Knowledge that Transforms

Central bank financial strength has not been a fundamental issue for a substantial period of time. However, recent theoretical and empirical studies argue that central banks need to maintain a sufficient level of financial strength to perform their functions effectively and to achieve monetary policy objectives. In this study, we examine the empirical relationship between central bank financial strength and inflation using an unbalanced panel data set for a sample of selected advanced and emerging countries. We observe a statistically significant and robust negative relationship between central bank financial strength and inflation. This relationship is robust in the presence of other determinants of inflation and for alternative estimation methods. Our results have important implications for policy makers and central bankers. Particularly, our results suggest that avoiding persistent losses and maintaining the health of the central bank balance sheet remain vital pre-conditions for desirable policy outcomes of a central bank.

Recent research finds that poorer individuals make financial mistakes when the decisions are difficult and rare. We examine who makes financial mistakes involving decisions that are easier and more frequent – specifically, the inadvertent failure to pay monthly credit card balances when sufficient funds are available. On the one hand poorer individuals may make such mistakes because of lower levels of financial literacy. Alternatively, richer individuals may make such mistakes because of the relatively lower costs to them of such mistakes. We examine this question using confidential individual credit card statement data, with over a million data points. Our results show that poorer individuals are more likely to make these mistakes, even after controlling for education.

Bank equity capital can play several roles; for example as a buffer against (unexpected) loss, as protection for other creditors in bankruptcy, and as ‘skin in the game’. There was never sufficient discussion of which role(s) the BCBS capital adequacy requirements (CARs) were meant to play, and whether they did so satisfactorily. In practice they did not. I discuss what principles should lie behind CARs if we could design these from scratch. I argue that there should be a minimum intervention point triggering official action to depose management and shareholders, and then move to resolution, with an increasingly penal ladder of sanctions as equity capital falls towards this point. A similar approach should also be applied to liquidity requirements.

This paper analyzes the effects of two regulatory mechanisms, namely a regulation of the structure of bank CEOs incentive pay and sanctions for the CEOs of failed banks, on bank risk shifting. We extend a standard model of CEO compensation by incorporating leverage and an investment decision. To the extent that bank depositors and creditors are even partially protected by public guarantees, we show that it is in the interests of bank shareholders to choose more risky investments than would be socially optimal, and therefore to design a CEO contract with excessive risk taking incentives. Thus, we argue that current corporate governance arrangements in the banking sector are not efficient. In this setting, we show that putting in place one of the aforementioned mechanisms could yield the socially optimal outcome at no cost. We also identify some limitations and potential perverse effects of these mechanisms.

This paper analyzes how risk premiums altered the use of commercial paper relative to bank loans during the recent financial crisis. Consistent with the theoretical and empirical literature on how surges in risk premiums can induce plunges in under-collateralized credit or credit funded with noninsured sources, results indicate that a spike in risk premiums induced a plunge in commercial paper use during the recent crisis. This paper also finds that Federal Reserve interventions in the money market helped prevent the commercial paper market from melting down to the extent seen during the early 1930s.

In standard public finance theory a government's cost of borrowing depends on the common beliefs held by rational investors regarding default risk. We advance understanding of the effects of diverse beliefs and overconfidence among investors in their ability to assess the sovereign's creditworthiness. Theoretically, we find that demand for insurance against default is positively related to the absolute difference between the market price of sovereign risk and the risk forecasted by the economy's fundamentals. We find preliminary support for this prediction in a newly available dataset on sovereign credit default swaps (CDSs): after controlling for the size of the public debt, the absolute size of the gap between the actual and forecasted spreads is positively related to the value of outstanding CDSs.

Banks’ controlling owners may exploit business relationships with other firms so as to tangibly or intangibly benefit themselves. This paper uses data from more than 2600 firms across 25 countries to study whether the control rights of the banks’ controlling owners are associated with whether firms need special connections with banks in order to obtain loans. I find that the control rights of the controlling owners increase the need for special connections. I also find that supervisory power raises the need for special connections and intensifies the adverse effect induced by concentrated control. No evidence is found that shareholder rights protection reduces the need for special connections, nor that bank officials become less corrupted as the control rights of the controlling owners increase. The results thus indicate that an increase in the control rights of the banks’ controlling owners only reduces the integrity of bank lending.

It has been argued that economies with more independent central banks experience lower inflation over time. In this paper we show that this relationship is sensitive to the methodology through which central bank independence indices are constructed. We stress the importance of employing dynamic central bank independence indices in two ways. First, we perform unit root tests with structural breaks to verify if the implementation of central bank reforms represents a structural break for the inflation rate dynamics. Second, we implement a panel data analysis. We find evidence that legislative reforms that modify the degree of independence of a central bank have a strong impact on the inflation rate dynamics. Moreover, underlying the importance of employing dynamic central bank independence indices, we confirm the negative relationship between the latter and inflation for a sample of 10 OECD countries.

Since the mid-1990s worldwide efforts were undertaken to improve the effectiveness of financial supervision, through modifications in the architecture and governance. Did these improvements mitigate the 2008–2009 Crisis? This paper brings the first systematic analysis of the role of three main efforts: consolidation in supervision, decreasing central bank involvement and improving supervisory governance. The analysis employs a new and complex database on supervisory architecture and governance for 102 countries and uses two new indicators to evaluate the supervisory regime: the Financial Supervision Herfindahl Hirschman (FSHH) and the Central Bank Supervisor Share (CBSS) Indexes. The empirical tests allow us to disentangle the relative effects of the supervisory regimes on macroeconomic resilience. We conclude that two supervisory features—supervisory consolidation and supervisory governance—were negatively correlated with resilience, while central bank involvement in supervision did not have any significant impact. Our results show that the conditions under which micro-features of the supervisory design produce automatically macro-optimal outcomes are far from identified, and consequently contradict what was the generally accepted view before the crisis.