Search Results
Journal Article
So Far, So Good: Government Insurance of Financial Sector Tail Risk
The US government has intervened to provide extraordinary support 16 times from 1970 to 2020 with the goal of preventing or mitigating (or both) the cost of financial instability to the financial sector and the real economy. This article discusses the motivation for such support, reviewing the instances where support was provided, along with one case where it was expected but not provided. The article then discusses the moral hazard and fiscal risks posed by the government's insurance of the tail risk along with ways to reduce the government's risk exposure.
Journal Article
Transmission of Sovereign Risk to Bank Lending
Banks hold a significant exposure to their own sovereigns. An increase in sovereign risk may hurt banks' balance sheets, causing a decrease in lending and a decline in economic activity. We quantify the transmission of sovereign risk to bank lending and provide new evidence about the effect of sovereign risk on economic outcomes. We consider the 1999 Marmara earthquake in Turkey as an exogenous shock leading to an increase in Turkey's default risk. Our empirical estimates show that, for banks holding a higher amount of government securities, the exogenous change in sovereign default risk ...
Working Paper
Sovereign Risk and Bank Lending: Theory and Evidence from a Natural Disaster
We quantify the sovereign-bank doom loop by using the 1999 Marmara earthquake as an exogenousshock leading to an increase in Turkey’s default risk. Our theoretical model illustrates that for banks withhigher exposure to government securities, a higher sovereign default risk implies lower net worth andtightening financial constraint. Our empirical estimates confirm the model’s predictions, showing that theexogenous change in sovereign default risk tightens banks’ financial constraints significantly for banks thathold a higher amount of government securities. The resulting tighter bank ...
Working Paper
Geopolitical Risk and Global Banking
How do banks respond to geopolitical risk, and is this response distinct from other macroeconomic risks? Using U.S. supervisory data and new geopolitical risk indices, we show that banks reduce cross-border lending to countries with elevated geopolitical risk but continue lending to those markets through foreign affiliates—unlike their response to other macro risks. Furthermore, banks reduce domestic lending when geopolitical risk rises abroad, especially when they operate foreign affiliates. A simple banking model in which geopolitical shocks feature expropriation risk can explain these ...
Working Paper
What are the consequences of global banking for the international transmission of shocks?: a quantitative analysis
The global financial crisis of 2008 was followed by a wave of regulatory reforms that affected large banks, especially those with a global presence. These reforms were reactive to the crisis. In this paper we propose a structural model of global banking that can be used proactively to perform counterfactual analysis on the effects of alternative regulatory policies. The structure of the model mimics the US regulatory framework and highlights the organizational choices that banks face when entering a foreign market: branching versus subsidiarization. When calibrated to match moments from a ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy and global banking
Global banks use their global balance sheets to respond to local monetary policy. However, sources and uses of funds are often denominated in different currencies. This leads to a foreign exchange (FX) exposure that banks need to hedge. If cross?currency flows are large, the hedging cost increases, diminishing the return on lending in foreign currency. We show that, in response to domestic monetary policy easing, global banks increase their foreign reserves in currency areas with the highest interest rate, while decreasing lending in these markets. We also find an increase in FX hedging ...
Working Paper
The Valuation Effects of Trade
This paper estimates the cash flow and real effects of currency mismatches generated by foreign-priced operations of French manufacturers. The value of transactions invoiced in foreign currencies is twice as sensitive to exchange rates as the value of transactions invoiced in the domestic currency. I aggregate foreign-priced operations to the firm level to build a shift-share measure of invoice currency mismatch. This measure outperforms any trade-weighted effective exchange rate index in explaining cash flows of trading firms. Large firms absorb valuation shocks in their balance sheet, and ...
Working Paper
On the Origins of the Multinational Premium
How do foreign direct investment (FDI) dynamics relate to the risk premium of a firm? To answer this question, we compare the stock returns of US firms with different FDI and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) exposure to study the evolution of stock returns as firms expand into foreign markets. We document three empirical regularities. First, there are cross-sectional risk premia associated with both multinational activity and mergers and acquisitions. Second, firm-level stock returns decline when a firm undertakes M&A activity and with merger deepening. Third, future multinational acquirers ...
Working Paper
Exchange rates dynamics with long-run risk and recursive preferences
Standard macro models cannot explain why real exchange rates are volatile and disconnected from macro aggregates. Recent research argues that models with persistent growth rate shocks and recursive preferences can solve that puzzle. I show that this result is highly sensitive to the structure of financial markets. When just a bond is traded internationally, then long-run risk generates insufficient exchange rate volatility. A long-run risk model with recursive-preferences can generate realistic exchange rate volatility, if all agents efficiently share their consumption risk by trading in ...
Working Paper
Official Debt Restructurings and Development
Despite the frequency of official debt restructurings, little systematic evidence has been produced on their characteristics and implications. Using a dataset covering more than 400 Paris Club agreements, this paper fills that gap. It provides a comprehensive description of the evolving characteristics of these operations and studies their impact on debtors. The progressive introduction of new terms of treatment gradually turned the Paris Club from an institution primarily concerned with preserving creditors? claims into an instrument to foster development in the world?s poorer nations, among ...