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Working Paper
Too-Big-to-Fail before the Fed
?Too-big-to-fail? is consistent with policies followed by private bank clearing houses during financial crises in the U.S. National Banking Era prior to the existence of the Federal Reserve System. Private bank clearing houses provided emergency lending to member banks during financial crises. This behavior strongly suggests that ?too-big-to-fail? is not the problem causing modern crises. Rather, it is a reasonable response to the threat posed to large banks by the vulnerability of short-term debt to runs.
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Uncertain booms and fragility
I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: ?normal times,? periods of modest investment, and ?booms,? periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur when the intermediary sector realizes moderate investment opportunities. Booms occur when the intermediary sector realizes many investment opportunities, but also occur when it realizes very few opportunities. As a result, investors face greater uncertainty in booms. During a boom, subsequent arrival of ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Dominance and US Monetary: 1940–1975
This narrative investigates the frictions that existed between the Federal Reserve?s monetary policies and the US Treasury?s debt-management operations from the onset of the Second World War through the end of the Federal Reserve?s even-keel actions in mid-1975. The analysis suggests that three factors can help explain why the Federal Reserve compromised the attainment of its statutorily mandated monetary-policy objectives for debt-management reasons: 1) the existence of an existential threat, 2) the fear that to do otherwise would create instability in the banking sector, and 3) the ...
Working Paper
Oil, Volatility and Institutions: Cross-Country Evidence from Major Oil Producers
This paper examines the long-run effects of oil revenue and its volatility on economic growth as well as the role of institutions in this relationship. We collect annual and monthly data on a sample of 17 major oil producers over the period 1961-2013, and use the standard panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach as well as its cross-sectionally augmented version (CS-ARDL) for estimation. Therefore, in contrast to the earlier literature on the resource curse, we take into account all three key features of the panel: dynamics, heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. Our ...
Working Paper
What we learn from China's rising shadow banking: exploring the nexus of monetary tightening and banks' role in entrusted lending
We argue that China's rising shadow banking was inextricably linked to potential balance-sheet risks in the banking system. We substantiate this argument with three didactic findings: (1) commercial banks in general were prone to engage in channeling risky entrusted loans; (2) shadow banking through entrusted lending masked small banks' exposure to balance-sheet risks; and (3) two well-intended regulations and institutional asymmetry between large and small banks combined to give small banks an incentive to exploit regulatory arbitrage by bringing off-balance-sheet risks into the balance ...
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Intermediary balance sheets
We document the cyclical properties of the balance sheets of different types of intermediaries. While the leverage of the bank sector is highly procyclical, the leverage of the nonbank financial sector is acyclical. We propose a theory of a two-agent financial intermediary sector within a dynamic model of the macroeconomy. Banks are financed by issuing risky debt to households and face risk-based capital constraints, which leads to procyclical leverage. Households can also participate in financial markets by investing in a nonbank ?fund? sector where fund managers face skin-in-the-game ...
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Liquidity policies and systemic risk
The growth of wholesale-funded credit intermediation has motivated liquidity regulations. We analyze a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which liquidity and capital regulations interact with the supply of risk-free assets. In the model, the endogenously time-varying tightness of liquidity and capital constraints generates intermediaries? leverage cycle, influencing the pricing of risk and the level of risk in the economy. Our analysis focuses on liquidity policies? implications for household welfare. Within the context of our model, liquidity requirements are preferable to ...
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The Countercyclical Benefits of Regulatory Costs
Legal academics, journalists, and senior executive branch officials alike have assumed that the cost of imposing new regulatory requirements is higher in severe recessions that drive the central bank’s policy rate to zero than in other times. This is not correct; the aggregate output costs of regulatory requirements decrease, not increase, in such recessions. This article is the first to analyze how this effect arises, drawing on both conventional macroeconomic models and empirical findings from the econometrics literature. Scholars and policymakers have likely missed the countercyclical ...
Working Paper
Reforming Fiscal Institutions in Resource-Rich Arab Economies: Policy Proposals
This paper traces the evolution of fiscal institutions of Resource-Rich Arab Economies (RRAEs) over time since their pre-oil days, through the discovery of oil to their build-up of oil exports. It then identifies challenges faced by RRAEs and variations in their severity among the different countries over time. Finally, it articulates specific policy reforms, which, if implemented successfully, could help to overcome these challenges. In some cases, however, these policy proposals may give rise to important trade-offs that will have to be evaluated carefully in individual cases.
Working Paper
Impacts of Monetary Stimulus on Credit Allocation and Macroeconomy: Evidence from China
We develop a new empirical framework to identify and estimate the effects of monetary stimulus on the real economy. The framework is applied to the Chinese economy when monetary policy in normal times was switched to an extraordinarily expansionary regime to combat the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. We show that this unprecedented monetary stimulus accounted for as high as a 4 percent increase of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate by the end of 2009. Monetary transmission to the real economy was through bank credit allocated disproportionately to financing investment in real ...