Download Free Essays On Information Asset Bubbles And Economic Policy Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Essays On Information Asset Bubbles And Economic Policy and write the review.

A study of asset price bubbles and the implications for preventing financial instability.
The global financial crisis triggered by fallout form the sub-prime mortgage market in the U.S. has led economists to focus attention on the role of monetary policy in the crisis. The question of how monetary policy affects the financial sector is the key to the current debate over the role financial stability should play in the monetary policy decisions. As a contribution to this debate, my dissertation examines the link between monetary policy and three main financial sectors-the banking sector, the stock market, anf the housing market. The first essay examines whether the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) responded to changes in equity prices during the period 1966-2009. I distinguish the indirect response, where the FOMC reacts to equity prices only when equity prices affect its target variables, from the direct response, where the FOMC reacts to equity prices directly regardless of their effects on the target variables. In addition, the paper models the Federal Reserve's reaction function as state dependent, hypothesizing that the FOMC may respond to changes in asset prices asymmetrically during different states of the economy. The results show that the FOMC did respond directly to equity price changes when asset prices were falling. During non-bust periods, the FOMC did not respond directly to equity prices. It used information on equity prices to forecast target variables. The second essay investigates the effect of expansionary and contractionary monetary policy on the risk taking behavior of low-capital and high-capital banks. Using quarterly data on federally insured banks spanning the period from 1991 to 2010, the paper shows that expansionary policy caused high capital banks to take more risk. Capital constrained banks were not significantly affected by expansionary monetary policy. Contractionary monetary policy, however, is not effective in affecting the risk-taking behavior of both capital-constrained and unconstrained banks. The paper, therefore, confirms the hypothesis that expansionary policy is more effective in encouraging capital unconstrained banks to invest more in risky assets. The third essay examines the role of monetary policy on housing bubbles in the last three decades. A spatial dynamic model is used to explicity account for spatial cross-section dependence in the data. Using quarterly panel data on 48 contiguous U.S. states and the District of Columbia, the paper discovers that the housing bubbles across the U.S. are mainly driven by the local or state specific factors during the period 1976-2000. However, the prolonged low interest rate since the 2001 recession contributed to the run-up in house prices acrsss states.
As the world economy becomes rapidly integrated through the globalization of markets for goods and services, it is crucial to understand how cross-country linkages through goods and financial markets explain observed business cycles in data. Furthermore, interdependent open economies imply that optimal policy is unlikely to be responding to domestic shocks only. This dissertation studies various aspects of open economies from a macroeconomic perspective and discusses related theoretical policy implications. Chapter 1 investigates the implication of intermediate goods on optimal monetary policy in open economies, and in particular, focusing on the welfare gains from monetary cooperation. In a relatively standard two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with input-output relations, I demonstrate that introducing intermediate goods can amplify the welfare gains caused by cost-push shocks by an order of magnitude larger. A detailed analysis on the equilibrium dynamics highlights a new channel that is absent in the previous literature: non-cooperative central banks respond differently to shocks in the intermediate goods market versus shocks in the final goods market, even if these shocks generate the same distortions when the two central banks cooperate. Furthermore, I find that increasing the degree of openness in the intermediate goods market can reduce the welfare gains from monetary cooperation. This casts doubt on whether the recent trend in international economic integration may justify the potential need for international monetary cooperation. Chapter 2 develops a simple framework for computing equilibrium shares of trade currency invoicing in open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The solution method follows closely to Devereux and Sutherland (2011)'s method in solving portfolio choice by applying information from second-order approximations of equilibrium conditions to solving zero-order portfolio shares. The framework is flexible enough to be extended to a Rotemberg sticky price model. To illustrate the approach, I use a simple symmetric two-country model and show that the results are consistent with existing theoretical findings on how monetary policy affects exchange rate pass-through. Chapter 3 investigates the interaction between inequality and financial development in determining the condition for rational asset bubbles to emerge in general equilibrium. I develop a simple overlapping generations model (OLG) with a production economy and financial frictions, which shows that wage inequality can cause dynamic inefficiency in an economy with an underdeveloped financial sector. Furthermore, the model developed in the chapter indicates that trade integration can create asset bubbles through the channel of increasing inequality. The result is consistent with observations where developing countries with export-led growth seem to experience episodes of bubble-like asset price booms and busts in the last three decades.
