Imperfect Information and Monopolistic Pricing in the Banking Industry

We critically discuss recent developments in the theory of banking, focusing on the two set of services that banks jointly provide: payment services by means of bookkeeping transactions and financial intermediation services. The limitation of the available information, of the capabilities of the human mind, and of the available time of any individual, produce relevant departures from the basic assumptions of perfectly competitive markets, creating the need for institutions such as banks. It can be shown that market forces can be very effective in assuring contractual performance in the banking industry, reducing the need of generalised legal restrictions. Besides, taking into account the peculiarities of contemporary banking institutions, credit rationing seems to be a far less significant phenomenon. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the focus of many current regulations of the banking system, in continental Europe in particular, is misplaced. The current regulatory framework produces too many distortions in market prices and the allocation of resources, and regulations impose a heavy burden on taxpayers. On the contrary, the more fundamental causes of instability are not properly addressed by the current legal requirements.

Monopolistic Pricing in the Banking Industry: a Dynamic Portfolio Model

This work develops a portfolio model of the banking firm where both the size and composition of the portfolio are jointly determined. The model provides a quite simple micro-foundation of the credit channel of the transmission of monetary policy. It allows analysing the pricing policies of the banking firm, and shows how interest rate shocks and credit quality shocks (the real shocks that change expected default costs) affect the equilibrium level of loans and deposits.

Uncertainty, Information, and Trust in Banking Intermediation

Banking intermediaries help to coordinate different agents’ plans, reducing the uncertainty that might otherwise hamper transactions because of disruptive “lemon” problems. By establishing trust relationships based on private information, banks allow risk pooling and provide insurance to different classes of agents, act as market makers, and provide services that save transaction and notary costs. “Lemon” problems are also important to understand the difference between market pricing of the risk of bonds and the banks’ pricing of the risk of loans. In the first case risk is priced on the basis of freely available information, relying heavily on the informational content of statistical time series. The resulting equilibria, though, are fragile, because they are subject to abrupt regime changes as new information becomes public. Banks, on the contrary, price loans on the basis of their private information, and they can thus provide insurance against different kinds of shocks. Given the opacity of their activities, and the huge externalities that their entrepreneurial choices imply, banks must be subject to an extensive regulation, imposing a transparent disclosure of their risk taking activities.Banks; Credit; Uncertainty; Information Costs; Trust

Monopolistic Pricing in the Banking Industry: a Dynamic Model

This work develops a portfolio model of the banking firm where both the size and composition of the portfolio are jointly determined. The model provides a micro-foundation of the credit channel of transmission of monetary policy. It allows to analise the pricing policies of the banking firm, and shows how interest rate shocks and credit quality shocks (the real shocks that change expected default costs) affect the equilibrium level of loans and deposits. Besides it shows the factors affecting the provision of insurance services by means of the smoothing of shocks.

The bank’s risk insurance and the EMU

Banks provide insurance against interest rate shocks and real shocks. After the introduction of the common currency the credit system tends to take more of the risk of the private sector, reducing the overall risk of the economy and increasing the risk sharing among different countries and regions. The increased diversification that the introduction of the Euro has allowed, has increased the smoothing of interest rate shocks, but it has increased the incentive to smooth real shocks unevenly. The integration of the credit system, where the authority to regulate national banking system is transferred to the ECB, would change in a relevant way the reaction of the banking system to shocks. The model shows that asymmetries in the transmission of monetary policy would be reduced. On the other hand, a common market for banking activities might tend to amplify the asymmetric impact of real shocks.

Error bounds for small jumps of L\'evy processes

The pricing of options in exponential Levy models amounts to the computation of expectations of functionals of Levy processes. In many situations, Monte-Carlo methods are used. However, the simulation of a Levy process with infinite Levy measure generally requires either to truncate small jumps or to replace them by a Brownian motion with the same variance. We will derive bounds for the errors generated by these two types of approximation.Comment: 21 p

The Diversification Benefits of Universal Banking

We find that both the aggregate issuance of bonds, and the volume of commercial and industrial loans outstanding in the US, respond to fluctuations in industrial production and interest rates, but in opposite directions. This empirical result suggests that universal banks can reduce the cyclical fluctuations of their income, by jointly providing direct lending and security underwriting services.Universal Banking, Diversification

Investment and External Finance: An Empirical Analysis

This paper looks for evidence that the availability of external finance affects the aggregate investment of non-financial corporations of the US. We do not find any empirical support for this hypothesis. Furthermore, we find that the amount of external finance raised does not depend on the need to finance investment. Share issuance seems to be largely driven by stock market prices; moreover, quite surprisingly, it generates a positive impact on both the Tobin’s Q and debt issuance.

Generalized Approximate Message-Passing Decoder for Universal Sparse Superposition Codes

Sparse superposition (SS) codes were originally proposed as a capacity-achieving communication scheme over the additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGNC) [1]. Very recently, it was discovered that these codes are universal, in the sense that they achieve capacity over any memoryless channel under generalized approximate message-passing (GAMP) decoding [2], although this decoder has never been stated for SS codes. In this contribution we introduce the GAMP decoder for SS codes, we confirm empirically the universality of this communication scheme through its study on various channels and we provide the main analysis tools: state evolution and potential. We also compare the performance of GAMP with the Bayes-optimal MMSE decoder. We empirically illustrate that despite the presence of a phase transition preventing GAMP to reach the optimal performance, spatial coupling allows to boost the performance that eventually tends to capacity in a proper limit. We also prove that, in contrast with the AWGNC case, SS codes for binary input channels have a vanishing error floor in the limit of large codewords. Moreover, the performance of Hadamard-based encoders is assessed for practical implementations