FSR are predictable, which would explain the observed lack of abnormal returns. We find that both sentiment and announced policies are predictable. We also examine the extent to which the release of the FSR reduces information asymmetry in financial markets, but do not find strong evidence.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125283343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Around 10% of European firms were in receipt of subsidized bank loans following the peak of the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011. To what extent did such forbearance lending contribute to the subsequent low output growth experienced by the euro area? In this paper, we address this question by developing a quantitative model of firm dynamics in which forbearance lending and firm defaults arise endogenously. The model provides a close approximation to key euro-area firm statistics over the period 2011 to 2014. We evaluate the impact of forbearance lending by considering a counterfactual scenario in which firms no longer have access to loan forbearance. Our key finding is that aggregate output, investment and total factor productivity are higher in the absence of forbearance lending than in the benchmark scenario that includes forbearance lending. This suggests that forbearance lending practices contributed to the low output growth across the euro area following the onset of the sovereign debt crisis.
{"title":"The Real Effects of Zombie Lending in Europe","authors":"Belinda Tracey","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3346350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3346350","url":null,"abstract":"Around 10% of European firms were in receipt of subsidized bank loans following the peak of the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011. To what extent did such forbearance lending contribute to the subsequent low output growth experienced by the euro area? In this paper, we address this question by developing a quantitative model of firm dynamics in which forbearance lending and firm defaults arise endogenously. The model provides a close approximation to key euro-area firm statistics over the period 2011 to 2014. We evaluate the impact of forbearance lending by considering a counterfactual scenario in which firms no longer have access to loan forbearance. Our key finding is that aggregate output, investment and total factor productivity are higher in the absence of forbearance lending than in the benchmark scenario that includes forbearance lending. This suggests that forbearance lending practices contributed to the low output growth across the euro area following the onset of the sovereign debt crisis.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129788418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lena Boneva, D. Elliott, I. Kaminska, O. Linton, Nick Mclaren, Ben Morley
There is substantial uncertainty about the impact of quantitative easing (QE) on market liquidity. Identifying the impact is particularly challenging due to the potential for reverse causality, because liquidity considerations might affect QE purchases. We address this challenge by studying the Bank of England’s 2016-17 Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme (CBPS). In particular, we use granular offer-level data from the CBPS auctions to construct proxy measures for the BoE’s demand for bonds and auction participants’ supply of bonds, allowing us to control for any reverse causality from liquidity to purchases. We find that CBPS purchases improved the liquidity of purchased bonds.
{"title":"The impact of corporate QE on liquidity: evidence from the UK","authors":"Lena Boneva, D. Elliott, I. Kaminska, O. Linton, Nick Mclaren, Ben Morley","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3346331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3346331","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 There is substantial uncertainty about the impact of quantitative easing (QE) on market liquidity. Identifying the impact is particularly challenging due to the potential for reverse causality, because liquidity considerations might affect QE purchases. We address this challenge by studying the Bank of England’s 2016-17 Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme (CBPS). In particular, we use granular offer-level data from the CBPS auctions to construct proxy measures for the BoE’s demand for bonds and auction participants’ supply of bonds, allowing us to control for any reverse causality from liquidity to purchases. We find that CBPS purchases improved the liquidity of purchased bonds.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131744294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Aikman, A. Haldane, Marc Hinterschweiger, S. Kapadia
The global financial crisis has been the prompt for a complete rethink of financial stability and policies for achieving it. Over the course of the better part of a decade, a deep and wide-ranging international regulatory reform effort has been under way, as great as any since the Great Depression. We provide an overview of the state of progress of these reforms, and assess whether they have achieved their objectives and where gaps remain. We find that additional insights gained since the start of the reforms paint an ambiguous picture on whether the current level of bank capital should be higher or lower. Additionally, we present new evidence that a combination of different regulatory metrics can achieve better outcomes in terms of financial stability than reliance on individual constraints in isolation. We discuss in depth several recurring themes of the regulatory framework, such as the appropriate degree of discretion versus rules, the setting of macroprudential objectives, and the choice of policy instruments. We conclude with suggestions for future research and policy, including on models of financial stability, market-based finance, the political economy of financial regulation, and the contribution of the financial system to the economy and to society.
