Knowledge that Transforms

We develop a behavioral New Keynesian model to analyze optimal monetary policy with heterogeneously myopic households and firms. Five key results are derived. First, our model reflects coherent microeconomic and aggregate myopia due to the consistent transition from subjective to objective expectations. Second, the optimal monetary policy entails implementing inflation targeting in a framework where myopia distorts agents’ inflation expectations. Third, price level targeting emerges as the optimal policy under output gap, revenue, or interest rate myopia. Under price level targeting, rational inflation expectations are a minimal condition for optimality under bounded rationality. Fourth, bounded rationality is not necessarily welfare-decreasing and is even associated with welfare gains for extreme cognitive discounting. Finally, our empirical results point to the behavioral model’s superiority over the rational model.

Government interventions as a solution to systemic banking crises continue to receive wide criticism. The new regulatory frameworks advocate banks’ bail-ins and resolutions that do not require governments’ involvement. However, as the recent events with Credit Suisse and Silicon Valley Bank show, the government still plays an active role in rescuing and resolving the bank's problems. We use the financial stability model of Goodhart et al.’s (2005, 2006a) to analyze the effects of various bank policy interventions on banks’ performance during the crisis rescue phase. We then explore whether those interventions work effectively in facilitating bank recovery and whether they reduce systemic risk in the long run. We use a unique granular bank-level dataset from 22 advanced economies covering the 1992–2017 period. We find that bank recapitalization without debt resolution measures does not resolve bank distress. The empirical results document that “bad-bank” resolution is positively correlated with a bank’s recovery as well as lower systemic risk. Those findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the optimal bank resolution architecture during systemic events.

Prior literature finds that staggered state-level adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) significantly constrains labor mobility. Using the IDD as an exogenous shock to labor mobility, we find that firms headquartered in states that adopt the IDD gravitate towards issuing short-term debt for external debt financing. We examine three mechanisms—default risk, information asymmetry, and agency cost mitigation—through which labor mobility restrictions affect debt maturity. Our results provide support for the information asymmetry mechanism, which suggests that firms are more inclined to use short-term debt when their information environment deteriorates. We find that in the wake of IDD adoption, firms tend to utilize short-term debt only in corporate bond markets and their debt maturity profiles become more concentrated.

The present paper estimates the impact of bureaucratic corruption on access to finance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sectors of 79 developing countries. Corruption can make it difficult for businesses to obtain financing by reducing profits, increasing credit demand, increasing the likelihood of bankruptcy , creating uncertainty about future profits, and exacerbating the asymmetric information problem between borrowers and lenders. Consistent with this viewpoint, our findings show that corruption significantly increases the likelihood of a manufacturing SME being financially constrained. A one standard deviation increase in the prevalence of corruption leads to a 3.5–4.9% point increase in the likelihood or probability of a manufacturing SME being financially constrained. In countries with credit bureaus and more freely functioning credit markets, the increase in the likelihood of being financially constrained due to higher corruption is much smaller. We argue and provide evidence that these heterogeneities stem from the specific ways in which corruption affects SMEs’ access to finance . Thus, the heterogeneities help to raise confidence against the omitted variable bias and reverse causality concerns with our estimation. We also find that higher corruption makes it more difficult for SMEs to access finance in more competitive product markets, as well as for small compared to medium-sized firms. The findings have important policy implications for anti-corruption initiatives, financial development, and the level of competition in product markets.

This paper addresses the question, “Does lenders’ culture affect their monitoring efforts and style?”, by exploring whether lender individualism affects the loan monitoring of U.S. borrowers for a sample of 27,164 syndicated loan facilities granted between 1998 and 2017. We proxy lender individualism based on the ancestral country of origin of the lead bank's CEO. We show that lender individualism leads to a less stringent monitoring style. We find that individualist lenders resort less to covenant monitoring, impose less strict contract terms, such as performance pricing and rely more on soft information. We also provide evidence that individualist lenders retain a larger loan share and deal with a larger number of lenders. Finally, we find that some governance characteristics (board size and percentage of female directors) and other CEO features (cash compensation, tenure, and non-duality) moderate the negative association between lender individualism and loan monitoring.

We use a novel, household opinion-based measure – Public Confidence in a Bank – to explore the role of bank-level and industry-level determinants of retail customers’ trust in commercial banks. Our study tracks bank-month confidence measures during the 1/1/2010–1/1/2019 period in an unbalanced sample of 181 closely monitored large Russian banks that collectively account for the supermajority of the country’s banking assets. We find that contrary to common expectations, public confidence in a bank is heavily driven by the industry-level financial stability indicators, while bank-level risk measures play only a minimal – or, at best, supplementary – role. This result reveals the important role of overall banking sector stability in determining public perception of the safety and soundness of individual banks and justifies the leading role of industry-level stability in ensuring trust in banks.

Credit unions in the United States (US) are exempt (benefit from subsidies) from federal corporate income taxes, which are traditionally justified by their non-profit cooperative status and mission of meeting the financial needs of individuals of modest means. In recent years, the efficacy and fairness of these subsidies has been debated extensively as the traditional demarcation between banks and credit unions and their respective customer bases have blurred. To investigate how credit unions allocate subsidies to various stakeholders, we estimate a structural profit model for matched pairs of credit unions and commercial banks. We find that credit unions use most (approximately 90%) of their tax exemption for the benefit of their membership via above-market deposit interest rates.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) enhanced its large-scale asset purchases in October 2010 by purchasing equity exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This study is the first to demonstrate that the BOJ provides downside protection for stock prices through the countercyclical purchase of ETFs. The BOJ responds to a large negative stock return during the overnight and morning periods, and submits purchase orders during lunchtime. Using the BOJ’s March 2020 announcement of doubling the annual purchase amount during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study also finds that the announcement effect is small and temporary. In contrast, the flow effect of the actual purchases is significant and increases. The BOJ’s countercyclical ETF purchase prevents equity risk premia from rising during an economic downturn.

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout expects to mitigate the severe negative impacts of the pandemic on global financial markets. Our study provides supporting evidence for this expectation. We find robust evidence that vaccinations significantly reduce the cross-country stock volatility connectedness among G7 nations, suggesting that the diversification benefits of an international equity portfolio may be enhanced during the pandemic when vaccinations accelerate. We present two explanations for this result. First, the vaccine deployment improves stock market return and decreases individual stock market volatility. Second, the vaccine rollout helps a country’s stock market be more resilient to exogenous shocks. We further demonstrate that a global portfolio using a tactical allocation rule based on the intensity of vaccinations can outperform a buy-and-hold portfolio in terms of risk-adjusted returns.

We investigate how external credit market development affects corporate earnings management, by studying the impact of the U.S. interstate banking and branching deregulations on the intensity of accruals-based and real earnings management. We find that the banking and branching deregulations significantly decrease both accruals-based and real earnings-management intensity among firms in deregulated states. The effect is stronger for those deregulated states that have lower bank branch density before deregulation and states that have greater out-of-state bank entry after deregulation. The impact on corporate earnings management is channelled through increased banking competition and credit supply providing firms with easier access to external financing. The findings are robust to various endogeneity concerns. We further document that interstate banking and branching deregulations reduce the instances of financial results being subsequently affected by accounting restatements and improve firms’ information environment.