Christian Upper

Using counterfactual simulations to assess the danger of contagion in interbank markets

Researchers at central banks increasingly turn to counterfactual simulations to estimate the danger of contagion owing to exposures in the interbank loan market. The present paper summarises the findings of such simulations, provides a critical assessment of the modelling assumptions on which they are based, and discusses their use in financial stability analysis. On the whole, such simulations suggest that contagious defaults are unlikely, but cannot be fully ruled out, at least in some countries. If contagion does take place, then it could lead to the breakdown of a substantial fraction of the banking system, thus imposing high costs to society. However, when interpreting these results, one has to bear in mind the potential bias caused by the very strong assumptions underlying the simulations. While robustness tests indicate that the models might be able to correctly predict whether or not contagion could be an issue and, possibly, also identify critical institutions, they are less suited for stress testing or for the analysis of policy options in crises, primarily due to their lack of behavioural foundations. Going forward, more work is needed on how to attach probabilities to the individual scenarios and on the microfoundations of the models.

The Tail Wags the Dog: Time-Varying Information Shares in the Bund Market

The paper analyses the information content of trades in Bund futures and German government bonds before and during the 1998 financial market turbulences and tests whether the contributions to price discovery of the two market segments were constant over time. The results suggest that, under the normal market conditions prevailing in the first half of the year, between 19% and 33% of the variation in the efficient price was due to trading in the spot market. In the aftermath of the recapitalisation of LTCM, by contrast, the bond markets share in price discovery dropped to zero, with information becoming incorporated into prices only in the futures market. This decline can be traced to an unusually high proportion of large client trades that were executed against dealer inventory, which suggests that they were primarily motivated by liquidity rather than by information. On the methodological side, the paper computes information shares and factor weights based on the Gonzalo-Granger decomposition in markets with different trading frequencies. In addition, the paper captures variations over time by using a sequence of break point tests.

Capital Misallocation and Financial Development: A Sector-Level Analysis

This study investigates how financial development affects capital allocation across industries in a panel of countries at different stages of development (China, India, Mexico, Korea, Japan and the US) over the period 1980-2014. Following the approach proposed by Chari et al (2007) and Aoki (2012), we compute wedges for capital and labour inputs for 26 industrial sectors in the six countries and add them up to economy-wide measures of capital and labour misallocation. We find that more developed financial systems allocate capital investment more efficiently than less developed ones. If financial development is low, faster capital accumulation is associated with a worsening of allocative efficiency. This effect reverses for higher levels of financial development. Sectors with high R&D expenditures or high capital investment benefit most from financial development. These effects are not only statistically significant, they are also large in economic terms.