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- Volume 4, 2012
Annual Review of Financial Economics - Volume 4, 2012
Volume 4, 2012
- Preface
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Implications of the Dodd-Frank Act*
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 1–38More LessIn this review, we provide an economic assessment of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 in terms of the likely efficacy of the financial-sector regulation it proposes. We focus in particular on its ability to contain systemic risk, the risk that many financial firms may fail en masse, and discuss the tools it employs. Namely, we examine enhanced capital requirements for systemically important financial firms, the separation of proprietary trading from bank holding companies (the Volcker rule), the resolution authority for orderly management of large complex financial institution (LCFI) failure, and attempts to contain risks in the shadow banking system. We relate the Act to its most important predecessor, the Banking Act of 1933, and consider the desirability and implications of the Dodd-Frank Act's all-encompassing approach to the reform of financial-sector architecture and regulation.
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Valuation of Government Policies and Projects
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 39–58More LessGovernments play a central role in the allocation of capital and risk in the economy. Evaluating the cost to taxpayers of government investments requires an assumption about the government's cost of capital. Governments often take their borrowing rate to be their cost of capital, which implicitly treats the market risk associated with their activities as having no cost to taxpayers. This article reviews the theoretical and practical rationale for treating market risk as a cost to governments, presents an interpretive review of the growing literature that applies the concepts and tools of modern finance to evaluating the costs of government policies and projects, and suggests directions for future research. Examples considered include deposit insurance, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve's emergency lending facilities, student loans, real infrastructure investments, and public pension plans.
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The Impacts of Automation and High Frequency Trading on Market Quality
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 59–98More LessIn recent decades, US equity markets have changed from predominantly manual markets with limited competition to highly automated and competitive markets. These changes occurred earlier for NASDAQ stocks (primarily between 1994 and 2004) and later for NYSE-listed stocks (mostly following Reg NMS and the 2006 introduction of the NYSE hybrid market). This paper surveys the evidence of how these changes impacted market quality and shows that overall market quality has improved significantly, including bid-ask spreads, liquidity, and transitory price impacts (measured by short-term variance ratios). The greater improvement in market quality for NYSE-listed stocks relative to NASDAQ stocks beginning in 2006 suggests causal links between the staggered market structure changes and market quality. Using proprietary data sets, provided by two exchanges, that identify the activity of high frequency trading firms, studies show these firms contributed directly to narrowing bid-ask spreads, increasing liquidity, and reducing intraday transitory pricing errors and intraday volatility.
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Shadow Banking Regulation
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 99–140More LessShadow banks conduct credit intermediation without direct, explicit access to public sources of liquidity and credit guarantees. Shadow banks contributed to the credit boom in the early 2000s and collapsed during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. We review the quickly growing literature on shadow banking and provide a conceptual framework of shadow banking regulation. Since the collapse, regulatory reform efforts have aimed at strengthening the stability of the shadow banking system. We review these reform efforts for shadow funding sources including asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP), tri-party repurchase agreements (repos), money market mutual funds (MMMFs), and securitization. Despite significant effort by lawmakers, regulators, and accountants, there has been uneven progress in achieving a more stable shadow banking system.
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Narrow Banking
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 141–159More LessThis review discusses the history of narrow banks, reform proposals involving narrow banks, and theory and empirical evidence regarding whether narrow banks should play a more prominent role in the financial system. Prior to the early-twentieth century, US banks tended to be much narrower than they are today. Common modern banking practices, such as maturity transformation and explicit loan commitments, arose only after the creation of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC. My review of theory and empirical evidence finds it largely supportive of narrow bank reforms. Most importantly, a narrow-banking system could have huge advantages in containing moral hazard and reducing the overall risk and required regulation of the financial system.
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Federal Reserve Liquidity Provision during the Financial Crisis of 2007–2009
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 161–177More LessThis review examines the Federal Reserve's (or Fed's) unprecedented liquidity provision during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. It first reviews how the Fed provides liquidity in normal times. It then explains how the Fed's new and expanded liquidity facilities were intended to enable the central bank to fulfill its traditional lender-of-last-resort role during the crisis while mitigating stigma, broadening the set of institutions with access to liquidity, and increasing the flexibility with which institutions could tap such liquidity. The review then assesses the growing empirical literature on the effectiveness of the facilities and provides insights as to where further research is warranted.
