Angelo Baglioni

The New Basle Accord: Which Implications for Monetary Policy Transmission?

The model shows how monetary policy affects the supply of bank loans, highlighting the difference between bank reaction to a monetary shock in the short run (fixed equity) and in the long run (endogenous equity). Results: I) Capital requirements matter, even if banks are well capitalized: the impact of monetary policy increases in the long run, when banks adjust their equity to the new level of market interest rates. II) Under the New Basle Accord, monetary policy has perverse effects on riskier borrowers, when banks lack equity: an expansionary policy leads to a contraction of bank loan supply to them.

Intertemporal budget constraint and public debt sustainability: the case of Italy

The theory of intertemporal budget constraint is applied to test Italian public debt sustainability, with the finding that current fiscal policy has not been following a sustainable path in the 1980s. In particular, we find that (i) while primary surplus is stationary, public debt is not, (ii) permanent shocks explain about 90% of forecast error variance of public debt, while playing a minor role in primary surplus and (iii) debt is not sustainable even if stochastic discount rates are accounted for.

The Intraday Price of Money: Evidence from the E-Mid Market

We present a simple model, where intraday and overnight interest rates are linked by a no-arbitrage argument. The hourly interest rate is shown to be a function of the intraday term structure of the overnight rate. This property holds under both assumptions, where an explicit intraday market for interbank loans exists and when it does not. In the first case, such a property is an equilibrium condition; in the second one it holds by definition, as a synthetic hourly loan is a portfolio of overnight contracts. We then provide empirical evidence, based on tick- by-tick data for the e-MID money market (covering the whole 2003). The overnight rate shows a clear downward pattern throughout the operating day. A positive hourly interest rate emerges from the intraday term structure of the overnight rate: we estimate the market price of a one hour interbank loan to be slightly above a half basis point.

Labor Mobility and Fiscal Policy in a Currency Union

Labor mobility is commonly taken as a property of an optimal currency area. But how does that property a¤ect the outcome of fiscal policies? We address this issue with a two country ?two period model, where both asymmetric and symmetric productivity shocks may hit the countries. We show that perfect (costless) labour mobility is not necessarily welfare improving, since it prevents the national fiscal authorities from pursuing indepen- dent policies, opening the way to a coordination problem between them, which is particularly relevant when the two countries di¤er for their intertemporal preferences. With symmetric shocks, the federal fiscal policy can improve welfare over national policies by playing a coordinating role. With asymmet- ric shocks, the federal fiscal policy allows both countries to reach a higher productive efficiency; to do that, the federal government must be endowed with a federal budget, playing a stronger role than plain coordination between countries.

The Single Supervisory Mechanism

This chapter describes the new architecture of banking supervision, going into the organizational details of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM). The new governing bodies of the ECB and its decision-making process are introduced. The distinction between significant and less significant banks plays a key role in the organization of the SSM. As far as significant banks are concerned, the Joint Supervisory Teams (JSTs) are at the core of the supervisory activity. Some controversial issues are discussed, like the separation between prudential supervision and monetary policy, the balance of powers between the ECB and the national authorities, the discretionary approach based on the SREP, and the lack of a single authority responsible for the macro-prudential supervision.

A Theory of Eurobonds

We provide a structural model of sovereign credit risk, where the risk premium paid by the government is linked to some key economic variables of a country: public debt and deficit, GDP growth. This model is then applied to measure the impact of splitting the public debt into a senior and a junior tranches and the effect of introducing Eurobonds: in the latter case, tranching is coupled with a cross-guarantee among eurozone countries and with a cash collateral. We show both in theory and in numerical estimates that eurobonds are able to lower the overall cost of servicing the public debt for some (high debt) countries in the euro area, without increasing the cost for the other ones. Moreover, they are likely to give governments an incentive to curb their deficits, due to the higher marginal cost of debt.

Corporate governance institutions as signalling and commitment devices

A model is presented, where firms issuing equity differ in the ability of their controlling shareholders to extract private benefits: thus a lemon problem, leading to cross-subsidization across issuers, is added to the moral hazard issue. A governance institution is introduced, enabling large shareholders to commit to the general interest of shareholders. The following main results are obtained. I) Such an institution is employed either as a signalling device or as a commitment tool. The relationship between governance structure (e.g. board independence) and private benefits is non-monotonic. II) The adoption of the institution is negatively related to ownership concentration, consistently with the empirical evidence that board independence is decreasing in CEO ownership. III) It is better to let the application of such governance mechanisms emerge as a market outcome, rather than be imposed by the regulation.

Marking-to-Market Government Guarantees to Financial Systems: An Empirical Analysis of Europe

We propose a new index for measuring the systemic risk of default of the banking sector, which is based on a homogeneous version of multivariate intensity based models (Cuadras – Auge distribution). We compute the index for 10 European countries, exploiting the information incorporated in the CDS premia of 44 large banks over the period January 2007 – September 2010. In this way, we provide a market based measure of the liability incurred by the Governments, due to the implicit bail-out guarantees they provide to the financial sector. We find that during the financial crisis the systemic component of the default risk in the banking sector has significantly increased in all countries, with the exception of Germany and the Netherlands. As a consequence, the Governments’ liability implicit in the bail out guarantee amounts to a quite relevant share of GDP in several countries: it is huge for Ireland, lower but still important for the other PIIGS (Italy is the least affected within this group) and for the UK. Finally, our estimate is very close to the overall amount of money already committed in the rescue plans adopted in Europe between October 2008 and March 2010, despite strong cross-country differences: in particular, Germany and Ireland seem to have committed an amount of resources much larger than needed; to the contrary, the Italian Government has committed much less than it should.

Leveraged Buybacks of Sovereign Debt: A Simple Model with an Application to Greece

The model presented in this paper shows that the outcome of a leveraged buyback of sovereign debt depends on the seniority structure of the deal. If the institution lending the funds needed for the buyback is senior, the debtor country benefits from the deal and the market price of bonds declines. The opposite holds if the lending institution is junior. If the loan is under-priced, the implied subsidy is shared between the borrowing country and its bondholders, who can benefit from a price increase of their bonds. This is actually what happened with the buyback of Greek sovereign bonds in 2012, as it is shown in the empirical section. Those results do not depend on the share of countrys wealth devoted to debt repayment, which instead plays a crucial role in shaping the outcome of unlevered buybacks.

Incomplete contracts, renegotiation, and the choice between bank loans and public debt issues

In a two-period model where an investment project is funded with standard debt, the probability distribution of final cash flow is determined, at the interim date, by an unverifiable state of nature together with a choice by the controlling party (entrepreneur or creditor). With a control allocation contingent on a noisy default signal, renegotiation may improve efficiency in two ways: (i) reduce excessive risk-taking - due to the entrepreneurs moral hazard - through debt forgiveness; (ii) avoid the costs of financial distress associated with excessive liquidation or underinvestment by debt-holders, by letting them receive an equity stake in the firm. Such efficiency gain is an advantage of bank loans over publicly traded debt, given that the former are more easily renegotiated than the latter. The difference between the two types of debt is increasing in the degree of contractual incompleteness (noise present in the default signal) and in the portion of project value accounted for by future discretionary investment options.