{"title":"Rethinking Financial Stability","authors":"D. Aikman, A. Haldane, Marc Hinterschweiger, S. Kapadia","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3130053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3130053","url":null,"abstract":"The global financial crisis has been the prompt for a complete rethink of financial stability and policies for achieving it. Over the course of the better part of a decade, a deep and wide-ranging international regulatory reform effort has been under way, as great as any since the Great Depression. We provide an overview of the state of progress of these reforms, and assess whether they have achieved their objectives and where gaps remain. We find that additional insights gained since the start of the reforms paint an ambiguous picture on whether the current level of bank capital should be higher or lower. Additionally, we present new evidence that a combination of different regulatory metrics can achieve better outcomes in terms of financial stability than reliance on individual constraints in isolation. We discuss in depth several recurring themes of the regulatory framework, such as the appropriate degree of discretion versus rules, the setting of macroprudential objectives, and the choice of policy instruments. We conclude with suggestions for future research and policy, including on models of financial stability, market-based finance, the political economy of financial regulation, and the contribution of the financial system to the economy and to society.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132209004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper studies the agency problem between bank management, shareholders, and the taxpayer. Executive bonuses increase in the probability the bank is too big to fail. Bank management recognise it is very likely optimal to select risky projects which exploit the taxpayer, implying project selection effort (eg due diligence) is more expensive to incentivise. This agency problem leads to too much risk for society, not for shareholders. Compensation rules aimed at solving management-shareholder agency problems — equity pay, deferred, including debt — do not correct the excessive risk taking. By contrast, malus and clawbacks can incentivise the bank management to make better risk choices.
{"title":"Bankers' Pay and Excessive Risk","authors":"John Thanassoulis, Misa Tanaka","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2674040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2674040","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the agency problem between bank management, shareholders, and the taxpayer. Executive bonuses increase in the probability the bank is too big to fail. Bank management recognise it is very likely optimal to select risky projects which exploit the taxpayer, implying project selection effort (eg due diligence) is more expensive to incentivise. This agency problem leads to too much risk for society, not for shareholders. Compensation rules aimed at solving management-shareholder agency problems — equity pay, deferred, including debt — do not correct the excessive risk taking. By contrast, malus and clawbacks can incentivise the bank management to make better risk choices.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124361527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why are house prices -80% correlated with job losses over the UK business cycle? My paper studies this striking fact together with the strong comovements between house prices and labour market variables in general. First, a regional panel is estimated to quantify the impact of house prices on the unemployment, job finding and job separation rates, whereby rejection rates of planning applications are used as instruments to find exogenous variation in house prices. Second, an orthogonalised VAR is used to estimate the aggregate impact of house price shocks. Both methods confirm the large impact of house price shocks on labour market variables and credit supply. To understand the mechanism, a general equilibrium model with collateral constraints, endogenous job separation and housing shocks is confronted with macroeconomic data via Bayesian methods. The results suggest that shocks to house prices (i) explain about 10% of output fluctuations and about 20% of fluctuations in corporate credit, unemployment and job separation rates via the collateral channel over the forecast horizon, and (ii) were a major cause in triggering the 1990 and 2008 recessions in the UK.
{"title":"House Prices and Job Losses","authors":"Gábor Pintér","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2702458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2702458","url":null,"abstract":"Why are house prices -80% correlated with job losses over the UK business cycle? My paper studies this striking fact together with the strong comovements between house prices and labour market variables in general. First, a regional panel is estimated to quantify the impact of house prices on the unemployment, job finding and job separation rates, whereby rejection rates of planning applications are used as instruments to find exogenous variation in house prices. Second, an orthogonalised VAR is used to estimate the aggregate impact of house price shocks. Both methods confirm the large impact of house price shocks on labour market variables and credit supply. To understand the mechanism, a general equilibrium model with collateral constraints, endogenous job separation and housing shocks is confronted with macroeconomic data via Bayesian methods. The results suggest that shocks to house prices (i) explain about 10% of output fluctuations and about 20% of fluctuations in corporate credit, unemployment and job separation rates via the collateral channel over the forecast horizon, and (ii) were a major cause in triggering the 1990 and 2008 recessions in the UK.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125637833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We construct an overlapping generations macroeconomic model with which to study the causes, consequences and remedies to ‘credit traps’ — prolonged periods of stagnant real activity accompanied by low productivity, financial sector undercapitalisation, and the misallocation of credit. In our model, credit traps arise when shocks to bank equity capital tighten banks’ borrowing constraints, causing them to allocate credit to easily collateralisable but low productivity projects. Low productivity weakens bank capital generation, reinforcing tight borrowing constraints, sustaining the credit trap steady state. We use the model to study policy options, both ex ante(avoiding credit traps) and ex post (escaping them). Ex ante, restrictions on bank leverage can help to enhance the economy’s resilience to the shocks that can cause credit traps. Further, a policymaker focused on maximising the economy’s resilience to credit traps would set leverage countercyclically, allowing an expansion of leverage in minor downturns and reducing leverage in upswings. However, ex post, relaxing a leverage cap will not help escape the trap. Instead, a range of unconventional policies are needed. We study publicly intermediated lending, discount window lending, and recapitalisation, and compare the efficacy of these policies under different conditions.