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Efficient Markets and the Law: A Predictable Past and an Uncertain Future
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 179–214More LessThis article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has offered a theoretical construct to accompany the general belief in the value of accurate and complete information that has animated the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since its creation. Specific applications of the EMH have been straightforward and predictable: For instance, its tenets as to market processing of public information helped motivate the streamlining of procedural requirements as to corporate disclosures and, more controversially, as to private securities class action lawsuits. In state corporate law, the EMH has influenced developments as to takeovers and the corporate objective. In contrast, the EMH and related learning have failed to sufficiently inform governmental actions to address financial illiteracy. Belief in the EMH and the value of efficient markets has weakened in the face of recent market anomalies and stress. The May 2010 flash crash is not easily reconciled with the EMH, and related phenomena such as high frequency trading involve an equity market microstructure far different from the microstructure at the time the EMH emerged. Actions motivated by the global financial crisis (GFC), such as the SEC short-selling ban in September 2008, arguably suggest a greater willingness to subordinate market efficiency in favor of other governmental goals. A range of important EMH-related issues loom beyond those associated with financial illiteracy, the equity market microstructure, and governmental goals. Foremost are those relating to the informational predicate on which market efficiency rests. One key aspect of the informational predicate relates to the disclosure challenges associated with financial innovations (such as asset-backed securities) and business entities heavily involved in financial innovation activities (such as certain money center banks). The “intermediary depiction model” that the SEC has always used is inadequate in financial innovation–related contexts. Another key aspect relates to the massive amounts of information that the Dodd-Frank Act requires to be provided to governmental bodies.
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Corporate Governance of Financial Institutions
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 215–232More LessWe identify the tension between dueling expectations of financial institutions as value-maximizing entities that also serve the public interest. We highlight the importance of information in addressing the public desire for banks to be safe yet innovative. Regulators can choose several approaches to increase market discipline and information production. Information production can be mandated outside of markets through increased regulatory disclosure. Regulators can also directly motivate potential producers of information by changing their incentives. Traditional approaches to bank governance may interfere with the information content of prices. Thus, the lack of transparency in the banking industry may be a symptom rather than the primary cause of bad governance. We provide examples of compensation and resolution. Reforms that promote the quality of security prices through information production can improve the governance of financial institutions. Future research is needed to examine the interactions between disclosure, information, and governance.
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Corporate Finance and Financial Institutions
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 233–253More LessMany corporate finance researchers have avoided analyzing financial institutions, perhaps on the grounds that they are “unique” or “different” from other types of firms. This assessment reflects some unusual features of financial firms' liabilities and a set of governmental regulatory restrictions that have become less pervasive in recent years. In fact, corporate finance theory applies equally well to financial firms, although some modifications are required to recognize the effects of government safety and soundness regulation. Regulated firms' private incentives account for most of the difficulties regulators encounter when trying to craft appropriate oversight mechanisms.
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A Survey of Systemic Risk Analytics
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 255–296More LessWe provide a survey of 31 quantitative measures of systemic risk in the economics and finance literature, chosen to span key themes and issues in systemic risk measurement and management. We motivate these measures from the supervisory, research, and data perspectives in the main text and present concise definitions of each risk measure—including required inputs, expected outputs, and data requirements—in an extensive Supplemental Appendix. To encourage experimentation and innovation among as broad an audience as possible, we have developed an open-source Matlab® library for most of the analytics surveyed, which, once tested, will be accessible through the Office of Financial Research (OFR) at http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/wsr/ofr/Pages/default.aspx.
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Sovereign and Financial-Sector Risk: Measurement and Interactions
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 297–312More LessThe complex spillover effects between sectors observed during the global financial crisis and recent European crisis make clear the importance of improving our understanding of the interactions and feedback mechanisms between sovereign and banking-sector risks. To that end, this paper presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the sovereign, banks, and their interlinkages based on contingent claims analysis (CCA). Our bank-by-bank framework uses balance-sheet data plus high-frequency market data in a way that measures risk exposures and can capture key risk transmission and feedbacks with the sovereign in real time. Risk transmission between banks and sovereigns can arise in the framework from several important sources: (a) bank holdings of risky sovereign debt, (b) explicit and implicit guarantees from sovereigns to banks, and (c) spillovers from sovereign spreads into bank borrowing costs. We illustrate the framework with several examples and ways forward to analyze multicountry sovereign and banking interactions.
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Regime Changes and Financial Markets
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 313–337More LessRegime-switching models can match the tendency of financial markets to often change their behavior abruptly and the phenomenon that the new behavior of financial variables often persists for several periods after such a change. Although the regimes captured by regime-switching models are identified by an econometric procedure, they often correspond to different periods in regulation, policy, and other secular changes. In empirical estimates, the means, volatilities, autocorrelations, and cross-covariances of asset returns often differ across regimes in a manner that allows regime-switching models to capture the stylized behavior of many financial series including fat tails, heteroskedasticity, skewness, and time-varying correlations. In equilibrium models, regimes in fundamental processes, such as consumption or dividend growth, strongly affect the dynamic properties of equilibrium asset prices and can induce nonlinear risk-return trade-offs. Regime switches also lead to potentially large consequences for investors' optimal portfolio choice.
