Eddie Gerba

Stock Market Cycles and Supply Side Dynamics

The agent-based (behavioural) model is extended to include a financial friction on the supply side. Firms finance capital purchases using external financing, but need to pay for it in advance. In addition, firm financing constraint and net worth are determined by stock market prices, which can (and will) deviate from the fundamental value. The result is that production, supply of credit and the share that firms pay to capital producers heavily depends on the stock market cycles. During phases of optimism, credit is abundant, access to production capital is easy, the cash-in-advance constraint is lax, the risks are undervalued, and production is booming. But upon reversal in market sentiment, the contraction in all these parameters is deeper and asymmetric. This is even more evident in the behavioural model since cognitive limitations of economic agents result in exacerbation of the contraction. Lastly, the behavioural model matches much of the data, including the interest rate, inflation, firm credit, firm financing spread, and bank net worth. It is also successful in matching several supply-side relations (capital-firm credit, inflation-interest rate) as well as their autocorrelations. The results from the empirical validation are favourable to the behavioural model.

Interaction between Monetary Policy and Bank Regulation: Theory and European Practice

The European Union has pursued a number of initiatives to create a safer and sounder financial sector for the single market. In parallel, bold unconventional monetary policies have been implemented in order to combat low inflation, foster risk taking and, ultimately, reinvigorate growth. But monetary and macro-prudential policies interact with each other and thus may enhance or diminish the effectiveness of the other. Monetary policy affects financial stability by shaping, for instance, leverage and borrowing. Equally, macro-prudential policies constrain borrowing, which in turn have side-effects on output and prices, and therefore on monetary policy. When both monetary and macroprudential functions are housed within the central bank, coordination is improved, but safeguards are needed to counter the risks from dual objectives. Against this background, this paper outlines the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of macro-prudential policy, and discusses the way it interacts with monetary policy. We identify advantages as well as risks from cooperating in the two policy areas, and provide suggestions in terms of institutional design on how to contain those risks. Against this backdrop, we evaluate the recent European practice.

Estimating US fiscal and monetary interactions: from Volcker chairmanship to the Great Recession

Locating the appropriate degree of interaction between fiscal and monetary policy plays a crucial role in ensuring economic stability. Their joint impact is, however, still unclear. We observe significant differences in the transmission of shocks, in particular between the Great Recession and the Great Moderation, and find a high degree of interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. Further, government revenues largely influence decisions on spending, while spending does not influence tax decisions. Spending stimuli are more effective in expanding output than tax cuts. Under certain conditions regarding private agent expectations, spending increases can result in high and persistent growth.

The Allocation of Non-Leisure Time and the Price of Capital: A Model Applied Empirically to the Wage Curve

Our aim in this paper is, first, to derive a model capable of explaining the stylized fact that fluctuations in labor market activities over the business cycle are primarily accommodated by changes in employment rather than in wages and, secondly, to test this model empirically. The model is simple, analytically tractable, capable of explaining a wide range of labor market behavior and, crucially, capable of explaining away real wage rigidities without resorting to market imperfections. Second, when tested empirically, the model is found to be strongly supported by the data of a diverse spectrum of economies. As it turns out, our model shares a key property with Phelps (1994) and Phelps and Zoega (1998), namely, that variations in the price of assets play a pivotal role in explaining variations in employment and in wage rates.

The Importance of Education Quality for Growth and Development

In this paper we present a model of optimizing behavior in a two-sector, centrally planned, economy that faces a given interest rate and that is capable of generating sustainable growth. By allowing the model economy to benefit from innovations at the technology frontier through a simple process of technological transfers, we are able to show that education quality not only speeds up the process of technology diffusion but it also helps account for 45-53 per cent of differences in labor productivity. As we argue, failure to control for the gap in technology levels between the leader and the follower economies severely biases downwards the semi-elasticity on educational attainment and it severely biases upwards the share of earnings from capital.

