Commentary on "Rebalancing the three pillars of Basel II."

This paper was part of the conference "Beyond Pillar 3 in International Banking Regulation: Disclosure and Market Discipline of Financial Firms," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia Business School, October 2-3, 2003.Bank supervision ; Bank capital ; Banking law

An Adverse Selection Model of Bank Asset and Liability Management with Implications for the Transmission of Monetary Policy

This paper develops a model of bank asset and liability management, based on the idea that information problems make it difficult for banks to raise funds with instruments other than insured deposits. The model can be used to address the question of how monetary policy works. One effect it captures is that when the Fed reduces reserves, this tightens banks' financing constraints and thereby leads to a cutback in bank lending -- this is the 'bank lending channel' in action. However, in addition to providing a specific set of microfoundations for the lending channel, the model also yields a novel account of how monetary policy affects bond-market interest rates.

Waves of Creative Destruction: Customer Bases and the Dynamics of Innovation

This paper develops a model of repeated innovation with knowledge spillovers. The model's novel feature is that firms compete on two dimensions: 1) product quality or cost, where one firm's innovation ultimately spills over to other firms; and 2) distribution costs, where there are no spillovers across firms and where incumbent firms' existing customer bases give them a competitive advantage over would- be entrants. Customer bases have two important consequences: 1) they can in some circumstances dramatically reduce the long-run average level of innovation; 2) they lead to endogenous bunching, or waves, in innovative activity.

Simple Forecasts and Paradigm Shifts

We postulate that agents make forecasts using overly simplified models of the world—i. e. , models that only embody a subset of available information. We then go on to study the implications of learning in this environment. Our key premise is that learning is based on a model-selection criterion. Thus if a particular simple model does a poor job of forecasting over a period of time, it is eventually discarded in favor of an alternative, yet equally simple model that would have done better over the same period. This theory makes several distinctive predictions, which, for concreteness, we develop in a stock-market setting. For example, starting with symmetric and homoskedastic fundamentals, the theory yields forecastable variation in the size of the value/glamour differential, in volatility, and in the skewness of returns. Some of these features mirror familiar accounts of stock-price bubbles.

Market Liquidity as a Sentiment Indicator

We build a model that helps explain why increases in liquidity - such as lower bid-ask spreads, a lower price impact of trade, or higher share turnover - predict lower subsequent returns in both firm-level and aggregate data. The model features a class of irrational investors, who underreact to the information contained in order flow, thereby boosting liquidity. In the presence of short-sales constraints, unusually high liquidity is a symptom of the fact that the market is currently dominated by these irrational investors, and hence is overvalued. This theory can also explain how managers might successfully time the market for seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), by simply following a rule of thumb that involves issuing when the SEO market is particularly liquid. Empirically, we find that: i) aggregate measures of equity issuance and share turnover are highly correlated; yet ii) in a multiple regression, both have incremental predictive power for future equal-weighted market returns.

Cyclical implications of the Basel II capital standards

This article reviews the economic efficiency implications of the Basel II capital standards. The authors argue that the mapping from measures of loan risk to capital requirements should not be time-invariant, but rather should be allowed to vary with business cycle conditions. They also attempt to assess empirically how much cyclicality in capital requirements might be induced by the current Basel II proposal. They find that the degree of cyclicality can be substantial.Bank capital ; Business cycles

Monetary Policy and Bank Lending

This paper surveys recent work that relates to the "lending" view of monetary policy transmission. It has three main goals: 1) to explain why it is important to distinguish between the lending and "money" views of policy transmission; 2) to outline the microeconomic conditions that are needed to generate a lending channel; and 3) to review the empirical evidence that bears on the lending view.

Growth vs. Margins: Destabilizing Consequences of Giving the Stock Market What it Wants

We develop a multi-tasking model in which a firm can devote its efforts either to increasing sales growth, or to improving per-unit profit margins by, e.g., cutting costs. If the firm's manager is concerned with the current stock price, she will tend to favor the growth strategy at those times when the stock market is paying more attention to performance on the growth dimension. Conversely, it can be rational for the stock market to weight observed growth measures more heavily when it is known that the firm is following a growth strategy. This two-way feedback between firms' business strategies and the market's pricing rule can lead to purely intrinsic fluctuations in sales and output, creating excess volatility in these real variables even in the absence of any external source of shocks.

Risk Management, Capital Budgeting and Capital Structure Policy for Financial Institutions: An Integrated Approach

We develop a framework for analyzing the capital allocation and capital structure decisions facing financial institutions such as banks. Our model incorporates two key features: I) value-maximizing banks have a well-founded concern with risk management; and ii) not all the risks they face can be frictionlessly hedged in the capital market. This approach allows us to show how bank-level risk management considerations should factor into the pricing of those risks that cannot be easily hedged. We examine several applications, including: the evaluation of proprietary trading operations; and the pricing of unhedgeable derivatives portfolios. This paper was presented at the Financial Institutions Center's May 1996 conference on "

Risk Management, Capital Budgeting and Capital Structure Policy for Financial Institutions: An Integrated Approach

We develop a framework for analyzing the capital allocation and capital structure decisions facing financial institutions such as banks. Our model incorporates two key features: i) value-maximizing banks have a well-founded concern with risk management; and ii) not all the risks they face can be frictionlessly hedged in the capital market. This approach allows us to show how bank-level risk management considerations should factor into the pricing of those risks that cannot be easily hedged. We examine several applications, including the evaluation of proprietary trading operations, and the pricing of unhedgeable derivatives positions.