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The Real Effects of Financial Markets
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 339–360More LessA large amount of activity in the financial sector occurs in secondary financial markets, where securities are traded among investors without capital flowing to firms. The stock market is the archetypal example, which in most developed economies captures a lot of attention and resources. Is the stock market just a sideshow or does it affect real economic activity? In this review, we discuss the potential real effects of financial markets that stem from the informational role of market prices. We review the theoretical literature and show that accounting for the feedback effect from market prices to the real economy significantly changes our understanding of the price formation process, the informativeness of the price, and speculators' trading behavior. We make two main points. First, we argue that a new definition of price efficiency is needed to account for the extent to which prices reflect information that is useful for the efficiency of real decisions (rather than the extent to which they forecast future cash flows). Second, incorporating the feedback effect into models of financial markets can explain various market phenomena that otherwise seem puzzling. Finally, we review empirical evidence on the real effects of secondary financial markets.
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Economic Activity of Firms and Asset Prices
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 361–384More LessIn this review we survey the recent research on the fundamental determinants of stock returns. These studies explore how firms' systematic risk and their investment and production decisions are jointly determined in equilibrium. Models with production provide insights into several types of empirical patterns, including (a) the correlations between firms' economic characteristics and their risk premia, (b) the comovement of stock returns among firms with similar characteristics, and (c) the joint dynamics of asset returns and macroeconomic quantities. Moreover, by explicitly relating firms' stock returns and cash flows to fundamental shocks, models with production connect the analysis of financial markets with the research on the origins of macroeconomic fluctuations.
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Consumption-Based Asset Pricing Models
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 385–409More LessA major research initiative in finance focuses on the determinants of the cross-sectional and time series properties of asset returns. With that objective in mind, asset pricing models have been developed, starting with the capital asset pricing models of Sharpe (1964), Lintner (1965), and Mossin (1966). Consumption-based asset pricing models use marginal rates of substitution to determine the relative prices of the date, event-contingent, composite consumption good. This model class is characterized by a stochastic discount factor process that puts restrictions on the joint process of asset returns and per capita consumption. This review takes a critical look at this class of models and their inability to rationalize the statistics that have characterized US financial markets over the past century. The intuition behind the discrepancy between model prediction and empirical data is explained. Finally, the research efforts to enhance the model's ability to replicate the empirical data are summarized.
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Taxes and Investment Choice
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 411–429More LessTaxes have a first-order effect on investors' trading decisions and portfolio choices and on the equilibrium pricing of assets. In this review, we investigate how certain features of the tax code impact investors and asset markets. We begin by considering how tax heterogeneity across investors and across securities can lead to market segmentation and discuss the nature of equilibrium prices and allocations with tax clienteles. We then turn our attention to the optimal trading of assets when the tax on capital gains and losses is deferred until the asset is sold. In the absence of portfolio considerations, the optimal trading policies are driven entirely by the desire of investors to minimize the tax cost of owning assets. We next focus on an investor's lifetime portfolio choice problem with capital gains taxes and discuss how the investor's optimal trading decisions and portfolio choices are influenced by both tax and diversification motives. Our discussion includes consideration of nonfinancial income, tax-deferred investment opportunities, and multiple risky assets.
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Closed-End Funds: A Survey
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 431–445More LessNew theories have emerged over the past 10 years that reveal CEFs to be an important and efficient organizational device. This review surveys the old and current literature on closed-end funds (CEFs) in general and theories of discounts in particular. Among the topics reviewed are liquidity transformation, the effects of tax overhang, the importance of managerial fees, the provision of leverage services, the impact of the potential irrationality of small investors on discounts, and rationality of CEFs' initial public offering (IPO) process.
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Commodity Investing
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 447–467More LessThis article reviews the literature on commodities from the perspective of an investor. We re-examine some of the early papers in the literature using recent data and find that the empirical support for the theory of normal backwardation as an explanation for the commodity risk premium is weak and that the evidence is more consistent with storage decisions. We then review the behavior of the main participants in the commodity futures markets with a particular focus on their impact on prices. Although there is continued disagreement in the literature about the role of speculative activity, our results show that money managers are generally momentum (positive feedback) traders, while producers are net short and contrarian (negative feedback) traders. There is less evidence that index traders and swap dealers trade based on past futures returns.
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Market Microstructure and the Profitability of Currency Trading
Vol. 4 (2012), pp. 469–495More LessCurrency trading is a vast and highly profitable business. This review examines the profitability of two popular currency trading strategies in light of currency-market microstructure research. The carry-trade strategy involves borrowing a low-interest currency and investing the proceeds in a high-interest currency. Technical trading strategies are determined exclusively on the basis of past asset prices and trading volumes. Under the efficient markets hypothesis, neither of these approaches to speculative trading should produce excess returns. The review shows that the profitability of carry-trade investing and technical trading strategies can represent rational long-run equilibria given the structure of currency markets and the incentives and constraints faced by traders.
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