Laura Valderrama

The Monetary Policy Regime and Banking Spreads in Barbados

The paper analyzes the determinants of banking spreads in Barbados, with a view to identifying the role of the monetary policy regime in explaining high spreads. The paper finds that interest rate spreads for Barbados are higher than would be suggested by its macroeconomic performance. Banking concentration and bank-specific variables, including bank size and provisions for nonperforming loans, do not have an important role in explaining variations in bank spreads. Rather, it appears that monetary policy variables, such as reserve requirements and capital controls, are the most important determinants of spreads.

Sovereign Tail Risk

We provide a new measure of sovereign country risk exposure to global sovereign tail risk (SCRE) based on information incorporated in 5-year sovereign CDS spreads. Our panel regressions with quarterly data from 53 countries show that macro risks have strong explanatory power for SCRE. After controlling for liquidity conditions and financial market variables, SCRE increases for countries with higher interest rates, public debt, public deficit, credit-to-GDP, lower economic growth and looser monetary policy. We show that our risk exposure variable reacts significantly more than mean (median) CDS spreads to macro-financial risks. Our results therefore imply that good fundamentals protect countries against sovereign risk especially in times of global distress.

Public Debt Markets in Central America, Panama, and the Dominican Republic

This paper-consisting of a regional study and seven country studies-reviews the state of domestic public debt markets in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama as at end-2005. Although they account for the lions share of capital markets, regional public debt markets remain underdeveloped for a variety of reasons. The problems of small scale, dollarization, and weak public finances in many countries are compounded by poor structure and composition of debt (with sizeable nonstandard and non-tradable components), fragmentation of public debt between central banks and the sovereigns and across instruments, poor debt management practices, weaknesses in securities market, and small investor bases all of which result in high transaction costs and a lack of liquid benchmarks. The paper also briefly discusses efforts towards and impediments to regional integration of public debt markets. The authorities recognize these problems and the paper takes note of the regional efforts to harmonize debt standards and improve issuance practices. It offers several recommendations to improve strategic debt management, issuance mechanics, and secondary trading.

Political Risk Aversion

This paper studies the effect of individual uncertainty on collective decision-making to implement innovation. We show how individual uncertainty creates a bias for the status quo even under irreversible voting decisions, in contrast with Fernandez and Rodrik (1991). Blocking innovation is rooted in the aversion to the potential loss of political clout in future voting decisions. Thus, risk neutral individuals exhibit what we call political risk aversion. Yet individual uncertainty is not all bad news as it may open the door to institutional reform. We endogenize institutional reform and show a non-monotonic relationship between institutional efficiency and the size of innovation.

Bank Solvency and Funding Cost: New Data and New Results

This paper presents new evidence on the empirical relationship between bank solvency and funding costs. Building on a newly constructed dataset drawing on supervisory data for 54 large banks from six advanced countries over 2004–2013, we use a simultaneous equation approach to estimate the contemporaneous interaction between solvency and liquidity. Our results show that liquidity and solvency interactions can be more material than suggested by the existing empirical literature. A 100 bps increase in regulatory capital ratios is associated with a decrease of bank funding costs of about 105 bps. A 100 bps increase in funding costs reduces regulatory capital buffers by 32 bps. We also find evidence of non-linear effects between solvency and funding costs. Understanding the impact of solvency on funding costs is particularly relevant for stress testing. Our analysis suggests that neglecting the dynamic features of the solvency-liquidity nexus in the 2014 EU-wide stress test could have led to a significant underestimation of the impact of stress on bank capital ratios.