Knowledge that Transforms

We study how political corruption affects stock market participation among households in China. Our identification strategy exploits recent anticorruption campaigns that reduce households’ exposure to political corruption and within-province variation in lifetime exposure to local corruption. We find that households with higher corruption exposure participate less in the stock market at both the extensive and intensive margins. Removals of top provincial officials during the anticorruption campaign increase the probability of stock market participation by 3 percentage points and households’ net equity purchases and equity share percentage by 13.2 and 0.2 percentage points, respectively. The effect is predominantly driven by the nonpecuniary effect of corruption on households’ trust and perceptions of institutional quality rather than on households’ accumulation of wealth. Our work highlights the negative externalities of political corruption on financial markets.

This paper studies the systemic risk contribution of a set of large publicly traded European banks. Over a sample covering the last twenty years and three different crises, we find that all banks in our sample significantly contribute to systemic risk. Moreover, larger banks and banks with a business model more exposed to trading and financial market volatility, contribute more. In the shorter sample characterized by the Covid-19 shock, sovereign default risks significantly affected the systemic risk contribution of all banks. However, the ECB announcement of the Pandemic Emergency Purchasing Programme restored calm in the European banking sector.

The liquidity of financial system plays a central role in systemic crises. In this paper, we show that the ECB haircut policies provided an important liquidity support to distressed financial institutions during the euro area sovereign debt turmoil. Using novel, micro data on the pool of collateral eligible to ECB open market operations, we construct a “public” liquidity mismatch indicator (LMI) for the French aggregate banking sector based on the ECB haircuts. We then compare it to the “private” LMI based on the haircuts in private repo markets in the spirit of Bai et al. (2018). The difference between the two indicators represents a new measure of the ECB liquidity support. Our results suggest that the ECB haircut policies indeed helped French banks to reduce the liquidity mismatch. Moreover, higher ECB liquidity support is associated with higher cash and sovereign asset holdings by the French banks as well as with their lower probability of default.

We introduce and study the main properties of a class of convex risk measures that refine Expected Shortfall by simultaneously controlling the expected losses associated with different portions of the tail distribution. The corresponding adjusted Expected Shortfalls quantify risk as the minimum amount of capital that has to be raised and injected into a financial position X to ensure that Expected Shortfall ESp(X) does not exceed a pre-specified threshold g(p) for every probability level p∈[0,1]. Through the choice of the benchmark risk profile g one can tailor the risk assessment to the specific application of interest. We devote special attention to the study of risk profiles defined by the Expected Shortfall of a benchmark random loss, in which case our risk measures are intimately linked to second-order stochastic dominance.

COVID-19 has temporarily changed the relative costs and benefits of different payment methods: cash has become more costly in terms of health risks, ease of use and likelihood of acceptance, whereas debit card usage has become less costly. As a result, consumers have shifted away from cash. Based on unique daily payment diary survey data collected between January 2018 and December 2021 amongst a representative panel of Dutch consumers, we study the shift in payment behaviour and payment preferences during two lockdown periods in the Netherlands in 2020 and 2021. Since the start of the first lockdown the likelihood of debit card usage at the expense of cash has increased by 12 percentage points compared to its trend level. About 60 percent of this shift on top of the autonomous trend persisted several months after the end of the first lockdown and part of it has persisted several months after the end of the second lockdown. The results indicate that the pandemic accelerated the increased usage of debit card at the POS, especially during the first pandemic year. Also, the pandemic has resulted in a shift in payment preferences towards more contactless payments. Both effects are largest for elderly people.

We study the impact of disclosure about bank fundamentals on depositors’ behavior in the presence (and absence) of economic linkages between financial institutions. Using a controlled laboratory environment, we identify under which conditions disclosure is conducive to bank stability. We find that bank deposits are sensitive to perceived bank performance. While banks with strong fundamentals benefit from more precise disclosure, an opposite effect is present for solvent banks with weaker fundamentals. Depositors take information about economic linkages into account and correctly identify when disclosure about one institution conveys meaningful information for others. Our findings suggest potential costs of bank transparency and that disclosure may not always be stability-enhancing.

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.

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.