Contributors -- About the co-editors -- Background on George Kaufman's contributions to the finance profession -- Public policy and financial economics : comments to honor George G. Kaufman / Charles L. Evans -- 57 years of banking changes and ideas / Alex J. Pollock -- Theory vs. practice and promise in banking and financial regulation / Harvey Rosenblum -- Central banking and regulation : changes through the years -- The changing fortunes of central banking / C.A.E. Goodhart -- Financial safety nets : the good, the bad, and the ugly / Edward J. Kane -- Systemic risk : taming the two 800-pound gorillas in the room / Charles W. Calomiris -- Shadowing capital regulation: 1986-2015 / Richard J. Herring -- Public policy issues in financial markets -- The fed and structural reforms to reduce interconnectedness and promote financial stability / Robert A. Eisenbeis -- The new failure resolution regulation : the good, the bad, and the unknowable / Robert Bliss and Franklin Edwards -- Monetary and other policy problems / Allan H. Meltzer -- Defining, measuring, and mitigating systemic risk at large insurance companies / Richard Rosen and Thanases Plestis -- Asset bubbles and public policy / Douglas D. Evanoff and A.G Malliaris -- The new realities of market structure and liquidity : where have we been? where are we going? / Chester Spatt -- Affordable housing goals, the financial crisis, and the efficient market hypothesis / Peter J. Wallison -- Good and bad lessons in finance from new information / Robert Litan
Providing a historical appraisal of bubble investments and blending theory with field observations, this insightful work will benefit academics, researchers and professionals observing the nexus of relationships between speculation, states and markets. By identifying particular trends and consequences, the book presents insight into the operation of speculative activity and its social, economic and political repercussions.
The compendium of papers in this volume focuses on aspects of economic uncertainty, financial instabilities and asset bubbles.Economic uncertainty is modeled in continuous time using the mathematical techniques of stochastic calculus. A detailed treatment of important topics is provided, including the existence and uniqueness of asymptotic economic growth, the modeling of inflation and interest rates, the decomposition of inflation and its volatility, and the extension of the quantity theory of money to allow for randomness.The reader is also introduced to the methods of chaotic dynamics, and this methodology is applied to asset pricing, the European equity markets, and the multi-fractality in foreign currency markets.Since the techniques of stochastic calculus and chaotic dynamics do not readily accommodate the presence of stochastic bubbles, several papers discuss in depth the presence of financial bubbles in asset prices, and econometric work is performed to link such bubbles to monetary policy.Finally, since bubbles often burst rather than deflate slowly, the last section of the book studies the crash of October 1987 as well as other crashes of national equity markets due to the Persian gulf crisis.
The central goal of this volume was to assemble outstanding scholars and policymakers in the field of financial markets and institutions and have them articulate significant market developments in their particular areas of expertise during the past few decades.Not just a celebratory volume, Public Policy and Financial Economics selected internationally recognized financial economists who have worked with Professor Kaufman during his years of scholarly research, and have a combined mastery of specialized financial markets themes and, very importantly, knowledge of public policies in the areas. All 15 chapters offer unique, innovative, and exciting expositions of several critical topics in financial economics.
In distilling a vast literature spanning the rational— irrational divide, this paper offers reflections on why asset bubbles continue to threaten economic stability despite financial markets becoming more informationally-efficient, more complete, and more heavily influenced by sophisticated (i.e. presumably rational) institutional investors. Candidate explanations for bubble persistence—such as limits to learning, frictional limits to arbitrage, and behavioral errors—seem unsatisfactory as they are inconsistent with the aforementioned trends impacting global capital markets. In lieu of the short-term nature of the asset owner—manager relationship, and the momentum bias inherent in financial benchmarks, I argue that the business risk of asset managers acts as strong motivation for institutional herding and ‘rational bubble-riding.’ Two key policy implications follow. First, procyclicality could intensify as institutional assets under management continue to grow. Second, remedial policies should extend beyond the standard suite of macroprudential and monetary measures to include time-invariant policies targeted at the cause (not just symptom) of the problem. Prominent among these should be reforms addressing principal-agent contract design and the implementation of financial benchmarks.