Knowledge that Transforms

We document a positive effect of product market competition (PMC) on venture capital (VC) staging. Employing large tariff rate reductions as an exogenous shock to PMC, we find that large tariff reductions lead to a greater likelihood of staged financing and a larger number of financing rounds. Cross-sectional analyses reveal that the effect is stronger for entrepreneurial firms that are younger, operate in high-tech and manufacturing industries, or receive investments from less reputable and inexperienced VCs. Our findings are consistent with the notion that by mitigating business uncertainty and survival risk, VC staging acts as a complement to PMC for enhancing entrepreneurial firms’ success.

Using a SVAR model with sign and zero restrictions, we propose a novel scheme to identify expectation, credit supply and mortgage rate shocks with the aim of exploring their role in the 2000s housing boom-bust cycles. Overall, credit supply and mortgage rate shocks are two major drivers of housing fluctuations instead of expectation shock. However, the relative importance of the three shocks varies considerably over different episodes. Specifically, gradual rise in house prices during 1999-2002 is mainly due to appreciation expectations. Such conclusion is reversed over boom-bust cycles. Compared with less than 10% contribution of expectation shock, credit supply and mortgage rate shocks become the two most important drivers of housing boom, with 20% and 24.5% contribution, respectively. In the bust, 20.2% and 23.1% of decline in house prices are associated with credit supply and mortgage rate shocks, respectively, while only 7.4% can be attributed to expectation shock.

This paper investigates how balance sheet opacity affects banks’ risk-taking behavior. We measure bank balance sheet opacity according to two metrics: the ratio of available-for-sale (AFS) securities and the ratio of off-balance sheet items. We show that balance sheet opacity is positively correlated with realized bank risk. Specifically, banks with more AFS securities have lower realized risk, while banks with more off-balance sheet items have higher realized risk. The correlation between opacity and risk depends on both macroeconomic variables and bank characteristics. The positive relationship between bank opacity and bank risk is weaker for better capitalized banks and banks that are subject to more market discipline. The relationship is also weaker during periods of favorable market conditions. Motivated by this analysis, we then investigate how regulation affects bank opacity. We show that higher capital requirements reduce bank opacity and bank risk through a portfolio rebalancing channel.

This study first investigates why only some banks use the internal models (IMs) introduced by Basel II that lead to more risk-sensitive capital ratios than standardized approaches (SA). I predict that banks opt for an IM if it allows economizing on capital requirements, given their underlying risk. I find support for this hypothesis by analyzing Mexican banks’ adoption of an IM for deposit maturity, a key input to measure interest rate risk, between 2006 and 2016. Secondly, I examine whether banks increase the duration of assets after IM adoption—high-maturity assets can be offset with deposits, leading to a lower risk exposure and additional capital savings. For the average maturity of total assets, I find no support for this conjecture. However, when a flattening of the yield curve spurs firms’ demand for high-maturity debt, micro data reveal that banks using the IM increase the duration of commercial loans more than those using the SA. These findings have broad implications for the design of internal risk models and of capital regulation.

This paper investigates patterns in housing market networks using Australian and Chinese data and a novel econometric approach based on pairwise time-varying Granger causality tests. The focus is on four fundamental questions. (1) Have housing markets become increasingly connected over time? (2) Does housing market connectivity increase or decrease with house prices? (3) Are socio-economic and geographic proximity important for housing market connections? (4) Do economic fundamentals or sentiment drive connectivity? The results reveal interesting differences in these markets and suggest that one size is not likely to fit all in terms of housing market policy.

According to the commodity currency hypothesis (CCH), a country’s commodity-export prices are predicted by its exchange rate. We investigate two types of aggregation biases that might affect CCH tests. First, monthly commodity prices are sometimes averaged across all days of the month, a practice that creates substantial spurious predictability in price changes. Second, in CCH tests commodity prices are often grouped into an index. If all commodity prices do not react equally fast to news, the active goods’ prices should lead those of the slower-acting ones and therefore predict the index. If so, the currency’s value changes can proxy for these active goods’ prices. We find a strong bias from price averaging in monthly returns, while the bias from ignoring predictability among commodities seems weak. When testing the CCH using end-of-period data the supporting evidence is weak at best.

Applying the difference-in-differences method, we show that high-speed rail (HSR) construction improves investment efficiency in China. The effect is more pronounced for companies with low information transparency and low media coverage, suggesting that HSR can mitigate information asymmetry while reducing external regulatory costs. Our analysis also shows that the effect is more powerful for non-state-owned enterprises, high-growth firms, and those companies located in core cities. Overall, our findings suggest that HSR can improve investment efficiency by shortening the travel time between firms and their investors.

We provide market-based evidence that a capital loss that is realized in the beginning of the year is less valuable than a loss that is taken at the end of the year. A simple binomial tree model that captures the resolution of tax rate uncertainty closely mimics observed market prices. Tax rate uncertainty arises from not knowing until the end of the calendar year whether the investor will have realized sufficient capital gains to fully benefit from losses harvested early in the year. We conclude that tax rate uncertainty influences investor behavior.

We develop a methodology to measure the expected loss of commercial banks in a market downturn, which we call stressed expected loss (SEL). We simulate a market downturn as a negative shock on interest rate and credit market risk factors that reflect the banks’ market-sensitive assets. We measure SEL as the difference between the mark-to-market value of the assets in the downturn and the book value of the liabilities. Based on large U.S. commercial banks, we empirically demonstrate that individual SEL predicts the loss of capital projected by banks in a severely adverse scenario and that aggregate SEL predicts macroeconomic variables.

How does the expansion of domestic banks in international markets affect the bank lending channel of monetary policy? Using bank-firm loan-level data, we find that loan growth and loan rates from international banks respond less to monetary policy changes than domestic banks and that internationalization partially mitigates the risk-taking channel of monetary policy. Banks with a large international presence tend to tolerate more their credit risk exposition relative to domestic banks. Moreover, international banks tend to rely more on foreign funding when policy rates change, allowing them to insulate better the monetary policy changes from their credit supply than domestic banks. This result is consistent with the predictions of the internal capital markets hypothesis. We also show that macroprudential FX regulation reduces banks with high FX exposition access to foreign funding, ultimately contributing to monetary policy transmission. Overall, our results suggest that the internationalization of banks lowers the potency of the bank lending channel. Furthermore, it diminishes the risk-taking channel of monetary policy within the limit established by macroprudential FX regulations.