Explaining the Great Moderation: Credit in the Macroeconomy Revisited

This study in recent history connects macroeconomic performance to financial policies in order to explain the decline in volatility of economic growth in the US since the mid-1980s, which is also known as the ‘Great Moderation’. Existing explanations attribute this to a combination of good policies, good environment, and good luck. This paper hypothesizes that before and during the Great Moderation, changes in the structure and regulation of US financial markets caused a redirection of credit flows, increasing the share of mortgage credit in total credit flows and facilitating the smoothing of volatility in GDP via equity withdrawal and a wealth effect on consumption. Institutional and econometric analysis is employed to assess these hypotheses. This yields substantial corroboration, lending support to a novel ‘policy’ explanation of the Moderation.real estate, macro volatility

Macroeconomic Effects of Corporate Default Crises: A Long-Term Perspective

Using an extensive new data set on corporate bond defaults in the U.S. from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the U.S. has experienced many severe corporate default crises in which 20 to 50 percent of all corporate bonds defaulted. Although the total par amount of corporate bonds has often rivaled the amount of bank loans outstanding, we find that corporate default crises have far fewer real effects than do banking crises. These results provide empirical support for current theories that emphasize the unique role that banks and the credit and collateral channels play in amplifying macroeconomic shocks.

Do Financial Variables Help Predict Macroeconomic Environment? The Case of the Czech Republic

In this paper, we 1) examine the interactions of financial variables and the macroeconomy within the block-restriction vector autoregression model and 2) evaluate to what extent the financial variables improve the forecasts of GDP growth and inflation. For this reason, various financial variables are examined, including those unexplored in previous literature, such as the share of liquid assets in the banking industry and the loan loss provision rate. Our results suggest that financial variables have a systematic and statistically significant effect on macroeconomic fluctuations. In terms of forecast evaluation, financial variables in general seem to improve the forecast of macroeconomic variables, but the predictive performance of individual financial variables varies over time, in particular during the 2008–2009 crisis.Forecasting, macroeconomic and financial linkages, vector autoregressions.

External financing of US corporations: Are loans and securities complements or substitutes?

“Multiple avenues of intermediation” (Greenspan 2000) suggest substitutability of corporate loan and bond finance which smooths external financing flows. Holmstrom and Tirole (1997) stress complementarity; for most firms bank finance and consequent monitoring is essential for bond finance. Econometric work based on their model is consistent with complementarity both on average over time and during financial crises, and for levels and volatilities. It implies that “multiple avenues” may not be effective as a buffer in a bank credit crunch, and hence supply-side blockages of bank credit may impact on real activity. There are important implications for regulation, not least Basel II

Using financial markets information to identify oil supply shocks in a restricted VAR

This paper introduces a methodology for identifying oil supply shocks in a restricted VAR system for a small open economy. Financial market information is used to construct an identification scheme that forces the response of the restricted VAR model to an oil shock to be the same as that implied by futures markets. Impulse responses are then calculated by using a bootstrapping procedure for partial identification. The methodology is applied to Finland and Sweden in illustrative examples in a simple 5-variable model. While oil supply shocks have an inflationary effect on domestic inflation in these countries during the past decade or so, the effect on domestic GDP is more ambiguous.oil futures; partial identification; macroeconomic shocks

International Interest Rate Differentials: The Interaction with Fiscal and Monetary Variables, and the Business Cycle

Adapting Den Haan's (1996) methodology based on VARs, this paper documents stylized facts about various deviations from international no arbitrage conditions between Canada and the United States. The calculated statistics provide important information about the dynamics of the economic variables that is lost when the focus is solely on unconditional correlation coefficients. In particular, we find that a higher public debt path and slower economic growth in Canada are associated with higher real interest rates in that country relative to that of the US. These results may suggest that international interest rate differentials reflect, at least in part, a risk premium. À l'aide d'une méthodologie adaptée de Den Haan (1996) basée sur les VAR, cette étude documente des régularités empiriques relativement à diverses déviations par rapport aux conditions internationales de non-arbitrage entre le Canada et les États-Unis. Les statistiques calculées fournissent de l'information pertinente, à propos de la dynamique entre les variables économiques, qui auraient été masquée en examinant uniquement des coefficients de corrélations non conditionnelles. En particulier, nous trouvons qu'un taux d'endettement public plus élevé et une croissance économique plus faible sont associés avec des taux d'intérêt réels plus élevés relativement aux taux américains. Ces résultats peuvent suggérer que les différentiels de taux d'intérêt reflètent, du moins en partie, une prime de risque.

Learning about the Interdependence between the Macroeconomy and the Stock Market

How strong is the interdependence between the macroeconomy and the stock market? This paper estimates a New Keynesian general equilibrium model, which includes a wealth effect from asset price fluctuations to consumption, to assess the quantitative importance of interactions among the stock market, macroeconomic variables, and monetary policy. The paper relaxes the assumption of rational expectations and assumes that economic agents learn over time and form near-rational expectations from their perceived model of the economy. The stock market, therefore, affects the economy through two channels: through a traditional ``wealth effect" and through its impact on agents' expectations. Monetary policy decisions also affect and are potentially affected by the stock market. The empirical results show that the direct wealth effect is modest, but asset price fluctuations have had important effects on output expectations. Shocks in the stock market can account for a large portion of output fluctuations. The effect on expectations, however, has declined over time.Stock market; Wealth channel; Monetary policy; Constant-gain learning; Bayesian estimation; Expectations

Financial stability and the Macroeconomy

This paper surveys the causes and macroeconomic consequences of financial instability. It emphasizes the key role of asymmetric information in causing financial instability and explores several recent instances of financial crises in industrial and emerging market countries. The paper then discusses the appropriate macroeconomic policies to reduce the risk of financial instability and to promote recovery from financial crises, if they have occurred. It argues that Central Banks should be just as concerned with financial stability as with price stability. It emphasizes that financial stability is by no means incompatible with the goal of price stability. In fact, price stability can promote financial stability since it leads to longer duration debt contracts and a sounder currency.

Monetary shocks, agency costs, and business cycles

This paper integrates money into a real model of agency costs. Money is introduced by imposing a cash-in-advance constraint on a subset of transactions. The underlying real model is a standard real-business-cycle model modified to include endogenous agency costs. The paper’s chief contribution is to demonstrate how the monetary transmission mechanism is altered by these endogenous agency costs. In particular, do agency costs amplify and/or propagate monetary shocks?Business cycles ; Monetary policy

Mortgage Lending and the Great moderation: a multivariate GARCH Approach

Financial innovation during the Great Moderation increased the size and scope of credit flows in the US. Credit flows increased both in volume and with regard to the range of activities and investments that was debt-financed. This may have contributed to the reduction in output volatility that was the Great Moderation. We hypothesize that during the Great Moderation (i) growth in mortgage finance partly decoupled from fundamentals as measured by overall output growth and (ii) this allowed mortgages less to finance residential investment and more to finance spending on other GDP components. We document that the start of the Moderation coincided with a surge in bank credit creation (especially mortgage credit), a rise in property income, a rise in the consumption share of GDP, and a change in correlation (from positive to negative) between consumption and non-consumption GDP components (investment, export and government expenditure). In a multivariate GARCH framework, we observe unidirectional causality in variance from total output to mortgage lending before the Great Moderation, which is no longer detectable during the Great Moderation. We also find that bidirectional causality in variance of home mortgage lending and residential investment existed before, but not during the Great Moderation. Both these findings are consistent with a role for credit dynamics in explaining the Great Moderation.great moderation; mortgage credit; multivariate GARCH; causality