The Nordic Banking Crises: Pitfalls in Financial Liberalizations?

European I Department and Monetary and Exchange Affairs Departmen

Implications of More Precise Information for Technological Development and Economic Welfare

This paper analyzes the dynamic interactions between the precision of information, technological development, and welfare within an overlapping generations model. More precise information about idiosyncratic production shocks has ambiguous effects on technological progress and welfare, which depend critically on the risk sharing capacity of the economy’s financial system. For example, we show that with efficient risk sharing more precise information adversely affects the equilibrium risk allocation and creates a negative uncertainty-related welfare effect, at the same time as it accelerates technological progress and increases R&D investment. In the past decade, interest in studies of economic growth under uncertainty has increased considerably. The literature has emphasized the role of technological progress and the function of financial systems in endogenous growth models (Greenwoo

The risk of financial assets and the volatility of their equilibrium prices when agents have non-time-separable preferences

SIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-24105 Kiel / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

Leverage and the price volatility of equity shares in equilibrium

Eckwert B, Drees B. Leverage and the price volatility of equity shares in equilibrium. The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance. 2000;40(2):155-167.The traditional valuation formulas for corporate debt, which are derived in a complete market setting and are based on the no-arbitrage principle, imply that equity prices become more volatile as leverage increases. If the asset structure is incomplete, the presence of corporate debt affects the linear subspace spanned by the payoffs of the existing assets, and the pricing of corporate debt and shares of levered firms becomes a simultaneous valuation problem. This paper characterizes the relationship between the price of corporate debt and the share price of a levered firm in an equilibrium framework where corporate debt is a non-redundant asset. While, in the absence of bankruptcy, higher leverage always implies riskier equity, it does not necessarily mean more volatile equity prices. In fact, the link between leverage and equity price volatility depends in a particular way on investors’ preferences towards risk

Implications of more precise information for technological development and economic welfare

Eckwert B, Drees B. Implications of more precise information for technological development and economic welfare. JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC DYNAMICS & CONTROL. 2010;34(2):266-279.This paper analyzes the dynamic interactions between the precision of information, technological development, and welfare within an overlapping generations model. More precise information about idiosyncratic production shocks has ambiguous effects on technological progress and welfare, which depend critically on the risk sharing capacity of the economy's financial system. Two effects, which can act in the same or in opposite directions, are at work: (i) more precise information allows agents to make better decisions but restricts the scope for risk sharing (the 'uncertainty-related effect') and (ii) more precise information, by changing R&D investment, may have a long-lasting effect due to the model's intertemporal production externality (the 'externality-related effect'). (C) 2009 International Monetary Fund. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

An simple resolution of the excess volatility puzzle

SIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-24105 Kiel / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

Is the price of a riskier asset more volatile?

SIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-24105 Kiel / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

Price volatility and risk with non-separability of preferences

Eckwert B, Drees B. Price volatility and risk with non-separability of preferences. Mathematical Social Sciences. 2000;39(1):21-34.This paper studies the relationship between the systematic risk of financial instruments and the volatility of their equilibrium prices in a two-period stochastic asset valuation model. Whereas there is no link between the relative risk of assets and their price volatility in standard representative-agent models with additively-separable preferences, in this model with non-separable preferences a riskier asset can have higher or lower price volatility than a safe asset depending on the intertemporal changes in risk aversion. If individual preferences exhibit risk substitutability (i.e. future relative risk aversion decreases with higher current consumption), then the riskier asset has a more volatile price than the less risky asset. Agents’ risk complementarity (i.e. increasing future relative risk aversion with higher current consumption), on the other hand, implies an inverse relationship between the relative riskiness of assets and the volatility of their prices