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This dissertation analyzes issues in monetary policy, global financial flows and financial stability. Chapters 2 and 3 are empirical and explore the effects of monetary policy on international debt flows to emerging markets and both debt and equity flows to Latin America. Chapter 4 is a theoretical agent based model of financial stability that examines systemic risk in financial networks with banks and non-financial transactors.
Financial inter-dependencies are since the financial crisis at the forefront of macroeconomic research and policy making. The world had painfully learned how small and localized events can travel through the global financial system with huge repercussions for the real economy. Since then, many studies have analyzed the propagation properties of given financial exposure networks. Each day, however, large amounts of financial assets are traded and financial institutions' balance-sheets change in response to new information, regulation or monetary policy. Changes in exposures crucially affect the transmission of shocks. This thesis develops general equilibrium frameworks that show how financial networks emerge endogenously from trade in financial assets between heterogeneous institutions. I use micro and macro-level datasets including confidential data from the Banque de France to structurally identify risk-preferences, institutions' beliefs about the distribution of future financial asset returns, and the specific constraints that drive financial network formation. The thesis also derives an explicit firm-level link of financial networks to an economy's productive structure.Chapter 1 of the thesis shows how firm-level productivity shocks propagate through financial networks. If firms need external funds to finance capital expenditure, banks create linkages between them that go beyond their input-output relationships. These links can affect aggregate output. The chapter builds a multi-sector production model of heterogeneous firms that are financed by heterogeneous leverage targeting banks. Banks are themselves connected through bilateral cross-holdings. Endogenous financial asset prices introduce a new propagation channel of productivity shocks. Structural parameters such as bank-level leverage constraints determine the strength of this channel and one statistic is sufficient to capture it. I use confidential matched bank-firm-level data from the Banque de France on corporate bond investments to estimate the model. The model can be used to study macro-prudential regulation and monetary policy.Chapter 2 uses bank- and instrument-level data on asset holdings and liabilities to identify and estimate a general equilibrium model of trade in financial instruments shaping an endogenous network of interlinked banks' balance-sheets. Bilateral ties are formed as each bank selects the size and the diversification of its assets and liabilities. Shocks propagate due to the response, rather than the size, of bilateral ties to such shocks. The network exhibit key theoretical properties: (i) more connected networks lead to less amplification of partial equilibrium shocks, (ii) the influence of a bank's equity is independent of the size of its holdings; (iii) more risk-averse banks are more diversified, lowering their own volatility but increasing their influence on other banks. The structural estimation of the network model for the universe of French banks shows that the endogenous change in the network matters two to three times more than the initial network of cross-holdings for the transmission of shocks. The estimated network is used to assess the effects of the ECB's quantitative easing policy.Chapter 3 concludes the thesis with a more aggregated sector-level analysis. It first studies how the sharp deterioration of the net external portfolio position of France between 2008 and 2014 was driven by sectoral patterns such as the banking sector retrenchment and the increase in foreign liabilities of the public and corporate sectors but was mitigated by the expansion of domestic and foreign asset portfolios of insurance companies. It provides a network representation of the links between domestic sectors and the rest of the world. Sectoral shock propagation through inter-sectoral security holdings is studied in an estimated balance-sheet contagion model.
In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the federal government has pursued significant regulatory reforms, including proposals to measure and monitor systemic risk. However, there is much debate about how this might be accomplished quantitatively and objectively—or whether this is even possible. A key issue is determining the appropriate trade-offs between risk and reward from a policy and social welfare perspective given the potential negative impact of crises. One of the first books to address the challenges of measuring statistical risk from a system-wide persepective, Quantifying Systemic Risk looks at the means of measuring systemic risk and explores alternative approaches. Among the topics discussed are the challenges of tying regulations to specific quantitative measures, the effects of learning and adaptation on the evolution of the market, and the distinction between the shocks that start a crisis and the mechanisms that enable it to grow.
