Norbert Metiu

Chapter 2 Linkages between Stock Market Fluctuations and Business Cycles in Asia

This chapter sheds new light on the linkages between stock market fluctuations and business cycles in Asia. It shows that at cyclical frequencies stock markets lead business cycles by six months on average. China, Korea, and Taiwan constitute exceptions, as their real and stock market cycles are contemporaneously synchronized. The low level of maturity of these markets offers a potential explanation of this outcome. Furthermore, we find that the linkage also holds during phases of cyclical upswing and downturn, with the exception of China, where the financial market lags behind industrial production during expansions. Finally, for most of the countries (except Thailand and Malaysia), the linkage is also robust to the presence of financial crises.

Time-varying Volatility, Financial Intermediation and Monetary Policy

We document that expansionary monetary policy shocks are less effective at stimulating output and investment in periods of high volatility compared to periods of low volatility, using a regime-switching vector autoregression. Exogenous policy changes are identified by adapting an external instruments approach to the non-linear model. The lower effectiveness of monetary policy can be linked to weaker responses of credit costs, suggesting a financial accelerator mechanism that is weaker in high volatility periods. To rationalize our robust empirical results, we use a macroeconomic model in which financial intermediaries endogenously choose their capital structure. In the model, the leverage choice of banks depends on the volatility of aggregate shocks. In low volatility periods, financial intermediaries lever up, which makes their balance sheets more sensitive to aggregate shocks and the financial accelerator more effective. On the contrary, in high volatility periods banks decrease leverage, which renders the financial accelerator less effective; this in turn decreases the ability of monetary policy to improve funding conditions and credit supply, and thereby to stimulate the economy. Hence, we provide a novel explanation for the non-linear effects of monetary stimuli observed in the data, linking the effectiveness of monetary policy to the procyclicality of leverage.