Search Results
Discussion Paper
On Fire-Sale Externalities, TARP Was Close to Optimal
Imagine that many large and levered banks suffer heavy losses and must quickly sell assets to reduce their leverage. We expect the market price of the assets sold to decline, at least temporarily. As a result, any other financial institutions that happen to hold the same assets will experience balance sheet losses through no fault of their own —a negative fire-sale externality. In this post, we show that the vulnerability to fire-sale externalities was high during the crisis and that the capital injections of the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) helped reduce it ...
Journal Article
The equity risk premium: a review of models
The authors estimate the equity risk premium (ERP)?the expected return on stocks in excess of the risk-free rate?by combining information from twenty models for the period 1960-2013. They begin their analysis by categorizing the models into five classes: trailing historical mean, dividend discount, cross-sectional estimation, regression analysis using valuation ratios or macroeconomic variables, and surveys. They find that an optimal weighted average of all models places the one-year-ahead ERP in June 2012 at 12.2 percent, close to levels reached in the mid- and late 1970s, when the ERP was ...
Discussion Paper
Assessing Contagion Risk in a Financial Network
Since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been an explosion of research trying to understand and quantify the default spillovers that can arise through counterparty risk. This first of two posts delves into the analysis of financial network contagion through this spillover channel. The authors introduce a framework, originally developed by Eisenberg and Noe, that is useful for thinking about default cascades.
Discussion Paper
What Can We Learn from Prior Periods of Low Volatility?
Volatility, a measure of how much financial markets are fluctuating, has been near its record low in many asset classes. Over the last few decades, there have been only two other periods of similarly low volatility: in May 2013, and prior to the financial crisis in 2007. Is there anything we can learn from the recent period of low volatility versus what occurred slightly more than one year ago and seven years ago? Probably; the current volatility environment appears quite similar to the one in May 2013, but it?s substantially different from what happened prior to the financial crisis.
Report
Fire-sale spillovers and systemic risk
We reveal and track over time the factors making the financial system vulnerable to fire sales by constructing an index of aggregate vulnerability. The index starts increasing in 2004, before any other major systemic risk measure, more than doubling by 2008. The fire-sale-specific factors of delevering speed and concentration of illiquid assets account for the majority of this increase. Individual banks? contributions to aggregate vulnerability are an excellent five-year-ahead predictor of SRISK, one of the most prominent systemic risk measures. Had our estimates been available at the time, ...
Working Paper
Strengthening the FOMC’s Framework in View of the Effective Lower Bound and Some Considerations Related to Time-Inconsistent Strategies
We analyze the framework for monetary policy in view of the effective lower bound (ELB). We find that the ELB is likely to bind in most future recessions and propose some ways that theoretical models imply that the framework could be strengthened. We also discuss ways that commitment strategies, which are not part of the framework, may improve economic outcomes. These policies can suffer from a time-inconsistency problem, which we analyze.
Report
How to escape a liquidity trap with interest rate rules
I study how central banks should communicate monetary policy in liquidity trap scenarios in which the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates is binding. Using a standard New Keynesian model, I argue that the key to anchoring expectations and preventing self-fulfilling deflationary spirals is to promise to keep nominal interest rates pegged at zero for a length of time that depends on the state of the economy. I derive necessary and sufficient conditions for this type of state-contingent forward guidance to implement the welfare-maximizing equilibrium as a globally determinate (that is, ...
Discussion Paper
Quantifying Potential Spillovers from Runs on High-Yield Funds
On December 9, 2015, Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund (FCF) announced a “Plan of Liquidation,” effectively halting investor redemptions. This announcement followed a period of poor performance and large outflows. Assets at the fund had declined from a peak of $2.5 billion in May of 2015 to $942 million in November. Investors had redeemed more than $1.1 billion in shares since April 2015, and the fund’s year-to-date performance as of November had fallen below -21 percent. The FCF “run” highlights the need to quantify the potential for systemic risk among open-end mutual funds and the ...
Discussion Paper
What’s Up with Stocks?
“U.S. stocks are racing toward a second consecutive quarter of dramatic gains, continuing a historic stock-market recovery that few predicted in the depths of the March downturn,” said a September Wall Street Journal article. “The stock market is detached from economic reality. A reckoning is coming,” said the Washington Post. What is going on? In this post, I look not at what stocks have actually done or will do, but at what investors expected should have happened, and what they expect will happen going forward. It turns out that, at least by the particular measure of expectations I ...
Report
Monetary policy and financial conditions: a cross-country study
Loose financial conditions forecast high output growth and low output volatility up to six quarters into the future, generating time-varying downside risk to the output gap, which we measure by GDP-at-Risk (GaR). This finding is robust across countries, conditioning variables, and time periods. We study the implications for monetary policy in a reduced-form New Keynesian model with financial intermediaries that are subject to a Value at Risk (VaR) constraint. Optimal monetary policy depends on the magnitude of downside risk to GDP, as it impacts the consumption-savings decision via the Euler ...