My research revolves around financial institutions. In this essay, I aim to further our understandings of the internal workings of financial intermediaries, how they interact in financial networks, and how they affect monetary policy and the macroeconomy. In the first chapter, James Peck and I study a bank run model where the depositors can choose how much to deposit. In the many years and many published articles following the bank runs paper of Diamond and Dybvig (1983), only a few papers have modeled the decision of whether to deposit, much less the decision of how much to deposit. The questions we address here are, how does the opportunity for consumers to invest outside the banking system- in investments that do not provide liquidity insurance- (1) affect the nature of the final allocation, (2) affect the nature of the optimal deposit contract, and (3) affect the fragility of the banking system? We extend the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model so to incorporate sequential service constraint and the opportunity of outside investments and show that under certain conditions the equilibrium entails partial deposits, thus arguing for the optimality of limited banking. One might think that when depositors are allowed to invest a fraction of their endowments outside the banking system, they would be hedging against the risk of a run occurring, but losing out on some of the services provided by banks. Thus, one might think that this would improve the stability of the financial system at the expense of lost efficiency. However, we show that the opposite could be true, with reduced stability (runs more likely) but higher efficiency! In the second chapter, I study the strategic behavior of heterogeneous banks in a network and its implications on the stability of the financial system. I construct a model alas Allen and Gale (2000) wherein banks differ in whether they are hit by an uninsurable excess liquidity demand. I show that in such a framework banks that are already facing a high liquidity demand are more likely to incur the burden of excess liquidity shocks even when that shock has not directly hit them, i.e. relatively healthier banks strategically pass liquidation costs to relatively less healthy banks. I also show that private bailouts arise endogenously in this framework. If the strategic behavior of a bank results in the other bank's failure, the first bank may choose to incur the burden of the liquidity shock by itself to let the other bank survive and, thus, to control the indirect costs of failure feeding back to its portfolio. I also show that for some economies the financial network becomes more stable as the level of cross-deposits is increased from the minimum level that fully insures banks against liquidity demand uncertainty up to a threshold level. In the third chapter, I study the role of financial intermediaries in the transmission of monetary policy in low interest rate environments. The global financial crisis not only proved our understanding of intermediaries were inaccurate and in many ways misleading but also provided an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the questions in ways that were not possible before. Among those, was the behavior of economic players in ultra-low and even negative market rates. I study the internal workings of intermediaries by exploiting geographical variation in market concentration and provide the first explanation for the gradual deterioration of monetary policy power in low market rates that does not rely on bank-specific characteristics and similarly applies to non-bank intermediaries. I show that- in stark contrast to the textbook view but consistent with my mechanism- in low market rates more concentrated banks respond to market rate falls by reducing their deposit supply as well as their loan supply by more than those of less concentrated banks. I argue this behavior is the response of banks to loan and deposit demand becoming less elastic to market rate changes in low market rates which itself is due to the shift of household assets from the ones that are fully responsive to market rate changes (e.g. money market funds) to those less responsive (e.g. deposits) or irresponsive (e.g. cash) in low market rates. As the market rate falls, The downward pressure of the increased market power and the upward pressure of the traditional channels, cause the non-monotonic response of banks to market rate changes. The results help explain the puzzling slow recovery of the economy as well as stable inflation after the global financial crisis. I also show that local house prices become less responsive to market rate changes in low market rates in the counties that are exposed to high-market-power banks.
My dissertation topic is on the impact of changes in the monetary policy interest rate target on bank distress and systemic risk in the U.S. banking system. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 had devastating effects on the banking system worldwide. The feeble performance of financial institutions during the crisis heightened the necessity of understanding systemic risk exhibited the critical role of monitoring the banking system, and strongly necessitated quantification of the risks to which banks are exposed, for incorporation in policy formulation. In the aftermath of the crisis, US bank regulators focused on overhauling the then existing regulatory framework in order to provide comprehensive capital buffers against bank losses. In this context, the Basel Committee proposed in 2011, the Basel III framework in order to strengthen the regulatory capital structure as a buffer against bank losses. The reform under Basel III framework aimed at raising the quality and the quantity of regulatory capital base and enhancing the risk coverage of the capital structure. Separately, US bank regulators adopted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to implement stress tests on systemically important bank holding companies (SIBs). Concerns about system-wide distress have broadened the debate on banking