Corporate Investment: Does Market Valuation Matter in the Aggregate?

macroeconomics, corporate investment, market valuation

Dependence on external finance: an inherent industry characteristic?

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about how to obtain representative values of DEF by sector and about why these values differ fundamentally between sectors have been adopted in additional studies seeking to show that sectors benefit unequally from a country?s level of financial development. However, the assumptions as such have not been examined. The present study, conducted with cyclically adjusted annual measures of DEF derived from U.S. industry data for 1977-1997, attempts to do so using data that are aggregated by sector. We find that those variables that may be regarded as structural/ technological have very low explanatory power, and that the DEF figures calculated from micro data do not correspond closely to what is obtained from aggregate figures. Hence key assumptions on which RZ's argumentation is based could not be validated. --Growth and finance,financial development,industry structure

Mexico versus Canada: Stability Benefits from Making Common Currency with USD?

Using a de facto classification of exchange-rate regimes, this paper investigates how the volatility of PPP-GDP per person and per hour of work is associated with such regimes in Mexico and in Canada. It finds that, for Mexico unlike Canada, the macroeconomic volatility left is much greater during periods when the nominal exchange rate with USD changes appreciably than when it is quasi-pegged. However, Mexico cannot safely peg to USD except through formal US-dollarization. Hence this finding suggests that the stability benefits of monetary union are greatest for emerging-market countries inside an economically integrating region and non-existent for financially highly advanced countries

Conditional Indexation Bias in Yields Reported on Inflation-Indexed Securities with Special Reference to UDIBONOS and TIPS

The real rate of return on inflation-indexed government securities is calculated and published as if indexation succeeded perfectly in keeping the real value of coupon and principal payments unchanged. In fact the procedure of indexing to the lagged momentum of the seasonally unadjusted CPI gives rise to three types of indexation bias that may change the expected real value of the future stream of payments in relation to the current par value. These biases are due to i) seasonality, ii) non-seasonal fluctuations in reported inflation rates, and iii) any expected “permanent” changes in future rates of inflation (or the reporting thereof) being capable of creating predictable changes in the real value of the inflation-adjusted principal with the indexation procedure actually in force. They are one more, directly quantifiable, reason why the reported yields do not provide the long-sought definite revelation of the riskless real rate of interest and hence of the expected rate of inflation by comparison with nominal interest rates.

Policy Responses during the Depth of the 2007- 09 Financial Crisis: Instrument Innovations, Executive Reconfigurations, and Legacies for U.S. Governance

The period September 2008 - March 2009 encompassed that part of the long-festering financial crisis severe enough to leave troubling legacies for the conduct of economic policies. Executive discretion in economic governance hurriedly expanded and centralized to address the depth of the crisis. The U.S. Department of the Treasury (i.e., the Treasury), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) acting in tandem, freely exercised emergency authority to prop up the financial system. This paper shows these interventions to have short-run benefits and long-run costs for market efficiency and stability.

The Economics of Offshore Financial Services and the Choice of Tax, Currency, and Exchange-Rate Regimes

Open-economy macroeconomists regularly invoke the policy trilemma that states that governments cannot simultaneously maintain an open capital account, a fixed exchange rate, and a domestically-oriented monetary policy. My thesis is that jurisdictions with substantial offshore activities find these and other macroeconomic choices significantly affected by something else: Concern for the continued health and development of their international financial business. Monetary, exchange-rate, and tax policies and the choice of domestic currency all will be impacted by this concern. The different choices made by (1) Denmark and Malta in ERM II, (2) offshore financial centers in Europe, and (3) financial centers in East Asia are considered to develop some general conclusions.ISBN: 978-3-902109-35-1

Contingent capital to strengthen the private safety net for financial institutions: Cocos to the rescue?

This study examines the promise of reducing expected resolution costs of financial institutions through either voluntary or mandated addition of contingently convertible debt securities to their long-term financing mix. I model the stochastic process by which an initially very well capitalized banking firm may come to violate its minimum capital maintenance requirement. Conversion of cocos then provides a second chance because the firm's initial capitalization is restored. Although regulatory insolvency remains a distant threat, the expected reductions in the cost of bankruptcy and hence the cost of capital are such that cocos may win a place in the liability structure of financial institutions without the need for mandates. --financial reforms,regulatory insolvency,contingent capital,bank regulations,cocos