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Begin New Search Topic Fiscal Policy Publishing Institution Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

1. Government Connections and Financial Constraints: Evidence from a Large Representative Sample of Chinese Firms

Author:
Robert Cull, Bo Sun, and Lixin Colin Xu
Publication Date:
01-2015
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
We examine the role of firms’ government connections, defined by government intervention in CEO appointment and the status of state ownership, in determining the severity of financial constraints faced by Chinese firms. We demonstrate that government connections are associated with substantially less severe financial constraints (i.e., less reliance on internal cash flows to fund investment), and that the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flows is higher for firms that report greater obstacles to obtaining external funds. We also find that those large non-state firms with weak government connections, likely the engine for innovation in the coming years in China, are especially financially constrained, due perhaps to the formidable hold that their state rivals have on financial resources after the ‘grabbing-the-big-and-letting-go-the-small’ privatization program in China. Our empirical results suggest that government connections play an important role in explaining Chinese firms’ financing conditions, and provide further evidence on the nature of the misallocation of credit by China’s dominant state-owned banks.
Topic:
Privatization, Governance, Business, Fiscal Policy, Innovation, and Banking
Political Geography:
China and Asia

2. Risk, Financial Development and Firm Dynamics

Author:
Bernardo Morias
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
I document that the average productivity of firms tends to increase, and its variance to decrease, as they age. These two facts combined suggest that managers learn to reduce their mistakes as they operate. I develop a quantitative framework mimicking these dynamics and find that young firms have substantially higher financing costs due to lower and riskier returns. In this scenario, a reduction in the financial development of an economy raises disproportionately the cost of credit of young-productive firms increasing the input misallocation within this subgroup. To test the validity of the theory, I find that the data confirms some novel predictions on a series of firm-level moments. Finally, I show that introducing these two facts allows the model to better explain the relation between financial and economic development.
Topic:
Development, Economic Theory, Risk, Fiscal Policy, Models, and Productivity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. International Financial Spillovers to Emerging Market Economies: How Important Are Economic Fundamentals?

Author:
Shaghil Ahmed, Brahima Coulibaly, and Andrei Zlate
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
We assess the importance of economic fundamentals in the transmission of international shocks to financial markets in various emerging market economies (EMEs). Our analysis covers the so-called taper-tantrum episode of 2013 and six earlier episodes of severe EME-wide financial stress since the mid-1990s. Cross-country regressions lead us to the following results: (1) EMEs with relatively better economic fundamentals suffered less deterioration in financial markets during the 2013 taper-tantrum episode. (2) Differentiation among EMEs set in quite early and persisted throughout this episode. (3) Controlling for economic fundamentals, we also find that, during the taper tantrum, financial conditions deteriorated more in those EMEs that had earlier experienced larger private capital inflows and greater exchange rate appreciation. (4) For earlier episodes, we find little evidence of investor differentiation across EMEs being explained by differences in their relative vulnerabilities during EME crises of the 1990s and early 2000s. (5) That said, differentiation across EMEs based on fundamentals does not appear to be unique to the 2013 episode. Differences in economic fundamentals played a role in explaining the heterogeneous EME financial market responses during the global financial crisis of 2008, and the role of fundamentals appeared to progressively increase through the European crisis in 2011 and subsequently the 2013 taper tantrum.
Topic:
Economics, Emerging Markets, Markets, Exchange Rate Policy, Fiscal Policy, and Economic Crisis
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. The Domestic and International Effects of Interstate U.S. Banking

Author:
Matteo Cacciatore, Fabio Ghironi, and Viktors Stebunovs
Publication Date:
08-2014
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
This paper studies the domestic and international effects of national bank market integration in a two-country, dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model with endogenous producer entry. Integration of banking across localities reduces the degree of local monopoly power of financial intermediaries. The economy that implements this form of deregulation experiences increased producer entry, real exchange rate appreciation, and a current account deficit. The foreign economy experiences a long-run increase in GDP and consumption. Less monopoly power in financial intermediation results in less volatile business creation, reduced markup countercyclicality, and weaker substitution effects in labor supply in response to productivity shocks. Bank market integration thus contributes to moderation of firm-level and aggregate output volatility. In turn, trade and financial ties allow also the foreign economy to enjoy lower GDP volatility in most scenarios we consider. These results are consistent with features of U.S. and international fluctuations after the United States began its transition to interstate banking in the late 1970s.
Topic:
Markets, Monopoly, Fiscal Policy, Banking, and Interstate Cooperation
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

5. Financial Business Cycles

Author:
Matteo Iacoviello
Publication Date:
08-2014
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Using Bayesian methods, I estimate a DSGE model where a recession is initiated by losses suffered by banks and exacerbated by their inability to extend credit to the real sector. The event triggering the recession has the workings of a redistribution shock: a small sector of the economy--borrowers who use their home as collateral--defaults on their loans. When banks hold little equity in excess of regulatory requirements, the losses require them to react immediately, either by recapitalizing or by deleveraging. By deleveraging, banks transform the initial shock into a credit crunch, and, to the extent that some firms depend on bank credit, amplify and propagate the shock to the real economy. I find that redistribution and other financial shocks that affect leveraged sectors accounts for two-thirds of output collapse during the Great Recession.
Topic:
Economics, Global Recession, GDP, Economic Theory, Fiscal Policy, and Banking
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. The Replacement of Safe Assets: Evidence from the U.S. Bond Portfolio