regulation towards a macro prudential approach. In this context, limiting bank risk and systemic risk has become a prolific research field at the crossroads of banking, macroeconomics, econometrics, and network theory over the last decade (Kuritzkes et al., 2005; Goodhart and Sergoviano, 2008; Geluk et al., 2009; Acharya et al., 2010, 2017; Tarashev et al., 2010; Huang et al., 2012; Browless and Engle, 2012, 2017 and Cummins, 2014). The European Central Bank (ECB) (2010) defines systemic risk as a risk of financial instability "so widespread that it impairs the functioning of a financial system to the point where economic growth and welfare suffer materially." While US bank regulators and policy-makers have moved to strengthen the regulatory framework in the post-crisis period in order to prevent another financial crisis, a growing recent line of research has suggested that there is a significant link between monetary policy and bank distress (Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist, 1999; Borio and Zhu, 2008; Gertler and Kiyotaki, 2010; Delis and Kouretas, 2010; Gertler and Karadi, 2011; Delis et al., 2017). In my research, I examine the link between the monetary policy and bank distress. In the first chapter, I investigate the impact of the federal funds rate (FFR) changes on the banking system distress between 2001 and 2013 within an unrestricted vector auto-regression model. The Fed used FFR as a primary policy tool before the financial crisis of 2007-2009, but focused on quantitative easing (QE) during the crisis and post-crisis periods when the FFR hit the zero bound. I use the Taylor rule rate (TRR, 1993) as an "implied policy rate", instead of the FFR, to account for the impact of QE on the economy. The base model of distress includes three macroeconomic indicators-real GDP growth, inflation, and TRR-and a systemic risk indicator (Expected capital shortfall (ES)). I consider two model extensions; (i) I include a measure of bank lending standards to account for the changes in the systemic risk due to credit tightening, (ii) I replace inflation with house price growth rate to see if the results remain robust. Three main results can be drawn. First, the impulse response functions (IRFs) show that raising the monetary policy rate contributed to insolvency problems for the U.S. banks, with a one percentage point increase in the rate raising the banking systemic stress by 1.6 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively, in the base and extend models. Second, variance decomposition (VDs) analysis shows that up to ten percent of error variation in systemic risk indicator can be attributed to innovations in the policy rate in the extended model. Third, my results supplement the view that policy rate hikes led to housing bubble burst and contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2009. This is an example for how monetary policy-making gets more complex and must be conducted with utmost caution if there is a bubble in the economy. In the second chapter, I examine the prevalence and asymmetry of the effects on bank distress from positive and negative shocks to the target fed fund rate (FFR) in the period leading to the financial crisis (2001-2008). A panel model with three blocks of control variables is used. The blocks include: positive/negative FFR shocks, macroeconomic drivers, and bank balance sheet indicators. A distress indicator similar to Texas Ratio is used to proxy distress. Shocks to FFR are defined along the lines suggested by Morgan (1993). Three main results are obtained. First, FFR shocks, either positive or negative, raise bank distress over the following year. Second, the magnitudes of the effects from positive and negative shocks are unequal (asymmetric); a 100 bps positive (negative) shock raises the bank distress indicator (scaled from 0 to 1) by 9 bps (3 bps) over the next year. Put differently, after a 100 bps positive (negative) shock, the probability of bankruptcy rises from 10% to 19% (13%). Third, expanding operations into non-banking activities by FHCs does not benefit them in terms of distress due to unanticipated changes in the FFR as FFR shocks (positive or negative) create similar levels of distress for BHCs and FHCs. In the third chapter, I explore the systemic risk contributions of U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) from 2001 to 2015 by using the expected shortfall approach. Developed by analogy with the component expected shortfall concept, I decompose the aggregate systemic risk, as measured by expected shortfall, into several subgroups of banks by using publicly available balance sheet data to define the probability of bank default. The risk measure, thus, encompasses the entire universe of banks. I find that concentration of assets in a smaller number of larger banks raises systemic risk. The systemic risk contribution of banks designated as SIFIs increased sharply during the financial crisis and reached 74% at the end of 2015. Two-thirds of this risk contribution is attributed to the four largest banks in the U.S.: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. I also find that diversifying business operations by expanding into nontraditional operations does not reduce the systemic risk contribution of financial holding companies (FHCs). In general, FHCs are individually riskier than BHCs despite their more diversified basket of products; FHCs contribute a disproportionate amount to systemic risk given their size, all else being equal. I believe monetary policy-making in the last decade carries many lessons for policy makers. Particularly, the link between the monetary policy target rate and bank distress and systemic risk is an interesting topic by all accounts due to its implications and challenges (explained in more detail in first and second chapters). The literature studying the relation between bank distress and monetary policy is fairly small but developing fast. The models I investigate in my work are simple in many ways but they may serve as a basis for more sophisticated models.
