Search Results
Journal Article
Asset building and the wealth gap
Building and maintaining financial security is increasingly difficult for a growing portion of American households. Wealth is less prevalent in middle-class households and increasing among the already well-to-do. At the same time, poverty is growing and concentrating disproportionately among the nonwhite population. As the cost of living outpaces income and wealth accumulation, a majority of U.S. households are ill-prepared for financial emergencies or retirement.
Report
Why are Switzerland's foreign assets so low? The growing financial exposure of a small open economy
Switzerland's international investment position shows a puzzling feature since 1999: Large and persistent current account surpluses have failed to boost the value of Swiss foreign assets. In this paper, we link this pattern to the substantial increase in the leveraging of Switzerland's international assets and liabilities over the last twenty years, which we document in detail. We estimate the impact of exchange rate and asset prices movements on Swiss net foreign assets, and show that they led to substantial valuations losses since 1999, accounting for between one-quarter and one-half of the ...
Journal Article
Robust capital regulation
Regulators and markets can find the balance sheets of large financial institutions difficult to penetrate, and they are mindful of how undercapitalization can create incentives to take on excessive risk. This study proposes a novel framework for capital regulation that addresses banks' incentives to take on excessive risk and leverage. The framework consists of a special capital account in addition to a core capital requirement. The special account would accrue to a bank's shareholders as long as the bank is solvent, but would pass to the bank's regulators?rather than its creditors?if the ...
Speech
Asset bubbles and the implications for central bank policy
Remarks at The Economic Club of New York, New York City.
Working Paper
High equity premia and crash fears. Rational foundations
We show that when in Lucas trees model the process for dividends is described by a lattice tree subject to infrequent but observable structural breaks, in equilibrium recursive rational learning may inflate the equity risk premium and reduce the risk-free interest rate for low levels of risk aversion. The key condition for these results to obtain is the presence of sufficient initial pessimism. The relevance of these findings is magnified by the fact that under full information our artificial economy cannot generate asset returns matching the empirical evidence for any positive relative risk ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy implementation: common goals but different practices
While the goals that guide monetary policy in different countries are very similar, central banks diverge in their methods of implementing policy. This study of the policy frameworks of four central banks?the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Swiss National Bank?focuses on two notable areas of difference. The first is the choice of an interest rate target, a standard feature of conventional monetary policy. The second is the choice of instruments for managing the central banks? expanded balance sheets?a decision made necessary by the banks? ...
Working Paper
Pessimistic beliefs under rational learning: quantitative implications for the equity premium puzzle
In the presence of infrequent but observable structural breaks, we show that a model in which the representative agent is on a rational learning path concerning the real consumption growth process can generate high equity premia and low risk-free interest rates. In fact, when the model is calibrated to U.S. consumption growth data, average risk premia and bond yields similar to those displayed by post- depression (1938-1999) U.S. historical experience are generated for low levels of risk aversion. Even ruling out pessimistic beliefs, recursive learning inflates the equity premium without ...
Speech
Remarks on the role of central bank interactions with financial markets
Remarks at New York University's Stern School of Business, New York City.
Report
Financial amplification of foreign exchange risk premia
Theories of systemic risk suggest that financial intermediaries? balance-sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We provide supporting evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals and a component associated with financial intermediaries? balance sheets. Relative to the benchmark model with only macroeconomic state variables, balance sheets amplify the U.S. dollar risk premium. We discuss applications to systemic risk monitoring.
Report
Dodd-Frank one year on: implications for shadow banking
One year after passage of the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA), regulators proposed several of the rules required for its implementation. In this paper, I discuss some aspects of proposed DFA rules in light of shadow banking. The topics are risk-retention rules for securitized products and the impact of capital reforms on asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) conduits. While the reform of securitization is resulting primarily from DFA, changes in accounting standards, together with the Basel capital reforms, have had important impacts on the economics of ABCP conduits.