Macroprudential policy in a Knightian uncertainty model with credit-, risk-, and leverage cycles

We study the impact of uncertainty on financial stability and the business cycle. We extend the work of Boz and Mendoza (2014) by endogenizing credit production, modifying learning mechanism into an adaptive set-up, as well as including financial and monetary policies. In our model households are (intrinsically) rational but take economic decisions under incomplete information. The incompleteness is not caused by their cognitive limitations, as in rational inattention theory (Sims, 2003). Households `learn by doing and once a sufficient number of realizations of the state variable have materialized, and the incomplete information set is completed. This learning set-up is incorporated into a New Keynesian model with credit market frictions, extended to include uncertainty, where a share of households needs external financing to consume. Because of limited enforceability of financial contracts, households are required to provide collateral for their loans, and so the relationship between the bank and household is tightened for many periods ahead. We find in our framework the build up of risk, leverage, increase in consumption and price of collateral takes longer than in other DSGEs with standard financial friction models. We also find that both the frequency and the amplitude of expansions and contractions are asymmetric - recessions are less frequent and deeper than expansions. Moreover, we find that boom-bust cycles occur as rare events. Using the Cogley and Sargants (2008) definition of a severe(or systemic) crisis, we find on average two such events per century. We also find that, different from standard boom-bust cycles, a systemic crisis can be followed by a sequence of subsequent contractions, as it makes the economy more unstable. The result is asymmetric distributions of key macroeconomic and financial variables, with high skewness and fat tails. Lastly, we also find that, by reducing the amount of borrowing and leverage in upturns, the LTV-ratio regulation is effective in smoothing the cycles and reducing the effects of a deep contraction on the real-financial variables. We also discuss the role of macroprudential policy in reducing information incompleteness by generating information that helps the agent learn faster the new environment, or provide a smoother transition to the new economic environment.

Have the US Macro-Financial Linkages Changed? The Balance Sheet Dimension

We establish a set of US stylized facts on prices, quantities and balance sheets, assess the consistency of the current generation of financial DSGE models to these, and provide guidance on the challenges ahead. We mainly find four aspects which future financial friction models should take into account. The first is the profound shift in household financing structure, both on the asset and liability side, which has meant that they have been left vulnerable. Second, the balance sheet of firms has become increasingly leveraged and coupled with more volatile and procyclical equity prices has meant that the balance sheet of firms has become increasingly procyclical and volatile since the 1990s. The current generation of FA models do capture some aspects of this but produce excessively smooth results. Third, it would be of interest for policy makers to find the optimal level/percentage of foreign ownership of the Federal debt at which the debt portfolio is diversified, but the future government budget constraint and its stabilisation capacity is not put in danger by over-exposure to international shocks. Lastly, models might be extended to include a regime-switching mechanism and explore the effects on model dynamics and model stability when the economy goes from a low volatility-low correlation state to a high volatility-high correlation state. A wider implication of our findings is that accumulation of stocks might alter agents risk preferences, production technologies, or beliefs to such a degree that the optimization problem that those agents face has transformed over time. The economy is effectively in a different state of nature, and agents may face different constraints. Future macroeconomic models need to take a different strategy to modeling the long-run ratios, since these have increased over the long-run, and this has had an effect on both the frequency and the amplitude of the business cycles.

Reconnecting Investment to Stock Markets: The Role of Corporate Net Worth Evaluation

Following recent studies by the Bank of England that the low financial market confidence and low expectations about private sector profits over the next three years has lead to unusually low price-to-book ratios, we incorporate a stock market mechanism in a general equilibrium framework. More specifically, we introduce an endogenous wedge between market and book value of capital, and make investment a function of it in a standard financial accelerator model. The price wedge is driven by an information set containing expectations about the future state of the economy. The result is that the impulse responses to exogenous disturbances are on average two to three times more volatile than in the benchmark financial accelerator model. More- over, the model improves the matching of firm variables and financial rates to US data compared to the standard financial accelerator model. We also derive a model based quadratic loss function and measure the extent to which monetary policy can feed a bubble by further loosening the credit market frictions that entrepreneurs face. A policy that explicitly targets stock market developments can be shown to improve welfare in terms of minimizing the consumption losses of consumers, even when we account for incomplete information of central bankers regarding the current state of the economy.