{"title":"Bank Leverage, Credit Traps and Credit Policies","authors":"Angus Foulis, B. Nelson, Misa Tanaka","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2639061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2639061","url":null,"abstract":"We construct an overlapping generations macroeconomic model with which to study the causes, consequences and remedies to ‘credit traps’ — prolonged periods of stagnant real activity accompanied by low productivity, financial sector undercapitalisation, and the misallocation of credit. In our model, credit traps arise when shocks to bank equity capital tighten banks’ borrowing constraints, causing them to allocate credit to easily collateralisable but low productivity projects. Low productivity weakens bank capital generation, reinforcing tight borrowing constraints, sustaining the credit trap steady state. We use the model to study policy options, both ex ante(avoiding credit traps) and ex post (escaping them). Ex ante, restrictions on bank leverage can help to enhance the economy’s resilience to the shocks that can cause credit traps. Further, a policymaker focused on maximising the economy’s resilience to credit traps would set leverage countercyclically, allowing an expansion of leverage in minor downturns and reducing leverage in upswings. However, ex post, relaxing a leverage cap will not help escape the trap. Instead, a range of unconventional policies are needed. We study publicly intermediated lending, discount window lending, and recapitalisation, and compare the efficacy of these policies under different conditions.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129782508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In many larger advanced economies labour productivity growth slowed sharply and remained subdued for years after the credit crisis of 2007/08. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the United Kingdom. We examine the dynamics of productivity among British businesses that lie behind this stagnation. The most striking feature is the widespread weakness in total factor productivity within firms, pointing to the importance of a common factor in explaining productivity weakness. In addition,we find that the positive correlation between surviving firms’ employment growth and their relative productivity ranking broke down after 2007/08, as would be expected if an adverse credit supply shock had caused inefficiencies in resource allocation across firms. Indeed, during the immediate recession years 2008/09, this shift was most apparent in sectors with many small and bank dependent businesses. But subsequently, while the contribution of external reallocation to aggregate productivity growth in 2010/13 was smaller than in previous years, this was not obviously associated with sectoral bank dependence. We illustrate the sensitivity of these findings to the choice of decomposition method.
{"title":"The UK Productivity Puzzle 2008-13: Evidence from British Businesses","authors":"Rebecca Riley, Chiara Rosazza Bondibene, G. Young","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2623635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2623635","url":null,"abstract":"In many larger advanced economies labour productivity growth slowed sharply and remained subdued for years after the credit crisis of 2007/08. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the United Kingdom. We examine the dynamics of productivity among British businesses that lie behind this stagnation. The most striking feature is the widespread weakness in total factor productivity within firms, pointing to the importance of a common factor in explaining productivity weakness. In addition,we find that the positive correlation between surviving firms’ employment growth and their relative productivity ranking broke down after 2007/08, as would be expected if an adverse credit supply shock had caused inefficiencies in resource allocation across firms. Indeed, during the immediate recession years 2008/09, this shift was most apparent in sectors with many small and bank dependent businesses. But subsequently, while the contribution of external reallocation to aggregate productivity growth in 2010/13 was smaller than in previous years, this was not obviously associated with sectoral bank dependence. We illustrate the sensitivity of these findings to the choice of decomposition method.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130364965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael Chin, Thomai Filippeli, Konstantinos Theodoridis
Long-term interest rates in a number of small open inflation-targeting economies co-move more strongly with US long-term rates than with short-term rates in those economies. We augment a standard small open economy model with imperfectly substitutable government bonds and time-varying term premia, that captures this phenomenon. The estimated model fits a range of US and UK data remarkably well, and produces term premium estimates that are comparable to estimates from the affine term structure model literature. We find that the strong co-movement between US and UK long-term interest rates arises primarily via correlated policy rate expectations, rather than through correlated term premia. This is due to policymakers in both economies responding to foreign productivity and discount factor shocks that cause persistent changes in inflation. We also overcome the common failure of similar models to account for the large influence of foreign disturbances on domestic economies found empirically, where in our model around 40% of the variation in UK GDP can be explained by shocks originating in the US economy.
{"title":"Cross-Country Co-Movement in Long-Term Interest Rates: A DSGE Approach","authors":"Michael Chin, Thomai Filippeli, Konstantinos Theodoridis","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2621409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2621409","url":null,"abstract":"Long-term interest rates in a number of small open inflation-targeting economies co-move more strongly with US long-term rates than with short-term rates in those economies. We augment a standard small open economy model with imperfectly substitutable government bonds and time-varying term premia, that captures this phenomenon. The estimated model fits a range of US and UK data remarkably well, and produces term premium estimates that are comparable to estimates from the affine term structure model literature. We find that the strong co-movement between US and UK long-term interest rates arises primarily via correlated policy rate expectations, rather than through correlated term premia. This is due to policymakers in both economies responding to foreign productivity and discount factor shocks that cause persistent changes in inflation. We also overcome the common failure of similar models to account for the large influence of foreign disturbances on domestic economies found empirically, where in our model around 40% of the variation in UK GDP can be explained by shocks originating in the US economy.","PeriodicalId":395566,"journal":{"name":"BOE: Working Paper Series (Topic)","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121469586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}