Topic Financial Markets

Big Banks and Macroeconomic Outcomes: Theory and Cross-Country Evidence of Granularity

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which idiosyncratic shocks to bank lending can generate aggregate fluctuations in the credit supply when the banking ...

Is the Willingness to Take Financial Risk a Sex-Linked Trait? Evidence from National Surveys of Household Finance

We investigate whether the willingness to take investment risk is a sex-linked trait and link the results to the country's gender equality regime. Our empirical analysis involves household data on financial asset holdings as well as on self-reported risk tolerance for Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Of those countries, Italy is by far the country with the greatest degree of gender inequality ...

Sustainable Financial Markets: Financial Transaction Tax and High Capital Buffers Indispensable

The sustainability of the financial markets is a requirement that has only appeared on the economic policy agenda very recently, whereas a stable financial system has been a declared goal for decades. The relationship between sustainability and stability is, however, still unclear. The two terms are often used synonymously but stability is only one part of sustainability. The following outlines the ...

A Financial System Should Be Able to Restore Stability Autonomously: Seven Questions to Dorothea Schäfer

On the Linkages between Stock Prices and Exchange Rates: Evidence from the Banking Crisis of 2007-2010

This study examines the nature of the linkages between stock market prices and exchange rates in six advanced economies, namely the US, the UK, Canada, Japan, the euro area, and Switzerland, using data on the banking crisis between 2007 and 2010. Bivariate GARCH-BEKK models are estimated producing evidence of unidirectional spillovers from stock returns to exchange rate changes in the US and the UK, ...

The PPP Hypothesis Revisited: Evidence Using a Multivariate Long-Memory Model

This paper examines the PPP hypothesis analysing the behaviour of the real exchange rates vis-à-vis the US dollar for four major currencies (namely, the Canadian dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound). An innovative approach based on fractional integration in a multivariate context is applied to annual data from 1970 to 2011. Long memory is found to characterise the Canadian dollar, ...

Long Memory in the Ukrainian Stock Market

This paper examines the dynamics of stock prices in Ukraine by estimating the degree of persistence of the PFTS stock market index. Using long memory techniques we show that the log prices series is I(d) with d slightly above 1, implying that returns are characterised by a small degree of long memory and thus are predictable using historical data. Moreover, their volatility, measured as the absolute ...

The "Celtic Crisis": Guarantees, Tranparency and Systemic Liquidity Risk

Bank liability guarantee schemes have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to shore up investor confidence and prevent bank runs. However, as the experiences of some European countries, most notably Ireland, have demonstrated, the credibility and effectiveness of these guarantees are crucially intertwined with the sovereign's funding risks. Employing methods from the literature on global ...

The Costs for Germany if the Eurozone Collapses

Business Cycles, International Trade and Capital Flows: Evidence from Latin America

This paper adopts a flexible framework to assess both short- and long-run business cycle linkages between six Latin American (LA) countries and the four largest economies in the world (namely the US, the Euro area, Japan and China) over the period 1980:I-2011:IV. The result indicate that within the LA region there are considerable differences between countries, success stories coexisting with extremely ...