Central bank balance sheet concerns and credible optimal escape from the Liquidity trap

I show that when a central bank is financially independent from the treasury and has balance sheet concerns, an increase in the size or a change in the composition of the central bank's balance sheet (quantitative easing) can serve as a commitment device in a liquidity trap scenario. In particular, when the short-term interest rate is up against the zero lower bound, an open market operation by the central bank that involves purchases of long-term bonds can help mitigate the deation and a large negative output gap under a discretionary equilibrium. This is because such an open market operation provides an incentive to the central bank to keep interest rates low in future in order to avoid losses in its balance sheet.

Insider trading, investment, and liquidity: a welfare analysis

We compare competitive equilibrium outcomes with and without trading by a privately infonned "monopolistic" insider, in a model with real investment portfolio choices ex ante, and noise trading generated by aggregate uncertainty regarding other agents' intertemporal consumption preferences. The welfare implications of insider trading for the ex ante expected utilities of outsiders are analyzed. The role of interim infonnation revelation due to insider trading, in improving the risk-sharing among outsiders with stochastic liquidity needs, is examined in detaiL

Balance of payment crises and capital flows : the role of liquidity

A model of externaI CrISIS is deveIoped focusing on the interaction between Iiquidity creation by financiaI intermediaries and foreign exchange collapses. The intermediaries' role of transforming maturities is shown to result in larger movements of capital and a higher probability of crisis. This resembles the observed cycle in capital fiows: large infiows, crisis and abrupt outfiows. The mo deI highlights how adverse productivity and international interest rate shocks can be magnified by the behavior of individual foreign investors linked together through their deposits in the intermediaries. An eventual collapse of the exchange rate can link investors' behavior even further. The basic model is then extended, quite naturally, to study the effects of capital fiow contagion between countries.

Trend following performance with size and liquidity: evidence from US, Brazil and Portugal

Neste trabalho, eu analiso a eficiência de se aplicar estratégias que identificam tendências em mercados de capitais, em três países diferentes, usando um conjunto de variáveis macroeconómicas. Em cada país, a estratégia é testada contra os índices de grande capitalização, pequena capitalização e o índice principal. Eu concluo que, ao combinar os sinais diários obtidos pela estratégia, é possível alcançar retornos ajustados ao risco superiores e reduzir as perdas possíveis do portfólio. No geral, enfatizo os benefícios de usar estratégias que exploram tendências para investidores avessos ao risco, obtendo retornos característicos de capitais próprios com a volatilidade característica de obrigações.

Does liquidity constraints matter for Ricardian equivalence?

The paper analysis a general equilibrium model with two periods, several households and a government that has to finance some expenditures in the first period. Households may have some private information either about their type (adverse selection) or about some action levei chosen in the first period that affects the probability of certain states of nature in the second period (moral hazard). Trade of financiai assets are intermediated by a finite collection of banks. Banks objective functions are determined in equilibrium by shareholders. Due to private information it may be optimal for the banks to introduce constraints in the set of available portfolios for each household as wellas household specific asset prices. In particular, households may face distinct interest rates for holding the risk-free asset. The government finances its expenditures either by taxing households in the first period or by issuing bonds in the first period and taxing households in the second period. Taxes may be state-dependent. Suppose government policies are neutml: i) government policies do not affect the distribution of wealth across households; and ii) if the government decides to tax a household in the second period there is a portfolio available for the banks that generates the Mme payoff in each state of nature as the household taxes. Tben, Ricardian equivalence holds if and only if an appropriate boundary condition is satisfied. Moreover, at every free-entry equilibrium the boundary condition is satisfied and thus Ricardian equivalence holds. These results do not require any particular assumption on the banks' objective function. In particular, we do not assume banks to be risk neutral.

Determinants of differential pricing of equity classes in the Brazilian equity market

We examine the differential pricing of equity classes between voting and non-voting shares in Brazilian listed companies with particular emphasis on privatized companies, and we discuss the role of majority control, liquidity, and governance issues that may influence these differentials over time. We include a brief discussion on the Brazilian corporate law system, its impact on controlling and minority shareholders, and the characteristics of the Brazilian privatization process, before proceeding to the econometric analysis. We find empirical evidence to support that liquidity is a major component for determining this differential pricing over time. Other variables, such as the ratio of non-voting equity to total equity, type of majority control, and changes in regulation signal the high level of agency costs between majority controllers and minority shareholders in explaining the differential pricing of equity classes.

Banks, liquidity crises and economic growth

How do the liquidity functions of banks affect investment and growth at different stages of economic development? How do financial fragility and the costs of banking crises evolve with the level of wealth of countries? We analyze these issues using an overlapping generations growth model where agents, who experience idiosyncratic liquidity shocks, can invest in a liquid storage technology or in a partially illiquid Cobb Douglas technology. By pooling liquidity risk, banks play a growth enhancing role in reducing inefficient liquidation of long term projects, but they may face liquidity crises associated with severe output losses. We show that middle income economies may find optimal to be exposed to liquidity crises, while poor and rich economies have more incentives to develop a fully covered banking system. Therefore, middle income economies could experience banking crises in the process of their development and, as they get richer, they eventually converge to a financially safe long run steady state. Finally, the model replicates the empirical fact of higher costs of banking crises for middle income economies.

