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Working Paper
Bank Liquidity and Capital Regulation in General Equilibrium
We develop a nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium model with a banking sector and use it to study the macroeconomic impact of introducing a minimum liquidity standard for banks on top of existing capital adequacy requirements. The model generates a distribution of bank sizes arising from differences in banks' ability to generate revenue from loans and from occasionally binding capital and liquidity constraints. Under our baseline calibration, imposing a liquidity requirement would lead to a steady-state decrease of about 3 percent in the amount of loans made, an increase in banks' holdings ...
Discussion Paper
Does Corporate Hedging of Foreign Exchange Risk Affect Real Economic Activity?
Foreign exchange derivatives (FXD) are a key tool for firms to hedge FX risk and are particularly important for exporting or importing firms in emerging markets. This is because FX volatility can be quite high—up to 120 percent per annum for some emerging market currencies during stress episodes—yet the vast majority of international trades, almost 90 percent, are invoiced in U.S. dollars (USD) or euros (EUR). When such hedging instruments are in short supply, what happens to firms’ real economic activities? In this post, based on my related Staff Report, I use hand-collected FXD ...
Working Paper
A Quantitative Analysis of Countercyclical Capital Buffers
What are the quantitative effects of countercyclical capital buffers (CCyB)? I study this question in the context of a nonlinear DSGE model with a financial sector that is subject to occasional panics. A calibrated version of the model is combined with US data to estimate sequences of structural shocks, allowing me to study policy counterfactuals. First, I show that raising capital buffers during leverage expansions can reduce the frequency of crises by more than half. Second, I show that lowering capital buffers during a panic can moderate the intensity of the resulting crisis. A ...
Working Paper
How Effective are Macroprudential Policies? An Empirical Investigation
In recent years, policymakers have generally relied on macroprudential policies to address financial stability concerns. However, our understanding of these policies and their efficacy is limited. In this paper, we construct a novel index of domestic macroprudential policies in 57 advanced and emerging economies covering the period from 2000:Q1 to 2013:Q4, with tightenings and easings recorded separately. The effectiveness of these policies in curbing bank credit growth and house price inflation is then assessed using a dynamic panel data model. The main findings of the paper are: (1) ...
Report
Macroprudential policy: case study from a tabletop exercise
Since the global financial crisis of 2007-09, policymakers and academics around the world have advocated the use of prudential tools for macroprudential purposes. This paper presents a macroprudential tabletop exercise that aimed at confronting Federal Reserve Bank presidents with a plausible, albeit hypothetical, macro-financial scenario that would lend itself to macroprudential considerations. In the tabletop exercise, the primary macroprudential objective was to reduce the likelihood and severity of possible future financial disruptions associated with the hypothetical overheating ...
Working Paper
Macroprudential Policy: Results from a Tabletop Exercise
This paper presents a tabletop exercise designed to analyze macroprudential policy. Several senior Federal Reserve officials were presented with a hypothetical economy as of 2020:Q2 in which commercial real estate and nonfinancial debt valuations were very high. After analyzing the economy and discussing the use of monetary and macroprudential policy tools, participants were then presented with a hypothetical negative shock to commercial real estate valuations that occurred in the second half of 2020. Participants then discussed the use of the tools during an incipient downturn. Some of the ...
Report
Disasters Everywhere: The Costs of Business Cycles Reconsidered
Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies more beneficial than widely thought. This paper shows that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble mini “disasters.” By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show empirically that this is true for all advanced economies since 1870. Focusing on the peacetime sample, we develop a tractable local projection framework to estimate consumption growth paths for normal and financial-crisis recessions. Using random coefficient local projections we get an easy and ...
Report
Real Consequences of Shocks to Intermediaries Supplying Corporate Hedging Instruments
I show that shocks to financial intermediaries that supply hedging instruments to corporations have real effects. I exploit a quasi-natural experiment in South Korea in 2010, where regulations required banks to hold enough capital for taking positions in foreign exchange derivatives (FXD). Using the variation in exposure to this regulation across banks, I find that the regulation caused a reduction in the supply of FXD, leading to a significant decline in exports for firms that held derivatives contracts with more exposed banks. These results indicate the crucial role of intermediaries in ...
Working Paper
Capital Buffers in a Quantitative Model of Banking Industry Dynamics
We develop a model of banking industry dynamics to study the quantitative impact of regulatory policies on bank risk taking and market structure as well as the feedback effect of market structure on the efficacy of policy. Since our model is matched to U.S. data, we propose a market structure where big banks with market power interact with small, competitive fringe banks. Banks face idiosyncratic funding shocks in addition to aggregate shocks which affect the fraction of performing loans in their portfolio. A nontrivial bank size distribution arises out of endogenous entry and exit, as well ...
Working Paper
Supervisory Stress Testing For CCPs : A Macro-Prudential, Two-Tier Approach
Stress testing has become an increasingly important mechanism to support a variety of financial stability objectives. Stress tests can be used to test the individual resilience of a single entity or to assess the system-wide vulnerabilities of a network. This article examines the role of supervisory stress testing of central counterparties (CCPs), which has emerged in recent years. A key message is that crucial differences in CCPs? role, risk profile and financial structure, when compared to banks, are likely to require significant adaptation in the design of supervisory stress tests (SSTs). ...