Knowledge that Transforms

Speculation creates an adverse selection cost for utility traders, who will choose not to trade if this cost exceeds the benefits of using the asset market. However, if they do not participate, the market collapses, since private information alone is not sufficient to create a motive for trade. There is, therefore, a limit to the number of speculative transactions that a given market can support. This paper compares this limit in decentralized, monopoly-intermediated and competitively-intermediated market regimes, finding that the second regime is best equipped to deal with speculation: an informed monopolist can price-discriminate investors and thus always avoid market breakdowns. These regimes are also compared in terms of welfare and trading volume. The analysis suggests a reason for the presence of intermediaries in financial markets.

Existing regulatory capital requirements are often criticized for only being loosely linked to the economic risk of the banks' assets. In view of the attempts of international regulators to introduce more risk sensitive capital requirements, we theoretically examine the effect of specific regulatory capital requirements on the risk-taking behavior of banks. More precisely, we develop a continuous time framework where the banks' choice of asset risk is endogenously determined. We compare regulation based on the Basel I building block approach to value-at-risk or ‘internal model’-based capital requirements with respect to risk taking behavior, deposit insurance liability, and shareholder value. The main findings are: (i) value-at-risk-based capital regulation creates a stronger incentive to reduce asset risk when banks are solvent, (ii) solvent banks that reduce their asset risk reduce the current value of the deposit insurance liability significantly, (iii) under value-at-risk regulation the risk reduction behavior of banks is less sensitive to changes in their investment opportunity set, and (iv) banks' equityholders can benefit from risk-based capital requirements.

Using data from regulatory reports, we examine the relationship between stock repurchases and financial performance for a large sample of bank holding companies. The sample includes both publicly-traded and non-publicly traded banking companies. The primary result is that higher levels of repurchases in one year are associated with higher profitability and a lower share of problem loans in the subsequent year. Our results appear to be driven primarily by bank holding companies with publicly-traded stock, especially those companies whose stock is traded on major exchanges. In assessing the source of the repurchase-performance link, we find evidence suggesting that it may be driven by different factors for different types of bank holding companies. In particular, the evidence is consistent with free-cash-flow considerations for banks traded on major stock exchanges, but only weakly supports this explanation for smaller, closely-held companies.

We consider a general equilibrium model with frictions in credit markets used by households. In our economy, houses provide housing services to consumers and serve as collateral to lower borrowing cost. We show that this amplifies and propagates the effect of monetary policy shocks on housing investment, house prices and consumption. We also consider the effect of a structural change in credit markets that lowers the transaction costs of additional borrowing against housing equity. We show that such a change would increase the effect of monetary policy shocks on consumption, but would decrease the effect on house prices and housing investment.