Author:
Carol C. Bertaut, Alexandra Tabova, and Vivian Wong
Publication Date:
11-2014
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
The expansion in financial sector "safe" assets, largely in the form of structured products from the U.S. and the Caribbean, in the lead-up to the global financial crisis has by now been fairly well documented. Using a unique dataset derived from security-level data on U.S. portfolio holdings of foreign securities, we show that since the crisis, it is mostly the foreign financial sector that appears to have met U.S. demand for safe and liquid investment assets by expanding its supply of debt securities. We also find a strong negative correlation between the foreign share of the U.S. financial bond portfolio and measures of U.S. safe assets availability: providing evidence on the importance of foreign-issued financial sector debt as a substitute when U.S. issued "safe" assets are scarce. Furthermore, although U.S. investors continue to tap foreign financial markets for "safe" assets, we show that the type of foreign financial debt that fills this portfolio niche post-crisis is quite different than pre-crisis. Post-crisis, we find that U.S. investors have replaced offshore-issued structured securities with high-grade U.S. dollar-denominated financial debt issued from a small group of OECD countries (most notably Australia and Canada). Lastly, these developments have led to a decline in home bias in the U.S. financial bond portfolio that we are able to document for the first time.
Topic:
Foreign Exchange, Financial Crisis, Investment, Fiscal Policy, and Bonds
Political Geography:
Caribbean, North America, and United States of America

7. Asymmetric Information and the Death of ABS CDOs

Author:
Daniel O. Beltran, Larry Cordell, and Charles Thomas
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
A key feature of the 2007 financial crisis is that for some classes of securities trade has practically ceased. And where trade has occurred, it appears that market prices are well below their intrinsic values. This seems especially true for those securities where the payoff streams are particularly complex, for example, structured finance ABS CDOs. One explanation for this is that information about these securities' intrinsic values since the crisis has been asymmetric, with current holders having better information than potential buyers. We first characterize the information asymmetries that were present in the structured finance ABS CDO market. Because many of the CDO dealers had partially or fully integrated the pipeline from mortgage originations through CDO issuance, they had informational advantages over potential buyers that could well have disrupted trading in CDOs as the crisis took hold in August of 2007. Using a "workhorse" model for pricing securities under asymmetric information and a novel dataset for the intrinsic values of ABS CDOs, we show how the resulting adverse selection problem could explain why the bulk of these securities either trade at significant discounts to their intrinsic values or do not trade at all.
Topic:
Security, Economics, Financial Crisis, and Fiscal Policy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

8. Taxation, Match Quality and Social Welfare

Author:
Brendan Epstein and Ryan Nunn
Publication Date:
04-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
A large public finance literature argues that taxable income elasticities are a sufficient statistic for the social welfare consequences of taxation. We develop calibrations that show such deadweight loss calculations are overestimates proportional to the quantitative significance of heterogeneity in amenities across job matches. In particular, the endogenous supply of amenities can substantially exacerbate this overestimation in both static and dynamic environments. Given the possibility of gradual migration of workers into more amenity-focused job matches in response to tax increases, welfare calculations based on long-run taxable income elasticities can be more misleading than those based on short-run elasticities.
Topic:
Governance, Tax Systems, Fiscal Policy, Welfare, and Social Services
Political Geography:
Global Focus

9. The Systemic Risk of European Banks

Author:
Lamont Black, Ricardo Correa, Xu Huang, and Hao Zhou
Publication Date:
07-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
We propose a hypothetical distress insurance premium (DIP) as a measure of the European banking systemic risk, which integrates the characteristics of bank size, default probability, and interconnectedness. Based on this measure, the systemic risk of European banks reached its height in late 2011 around E 500 billion. We find that the sovereign default spread is the factor driving this heightened risk in the banking sector during the European debt crisis. The methodology can also be used to identify the individual contributions of over 50 major European banks to the systemic risk measure. This approach captures the large contribution of a number of systemically important European banks, but Italian and Spanish banks as a group have notably increased their systemic importance. We also find that bank-specific fundamentals predict the one-year-ahead systemic risk contribution of our sample of banks in an economically meaningful way.
Topic:
Debt, Regional Cooperation, European Union, Regulation, Risk, Fiscal Policy, and Banking
Political Geography:
Europe

10. Portfolio Diversification and the Cross-Sectional Distribution of Foreign Investment

Author:
Alexandra Tabova
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
In this paper I explore the role of portfolio diversification in explaining the distribution of foreign investment across countries. I capture the portfolio diversification motive by a measure of country-specific riskiness, "covariance risk", which I construct as how countries' growth rates covary with the stochastic discount factor of a representative international investor. My key new empirical finding is a strong and significant correlation between this new measure of country riskiness and foreign investment allocations. Less risky countries, i.e. countries whose growth rates are more highly correlated with the investor's stochastic discount factor, receive larger investment shares than more risky countries. I interpret this result as evidence that investors do take into account diversification opportunities, not only for portfolio investment decisions, but also for foreign direct investment decisions. My empirical results confirm the theoretical predictions of standard portfolio allocation models.
Topic:
Foreign Direct Investment, Investment, Risk, Fiscal Policy, Securities, and Stock Markets
Political Geography:
Global Focus