A conditional likelihood ratio test for structural models

This paper develops a general method for constructing similar tests based on the conditional distribution of nonpivotal statistics in a simultaneous equations model with normal errors and known reducedform covariance matrix. The test based on the likelihood ratio statistic is particularly simple and has good power properties. When identification is strong, the power curve of this conditional likelihood ratio test is essentially equal to the power envelope for similar tests. Monte Carlo simulations also suggest that this test dominates the Anderson- Rubin test and the score test. Dropping the restrictive assumption of disturbances normally distributed with known covariance matrix, approximate conditional tests are found that behave well in small samples even when identification is weak.

A onda de abertura de capital de bancos no Brasil

Esse estudo investiga a onda de IPOs de bancos brasileiros de 2005 a 2007. Verificou-se que os bancos que fizeram IPO apresentam características ex-ante diferentes de bancos de mesmo porte e tipo de atuação que permaneceram com capital fechado, como maior rentabilidade, maior parcela de seus ativos aplicados em operações de crédito, menor proporção de créditos não performados e mais restrição de capital. Esses resultados mostram que a onda de abertura de capital de bancos não pode ser explicada pela teoria comportamental, e são resultado das oportunidades de crescimento distintas desses bancos em relação a seus concorrentes. Dessa forma, a liquidez de mercado deve ser entendida como condição necessária, mas não suficiente, para explicar os IPOs desses bancos. A evidência encontrada sobre o efeito da abertura de capital no desempenho operacional desses bancos sugere um aumento na proporção créditos-ativos, associado a um aumento na proporção de créditos de pior qualidade, mesmo controlado pelo boom de crédito ocorrido nesse período. Também se percebe uma melhora na eficiência administrativa, o que pode indicar economias de escala nos bancos que realizaram IPO.

Consumption-wealth ratio and expected stock returns: evidence from panel data

This paper investigates the role of consumption-wealth ratio on predicting future stock returns through a panel approach. We follow the theoretical framework proposed by Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), in which a model derived from a nonlinear consumer’s budget constraint is used to settle the link between consumption-wealth ratio and stock returns. Using G7’s quarterly aggregate and financial data ranging from the first quarter of 1981 to the first quarter of 2014, we set an unbalanced panel that we use for both estimating the parameters of the cointegrating residual from the shared trend among consumption, asset wealth and labor income, cay, and performing in and out-of-sample forecasting regressions. Due to the panel structure, we propose different methodologies of estimating cay and making forecasts from the one applied by Lettau and Ludvigson (2001). The results indicate that cay is in fact a strong and robust predictor of future stock return at intermediate and long horizons, but presents a poor performance on predicting one or two-quarter-ahead stock returns.

Liquidity proxies in the Brazilian debenture market

Este estudo analisa as variáveis de liquidez no mercado corporativo brasileiro de debêntures e testa a variável Eurobond para compreender quais características ajudam a prever a liquidez de debêntures. Embora os mercados de capitais brasileiros tenham melhorado drasticamente nos últimos anos, as grandes empresas brasileiras têm muitas opções na hora de tomar a decisão de aumentar capital (emissão de Eurobônus é um deles). Este estudo busca preencher uma lacuna na literatura acadêmica vendo se existe uma relação de liquidez entre os dois mercados. O proxy Eurobond foi encontrado significativo ao nível de 5% e o nível de 1%. Os outras proxies que foram significativos (valor de emissão, data de vencimento inicial, Avaliação) coincidem com os resultados de estudos anteriores.

Consumption-Wealth Ratio and Expected Stock Returns: Evidence from Panel Data on G7 Countries

Using the theoretical framework of Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), we perform an empirical investigation on how widespread is the predictability of cay {a modi ed consumption-wealth ratio { once we consider a set of important countries from a global perspective. We chose to work with the set of G7 countries, which represent more than 64% of net global wealth and 46% of global GDP at market exchange rates. We evaluate the forecasting performance of cay using a panel-data approach, since applying cointegration and other time-series techniques is now standard practice in the panel-data literature. Hence, we generalize Lettau and Ludvigson's tests for a panel of important countries. We employ macroeconomic and nancial quarterly data for the group of G7 countries, forming an unbalanced panel. For most countries, data is available from the early 1990s until 2014Q1, but for the U.S. economy it is available from 1981Q1 through 2014Q1. Results of an exhaustive empirical investigation are overwhelmingly in favor of the predictive power of cay in forecasting future stock returns and excess returns.