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Working Paper
Relative Wealth Concerns, Executive Compensation, and Systemic Risk-Taking
Given the recent empirical evidence on peer effects in CEO compensation, this paper theoretically examines how relative wealth concerns, in which a manager?s satisfaction with his own compensation depends on the compensation of other managers, affect the equilibrium contracting strategy and managerial risk-taking. We find that such externalities can generate pay-for-luck as an efficient compensation vehicle in equilibrium. In expectation of pay-for-luck in other firms, tying managerial pay to luck provides insurance to managers against a compensation shortfall relative to executive peers ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Uncertainty
We construct new measures of uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy actions and their consequences - monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) indexes. We show that, under a variety of VAR identification schemes, positive shocks to uncertainty about monetary policy robustly raise credit spreads and reduce output. The effects are of comparable magnitude to those of conventional monetary policy shocks. We evaluate the usefulness of our MPU indexes, and examine the influence of Fed communication. Our analysis suggests that policy rate normalization that is accompanied by reduced uncertainty can help ...
Discussion Paper
Measuring Cross Country Monetary Policy Uncertainty
In previous work, we constructed a news-based index of U.S. monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) that captures the degree of uncertainty the public perceives about Federal Reserve policy actions and their consequences. In this note, we extend that work to Canada, the Euro Area, Japan, and United Kingdom.
Working Paper
Government Connections and Financial Constraints: Evidence from a Large Representative Sample of Chinese Firms
We examine the role of firms' government connections, defined by government intervention in CEO appointment and the status of state ownership, in determining the severity of financial constraints faced by Chinese firms. We demonstrate that government connections are associated with substantially less severe financial constraints (i.e., less reliance on internal cash flows to fund investment), and that the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flows is higher for firms that report greater obstacles to obtaining external funds. We also find that those large non-state firms with weak ...
Working Paper
Asset returns with earnings management
The paper investigates stock return dynamics in an environment where executives have an incentive to maximize their compensation by artificially inflating earnings. A principal-agent model with financial reporting and managerial effort is embedded in a Lucas asset-pricing model with periodic revelations of the firm's underlying profitability. The return process generated from the model is consistent with a range of financial anomalies observed in the return data: volatility clustering, asymmetric volatility, and increased idiosyncratic volatility. The calibration results further indicate that ...
Working Paper
Taxonomy of Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility Measures
A large number of measures for monitoring risk and uncertainty surrounding macroeconomic and financial outcomes have been proposed in the literature, and these measures are frequently used by market participants, policy makers, and researchers in their analyses. However, risk and uncertainty measures differ across multiple dimensions, including the method of calculation, the underlying outcome (that is, the asset price or macroeconomic variable), and the horizon at which they are calculated. Therefore, in this paper, we review the literature on global risk, uncertainty, and volatility ...
Discussion Paper
The Fed’s Inaugural Conference on the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar
The U.S. dollar has played a preeminent role in the global economy since the second World War. It is used as a reserve currency and the currency of denomination for a large fraction of global trade and financial transactions. The status of the U.S. dollar engenders important considerations for the effectiveness of U.S. policy instruments and the functioning of global financial markets. These considerations include understanding potential factors that may alter the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the future, such as changes in the macroeconomic and policy environments or the development of new ...
Working Paper
The Stock Market Response to a "Regulatory Sine Curve"
We construct new indicators of financial regulatory intensity and find evidence that a "regulatory sine curve" generally exists: regulatory oversight increases following a recession and wanes as the economy returns to normalcy. We then build an asset pricing model, based on the idea that regulatory oversight both deters incentives to commit fraud ex ante and reveals hidden negative information ex post. Our calibration suggests that these mechanisms can be quantitatively important for stock price dynamics.
Working Paper
Uncertainty, Curreny Exess Returns, and Risk Reversals
In this paper we provide strong evidence that heightened uncertainty in the U.S. real economy or financial markets significantly raises excess returns to the currency carry trade. We posit that this works through the influence of uncertainty on global investors' risk preferences. Macro and financial uncertainty also lower foreign exchange risk reversals, an effect that is particularly strong for high interest rate portfolios. Our results are consistent with the idea that an increase in uncertainty regarding the U.S. economy or financial markets increases investors' risk aversion, which in ...
Working Paper
Risk Choices and Compensation Design
We analyze the impact of bad-tail risks on managerial pay functions, especially the decision to pay managers in stock or in options. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we find that options are often a superior vehicle for limiting managerial incentives to take bad-tail risks while providing incentives to exert effort. Arrangements similar to collar options are able to incent the desired project choice in wider range of circumstances than call options or stock. However, information requirements appear high. We briefly explore alternatives with features similar to maluses and clawbacks, which ...