Knowledge that Transforms

Why in many economies households and firms borrow and make deposits in foreign currency? Expanding on the existing literature, our framework addresses this question allowing for interest rate differentials and access to foreign funds to play a role in explaining this process of asset substitution or financial dollarization. Using a newly compiled data set on transition economies and employing a standard panel as well as a panel-VAR methodology we find that increasing access to foreign funds leads to higher credit dollarization, while it decreases deposit dollarization. Interest rate differentials matter for the dollarization of both loans and deposits.

We study the impact of the arrival of macroeconomic news on the informational and noise-driven components in high-frequency quote processes and their conditional variances. We decompose bid and ask returns into a common (“efficient return”) factor and two market-side-specific components capturing market microstructure effects. The corresponding variance components reflect information-driven and noise-induced volatilities. We find that all volatility components reveal distinct dynamics and are positively influenced by news. The proportion of noise-induced variances is highest before announcements and significantly declines thereafter. Moreover, news-affected responses in all volatility components are influenced by order flow imbalances.

We investigate the source of information advantage in inter-dealer FX trading using data on trades and counter-party identities. In liquid dollar exchange rates, information is concentrated among dealers that trade most frequently and specialize their activity in a particular rate. In cross-rates, traders that engage in triangular arbitrage are best informed. Better-informed traders are also located on larger trading floors. In cross-rates, the ability to forecast flows explains all of the advantage of the triangular arbitrageurs. In liquid dollar rates, specialist traders can forecast both order-flow and the component of exchange rate changes that is uncorrelated with flow.

This paper analyzes the under-investigated relationship uniting financial development and income distribution. We use a novel approach taking into account for the first time the specific channels linking banks, capital markets and income inequality, the time-varying nature of the relationship, and reciprocal causality. We construct a set of annual indicators of banking and capital market size, robustness, efficiency and international integration. We then estimate the determinants of income distribution using a panel Bayesian structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model, for a set of 49 countries over the 1994–2002 period. We uncover a significant causality running from financial sector development to income distribution. In addition, the banking sector seems to exert a stronger impact on inequality. Finally, the relationship appears to depend on the characteristics of the financial sector, rather than on its size.

We analyze the relationship between bank size and risk-taking under the Basel II Capital Accord. Using a model with imperfect competition and moral hazard, we show that the introduction of an internal ratings based (IRB) approach improves upon flat capital requirements if the approach is applied uniformly across banks and if the costs of implementation are not too high. However, the banks’ right to choose between the standardized and the IRB approaches under Basel II gives larger banks a competitive advantage and, due to fiercer competition, pushes smaller banks to take higher risks. This may even lead to higher aggregate risk-taking.

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of different government policies to prevent the emergence of banking crises. In particular, we study the impact on welfare of using taxpayers money to recapitalize banks, government injection of money into the banking system through credit lines, the creation of a buffer and taxes on financial transactions (the Tobin tax). We illustrate the trade-off between these policies and derive policy implications.

This paper investigates the dynamics of individuals’ investments leading up to their decision to make the first investment abroad. We show that investors first invest in domestic securities and only some time later they invest abroad in foreign securities. We also show that investors who trade more often in the domestic market start to invest abroad earlier. Our findings suggest that the experience investors acquire while they trade in the domestic market is a key reason why active investors enter the foreign market earlier. A reason is that highly educated investors as well as investors with more financial knowledge, arguably those for whom learning by trading is the least important, do not need to trade as much in the domestic market before they start investing in foreign securities. Another reason is that investors who start investing in foreign securities are able to improve on their performance afterwards. This improvement in performance constitutes further evidence that the home country bias is costly.

This study proposes a new price impact ratio as an alternative to the widely used Amihud’s (2002) Return-to-Volume ratio. We demonstrate that the new price impact ratio, which is deemed Return-to-Turnover ratio, has a number of appealing features. Using daily data from all stocks listed on the London Stock Exchange over the period 1991–2008, we provide overwhelming evidence that this ratio, while being unequivocal to construct and interpret, is also free of a size bias. More importantly, it encapsulates the stocks’ cross-sectional variability in trading frequency, a relatively neglected but possibly important determinant of stock returns given the recently observed trends in financial markets. Overall, our findings argue against the conventional wisdom that there is a simple direct link between trading costs and stock returns by strongly suggesting that it is the compound effect of trading frequency and transaction costs that matters for asset pricing, not each aspect in isolation.

This paper tests the static tradeoff theory against the pecking order theory. We focus on an important difference in prediction: the static tradeoff theory argues that a firm increases leverage until it reaches its target debt ratio, while the pecking order yields debt issuance until the debt capacity is reached. We find that for our sample of US firms the pecking order theory is a better descriptor of firms’ issue decisions than the static tradeoff theory. In contrast, when we focus on repurchase decisions we find that the static tradeoff theory is a stronger predictor of firms’ capital structure decisions.

We study the decision to distribute funds as well as the choice of the payout channel (i.e. dividends, repurchases, or both). Our analysis of the payout policy of UK firms demonstrates that the importance of share repurchases is increasing, but dividends still constitute a vast proportion of the total payout. We document that there is a relation between the presence of blockholders and the choice of the payout channel. We find that payout decisions are influenced by directors’ liquidity needs but are not consistent with the agency theory of payout. We also reject the tax-clientele explanation for payout choices.