Jean-Stéphane Mésonnier

How Useful is The Marginal Expected Shortfall for the Measurement of Systemic Exposure: A Practical Assessment

We explore the practical relevance from a supervisors perspective of a popular market-based indicator of the exposure of a financial institution to systemic risk, the marginal expected shortfall (MES). The MES of an institution can be defined as its expected equity loss when the market itself is in its left tail. We estimate the dynamic MES recently proposed by Brownlees and Engle (2011) for a panel of 65 large US banks over the last decade and a half. Running panel regressions of the MES on bank characteristics, we first find that the MES can be roughly rationalized in terms of standard balance sheet indicators of bank financial soundness and systemic importance. We then ask whether the cross section of the MES can help to identify ex ante, i.e. before a crisis unfolds, which institutions are the more likely to suffer the most severe losses ex post, i.e. once it has unfolded. Unfortunately, using the recent crisis as a natural experiment, we find that standard balance-sheet metrics like the tier one solvency ratio are better able than the MES to predict equity losses conditionally to a true crisis.

Did the EBA Capital Exercise Cause a Credit Crunch in the Euro Area

We exploit a unique monthly dataset of bank balance sheets to document the lending behaviour of euro area banks that were subject to the EBAs 2011/12 Capital Exercise. This exercise was announced in October 2011 and required large European banking groups to meet a higher Tier 1 capital ratio by June 2012, after accounting for an unprecedented temporary buffer against exposure to sovereign debt. Controlling for bank characteristics and demand at the level of country of residence, we find that banks in a banking group that had to increase its capital by 1 percent of risk-weighted assets tended to have annualized loan growth (over the 9 month period of the exercise) that was between 1.2 and 1.6 percentage points lower than for banks in groups that did not have to increase their capital ratio. Looking at aggregate effects at the country level, we also find that banks that did not have to recapitalize did not substitute for more constrained lenders. Our results are of particular relevance for the decisions facing the new European Single Supervisor in advance of its Asset Quality Review due in November 2014.

Fiscal Sustainability, Default Risk and Euro Area Sovereign Bond Spreads Markets

This paper develops an arbitrage-free affine term structure model of potentially defaultable sovereign bonds to model a cross-section of eight euro area government bond yield curves since January 1999. The existence of a common monetary policy under European Monetary Union determines the short end of the yield curves, whereas decentralized debt policies drive expected default probabilities and thereby spreads towards Germany, assumed to be free of default risk. The pricing factors are three observable area-wide macroeconomic variables and measures of national fiscal sustainability, which we proxy by expected changes in debt/GDP ratios of the respective countries. Our model explains spreads both before and during the crisis to an impressive extent. The deterioration in public finances was the major driver of the widening in spreads since 2008 through both heightened compensations for default risk and increases in risk premia. We also present perceived probabilities of sovereign default at any maturity and assess their elasticity to shifts in expected changes in debt/GDP ratios.

Does uncertainty make a time-varying natural rate of interest irrelevant for the conduct of monetary policy?

We compute optimized monetary policy rules for the ECB when the euro area economy is described by a small empirical macroeconomic model with a time-varying natural interest rate which is positively correlated with fluctuations in trend output growth. We investigate the consequences of both measurement uncertainty with respect to unobservable variables and uncertainty about key model parameters. An optimized Taylor rule with time-varying neutral rate appears to perform well compared to the unconstrained optimal policy, and better than other simple rules found in the literature, even when it is penalized by taking into account both types of uncertainty.

Fiscal Sustainability, Default Risk and Euro Area Sovereign Bond Spreads

This paper develops an arbitrage-free affine term structure model of potentially defaultable sovereign bonds to model a cross-section of eight euro area government bond yield curves since January 1999. The existence of a common monetary policy under European Monetary Union determines the short end of the yield curves, whereas decentralized debt policies drive expected default probabilities and thereby spreads towards Germany, assumed to be free of default risk. The pricing factors are three observable area-wide macroeconomic variables and measures of national fiscal sustainability, which we proxy by expected changes in debt/GDP ratios of the respective countries. Our model explains spreads both before and during the crisis to an impressive extent. The deterioration in public finances was the major driver of the widening in spreads since 2008 through both heightened compensations for default risk and increases in risk premia. We also present perceived probabilities of sovereign default at any maturity and assess their elasticity to shifts in expected changes in debt/GDP ratios.

Can the Provision of Long-Term Liquidity Help to Avoid a Credit Crunch? Evidence from the Eurosystem's LTROs

We exploit the Eurosystem’s longer-term refinancing operations (LTROs) of 2011-2012 to analyze the effects that a large provision of central bank liquidity to banks has on the credit supply to firms. We control for credit demand by examining firms that borrow from several banks, in addition to controlling for banks’ risk. We find that LTROs enhanced loan supply in France. Nevertheless, the transmission took place mostly with the first operation of December 2011, in which constrained banks bid more, and larger borrowers benefited more. The opportunity to substitute long-term central bank borrowing for short-term borrowing was instrumental in this transmission.

The forecasting power of real interest rate gaps: an assessment for the Euro area

The real Interest Rate Gap (IRG)–the gap between the short-term real interest rate and its ‘natural’ level–is a theoretical concept that has attracted much attention in central banks in recent years. This article aims at clarifying its practical relevance for monetary policy in real time. For this purpose, it provides an empirical assessment of the usefulness of a semi-structural versus purely statistical estimates of the real IRG for predicting policy relevant macroeconomic variables in the Euro area. However mixed, the results confirm that semi-structural estimates of the real IRG deserve being added to the central banks’ toolbox.

The Macroeconomic Effects of Shocks to Large Banks’ Capital

We propose a simple approach to quantifying the macroeconomic effects of shocks to large banks’ leverage. We first estimate a standard dynamic model of leverage targeting at the bank level and use it to derive an aggregate measure of the economic capital buffer of large US bank holding corporations. We then evaluate the response of key macro variables to a shock to this aggregate bank capital buffer using standard monetary VAR models. We find that shocks to the capital of large US banks explain a substantial share of the variance of credit to firms and real activity.

National Natural Rates of Interest and the Single Monetary Policy in the Euro Area

Using a semi-structural approach, we jointly estimate time-varying national natural real rates of interest for the largest four economies of the Euro area over 1999-2016 and discuss the associated challenges for the single monetary policy. We find evidence of an increased dispersion of real equilibrium rates across major Euro area economies during the Euro area sovereign debt crisis. This dispersion translated into significantly diverging national real interest rate gaps, a synthetic metrics of the perceived monetary policy stance, between core and Southern countries. Real interest rate gaps have nonetheless converged towards zero in all four economies as of 2014, suggesting that it took the acceleration of unconventional policies since mid-2013 to eventually restore the conditions for a really common monetary policy in the Euro area.