In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, significant attention was paid to systemic risk within heavily interconnected financial networks. The academic discussions on interbank network structure, market stability, and contagion gave rise to a policy debate about whether major banks had become both too big and too interconnected to fail. However, despite the focus on systemic risk-the risk of market collapse resulting from firm-level risks-within the financial sector, little attention was paid to systemic risks in the economy at large. The authors of this report address that gap in research. To begin to measure the potential magnitude of systemic risk in the broad economy, the authors estimated firm-to-firm connections across sectors of the U.S. economy. Using network analysis on observed firm-level networks to elucidate heavily interconnected firms and areas of centrality (i.e., firms of significant network importance), statistical inference, and network calibration, the authors provide a new approach to modeling the economy at the firm level that expands on the traditional sector-level input-output modeling by estimating firm-level input-output flows. The result allows one to use traditional input-output modeling to estimate the size of potential idiosyncratic shocks and to use economically weighted measures of centrality to reveal systemically important firms. The approach is a contribution to the growing literature on the microfoundations of economic risk, with the potential for use across a wide range of applications from financial stability to natural disasters.
Following the recent financial crisis, regulators have been preoccupied with the concept of systemic risk in financial markets, believing that such risk could cause the markets that they oversee to implode. At the same time, they have demonstrated a certain inability to develop and implement comprehensive policies to address systemic risk. This inability is due not only to the indeterminacy inherent in the term 'systemic risk' but also to existing institutional structures which, because of their existing legal mandates, ultimately make it difficult to monitor and regulate systemic risk across an entire economic system. Bringing together leading figures in the field of financial regulation, this collection of essays explores the related concepts of systemic risk and institutional design of financial markets, responding to a number of questions: In terms of systemic risk, what precisely is the problem and what can be done about it? How should systemic risk be regulated? What should be the role of the central bank, banking authorities, and securities regulators? Should countries implement a macroprudential regulator? If not, how is macroprudential regulation to be addressed within their respective legislative schemes? What policy mechanisms can be employed when developing regulation relating to financial markets? A significant and timely examination of one of the most intractable challenges posed to financial regulation.
In this dissertation, I study the financial systemic risk from firm-level perspectives. Chapter 1 investigates a breakdown of the total financial system risk into individual contributors and sources. Chapter 2 studies a theoretical model about the active balance sheet management of individual bank in securitization. Chapter 3 and 4 present empirical evidence about securitization asset choices of banks when they face different constraints. Chapter 5 provides a brief summary of findings in this dissertation. In chapter 1, I propose a novel systemic importance (SI) index that tracks the contribution of a financial institution to the total financial system risk. That risk measure can be decomposed into idiosyncratic and spillover risk contribution to further study the risk characteristics of each firm. Using equity return data from 1965 to 2018, I find two important results. First, the spillover risk can account for approximately 80% of the aggregate financial system risk, which emphasizes the importance of contagion risk as a major amplification mechanism of shocks during a systemic event. Second, a portfolio of the top 20 most systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), ranked by SI index, earns a significantly lower risk-adjusted return than their counterparts. This substantial equity funding cost advantage of approximately 4% per year on average implies that the ex-ante implicit government guarantee for the “too-important-to-fail” is priced by the market. In chapter 2, I develop a theoretical model that features two benefits of securitization. First, banks can reduce idiosyncratic risks and enhance risk-absorbing capacity by converting a fraction of their risky investments into securitized assets. Second, securitized assets require less regulatory capital, helping banks obtain a higher leverage without breaking the regulation. This chapter studies effects of the two motives above, namely risk-transferring and regulatory arbitrage, on bank portfolio choices. My analytical results predict that banks would securitize safer loans and retain only higher-risk, higher-return assets that justify their regulatory capital cost. In chapter 3, I analyze new data points in the recently revamped HMDA data to examine mortgage securitization decision choices and motives of all non-exempt banks in the US. Combining with the bank-level data from Call Reports, I find that capital-constrained banks retain riskier loans and involve more in the securitization market to optimize return on capital and keep regulatory ratios in control. On the other hand, risk-constrained banks use securitization mainly for the purpose of risk and liquidity improvement. When putting together, risk transferring seems to dominate regulatory arbitrage as the main reason banks engage in securitization. Chapter 4 serves as a complementary case study to Chapter 3, in which I investigate the mortgage loan approval and securitization decision of PNC Bank. There are three interesting findings: First, the bank uses third-party automated underwriting systems to originate over 90% of its conforming residential mortgage loans and then sell more than 70% of them. Second, the bank retains safer loans on balance sheet, which emphasizes the role of securitization as a risk-transferring mechanism. Third, compared to a non-depository financial institution (shadow bank), a traditional commercial bank like PNC behaves differently and shows a clear presence of active securitization management. With a stable deposit funding channel, PNC is able to originate jumbo loans at a higher approval rate, retain more loans on balance sheet, and selectively choose to sell off riskier loans.