Financial Dependence, Stock Market Liberalizations, and Growth

Stock market liberalizations provide a natural experiment to test for the causal relation between financial development and economic growth. We test this relation by investigating whether liberalizations facilitate growth through the particular mechanism of reducing capital market imperfections that drive a wedge between the external and internal cost of capital to firms. Using panel data on a large sample of emerging markets, we find no evidence of a uniform shift across all sectors in average industry growth following liberalization. Instead, consistent with the hypothesis that liberalizations lower the incremental cost of external capital, it appears that industries that depend more on external finance experience significantly higher growth following liberalization. We also find that growth occurs through the creation of new establishments, which is more likely to require external funds, rather than through an expansion in the average size of existing establishments, which firms are more likely to finance with internal cash. These results are robust to alternative hypotheses, country and industry specific controls, other economic reforms, world business cycle e ects, and contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39947/3/wp562.pd

Financial Dependence, Stock Market Liberalizations, and Growth

Stock market liberalizations provide a natural experiment to test for the causal relation between financial development and economic growth. We test this relation by investigating whether liberalizations facilitate growth through the particular mechanism of reducing capital market imperfections that drive a wedge between the external and internal cost of capital to firms. Using panel data on a large sample of emerging markets, we find no evidence of a uniform shift across all sectors in average industry growth following liberalization. Instead, consistent with the hypothesis that liberalizations lower the incremental cost of external capital, it appears that industries that depend more on external finance experience significantly higher growth following liberalization. We also find that growth occurs through the creation of new establishments, which is more likely to require external funds, rather than through an expansion in the average size of existing establishments, which firms are more likely to finance with internal cash. These results are robust to alternative hypotheses, country and industry specific controls, other economic reforms, world business cycle e ects, and contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks.

Endogenous contractual externalities

We study effort and risk-taking behaviour in an economy with a continuum of principal-agent pairs where each agent exerts costly hidden effort. When the industry productivity is uncertain, agents have motivations to match the industry average effort, which results in contractual externalities. Contractual externalities have welfare changing effects when the information friction is correlated and the industry risk is not revealed. This is because principals do not internalise the impact of their choice on other principals' endogenous industry risk exposure. Relative to the second best, if the expected productivity is high, risk-averse principals over-incentivise their own agents, triggering a rat race in effort exertion, resulting in over-investment in effort and excessive exposure to industry risks relative to the second best. The opposite occurs when the expected productivity is low

Stock market tournaments

We propose a new theory of suboptimal risk-taking based on contractual externalities. We examine an industry with a continuum of firms. Each firm's manager exerts costly hidden effort. The productivity of effort is subject to systematic shocks. Firms' stock prices reflect their performance relative to the industry average. In this setting, stock-based incentives cause complementarities in managerial effort choices. Externalities arise because shareholders do not internalize the impact of their incentive provision on the average effort. During booms, they over-incentivise managers, triggering a rat-race in effort exertion, resulting in excessive risk relative to the second-best. The opposite occurs during busts

Multi-asset noisy rational expectations equilibrium with contingent claims

We consider a noisy rational expectations equilibrium in a multi-asset economy populated by informed and uninformed investors, and noise traders. Informed investors privately observe an aggregate risk factor affecting the probabilities of different states of the economy. Uninformed investors attempt to extract that information from asset prices, but full revelation is prevented by noise traders. We relax the usual assumption of normally distributed asset payoffs and allow for assets with more general payoff distributions, including contingent claims, such as options and other derivatives. We show that assets reveal information about the risk factor only if they help span the exposure of probabilities of states to the risk factor. When the market is complete, we provide equilibrium asset prices and optimal portfolios of investors in closed form. In incomplete markets, we derive prices and portfolios in terms of easily computable inverse functions

The spread of COVID-19 in London: network effects and optimal lockdowns

We generalise a stochastic version of the workhorse SIR (Susceptible-Infectious- Removed) epidemiological model to account for spatial dynamics generated by network interactions. Using the London metropolitan area as a salient case study, we show that commuter network externalities account for about 42% of the propagation of COVID-19. We find that the UK lockdown measure reduced total propagation by 57%, with more than one third of the effect coming from the reduction in network externalities. Counterfactual analyses suggest that: i) the lockdown was somehow late, but further delay would have had more extreme consequences; ii) a targeted lockdown of a small number of highly connected geographic regions would have been equally effective, arguably with significantly lower economic costs; iii) targeted lockdowns based on threshold number of cases are not effective, since they fail to account for network externalities

Within-bank spillovers of real estate shocks

By considering banks as portfolios of assets in different locations, we study how real estate shocks are transmitted across bank’s business areas while controlling for local demand shocks and bank location–specific factors. Affected banks substantially alter their loan portfolios: we find evidence of real estate price declines affecting both real estate and non-real estate types of lending. Banks also roll over and fail to liquidate problematic loans, while accumulating more non-performing loans. These results provide evidence of internal contagion of real estate shocks within banks

Dynamic asset-backed security design

Borrowers obtain liquidity by issuing securities backed by current period payoff and resale price of a long-lived collateral asset. They are privately informed about the payoff distribution. Asset price can be self-fulfilling: higher asset price lowers adverse selection, allows borrowers to raise more funding which makes the asset more valuable, leading to multiple equilibria. Optimal security design eliminates multiple equilibria, improves welfare, and can be implemented as a repo contract. Persistence in adverse selection lowers debt funding, generates volatility in asset price, and exacerbates credit crunch. The theory demonstrates the role of asset-backed securities on stability of market-based financial systems

Multi-asset noisy rational expectations equilibrium with contingent claims

We study a noisy rational expectations equilibrium in a multi-asset economy populated by informed and uninformed investors and noise traders. The assets can include state contingent claims such as Arrow-Debreu securities, assets with only positive payoffs, options or other derivative securities. The probabilities of states depend on an aggregate shock, which is observed only by the informed investor. We derive a three-factor CAPM with asymmetric information, establish conditions under which asset prices reveal information about the shock, and show that information asymmetry amplifies the effects of payoff skewness on asset returns. We also find that volatility derivatives make incomplete markets effectively complete, and their prices quantify market illiquidity and shadow value of information to uninformed investors

Network risk and key players: a structural analysis of interbank liquidity

We model banks' liquidity holding decision as a simultaneous game on an interbank borrowing network. We show that at the Nash equilibrium, the contributions of each bank to the network liquidity level and liquidity risk are distinct functions of its indegree and outdegree Katz-Bonacich centrality measures. A wedge between the planner and the market equilibria arises because individual banks do not internalize the effect of their liquidity choice on other banks' liquidity benefit and risk exposure. The network can act as an absorbent or a multiplier of individual banks' shocks. Using a sterling interbank network database from January 2006 to September 2010, we estimate the model in a spatial error framework, and find evidence for a substantial, and time varying, network risk: in the period before the Lehman crisis, the network is cohesive and liquidity holding decisions are complementary and there is a large network liquidity multiplier; during the 2007-08 crisis, the network becomes less clustered and liquidity holding less dependent on the network; after the crisis, during Quantitative Easing, the network liquidity multiplier becomes negative, implying a lower network potential for generating liquidity. The network impulse-response functions indicate that the risk key players during these periods vary, and are not necessarily the largest borrowers