Essays on Liquidity, Informational Frictions, and Monetary Policy

Essays on Liquidity, Informational Frictions, and Monetary Policy
Author: Kee Youn Kang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2017
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

The dissertation, which consists of two chapters, is devoted to exploring the role of informational friction in monetary economics and finance.Chapter I: COUNTERFEITING, SCREENING AND GOVERNMENT POLICY.In this chapter, I construct a search theoretic model of money in which counterfeit money can be produced at a cost but agents can screen for fake money also at a cost. Counterfeiting can occur in equilibrium when both costs and the inflation rate are sufficiently low. Optimal monetary policy is the Friedman rule. However, the rationale for the Friedman rule in an economy with the circulation of counterfeit money differs from the conventional mechanism that holds in the model when counterfeiting does not occur. I also study optimal anti-counterfeiting policy that determines the counterfeiting cost and the screening cost.Chapter II: CENTRAL BANK PURCHASES OF PRIVATE ASSETS: AN EVALUATIONIn this chapter, I develop a model of asset exchange and monetary policy, augmented to incorporate a housing market and a frictional financial market. Homeowners take out mortgages with banks using their residential properties as collateral to finance consumption. Banks use mortgages and government liabilities as collateral to secure deposit contracts, but they have an incentive to fake the quality of mortgages at a cost. Quantitative easing (QE) in the form of central bank purchases of mortgages from private banks has effects on the composition of assets in the economy, and on the incentive structure of the private sector. When the incentive problem is severe, the central bank can unambiguously improve welfare by purchasing mortgages. However, when it is not severe, the central bank's mortgage purchases cause a housing construction boom and sometimes can lower exchange in the economy, hence reducing welfare.

Essays on Information, Liquidity and Financial Frictions

Essays on Information, Liquidity and Financial Frictions
Author: Wukuang Cun
Publisher:
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2015
Genre: Financial crises
ISBN:

This dissertation seeks to understand how financial frictions arise and how they can affect the economy, and explores the implications of financial frictions for monetary policy during crises. Specifically, Chapter 2 and 3 study the endogenous nature of information asymmetry and explore its implications for financial markets and the macro economy. Chapter 4 studies the potential side effects of large scale asset purchase by central banks. In Chapter 2, I study a dynamic economy in which the information on asset quality is asymmetric and the degree of information asymmetry endogenously varies with the macro-economy, which amplifies the effects of shocks. In the model, firms hold assets of heterogeneous quality and borrow for operating expenses. Production is subject to idiosyncratic shocks, which may force the firms to liquidate their assets to pay off debts. Firms are initially uninformed of the qualities of their assets, but they can acquire private information on their own assets at a cost. Private information is individually beneficial, but it creates a lemons problem that lowers market liquidity and distorts economic decisions. Adverse shocks trigger private information acquisition, which exacerbates the lemons problem. As results, market liquidity drops and economic activity declines. The model can generate larger fluctuations in financial and macroeconomic variables than an otherwise the same model with the level of information asymmetry being fixed. In Chapter 3, I provide a possible explanation for the countercyclical movements in the measures of asset return volatility. In the model, external financing is costly due to the information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders. When the borrowers' financial conditions are worsened, the costs of external financing rise. Borrowers respond by increasing their transparency to outside investors to mitigate information asymmetry, which helps reduce the external financing cost. As a result, returns on external financing instruments disperse and fluctuate more as more information is disclosed, leading to increases in the cross sectional dispersion and the time series volatility of returns. This model can generate countercyclical dispersion, volatility in returns and external finance premium, with correlation coefficients between pairs of these measures quantitatively in line with the data. In Chapter 4, I explore the potential side effects of central bank asset purchase. In the model, commercial banks and shadow banks hold liquid assets as part of their operations. Asset purchases by the central bank decreases the supply of liquid assets that shadow banks can directly hold. When commercial banks do not face binding leverage constraints, shadow banks respond by increasing their deposits in or credit lines from commercial banks and central bank asset purchases are neutral. In the presence of a binding leverage constraint, however, asset purchases create distortions that decrease shadow banks' liquidity holdings and their lending. While conventional wisdom says that central bank asset purchases should be expansionary, I show that central bank asset purchases are necessarily contractionary when the level of bank reserves is high.

Essays on Information Frictions and Liquidity in Macroeconomics

Essays on Information Frictions and Liquidity in Macroeconomics
Author: Cathy Zhang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN: 9781303141652

This dissertation consists of three essays on information frictions and liquidity in macroeconomics. The first chapter introduces a form of bounded rationality called adaptive learning in a news-driven economy in order to better explain the depth and persistence of recessions. In doing so, this paper adopts expectational stability ("E-stability") as a natural criterion for rationality. In examining the model's stability properties, I find that when agents do not observe current state variables when forming expectations, the rational expectations equilibrium (REE) is not learnable for calibrated parameter values capable of generating news-driven recessions. The second chapter develops an information-based theory of international currency based on search frictions, private trading histories, and imperfect recognizability of assets. Using an open-economy search model with multiple competing currencies, the value of each currency is determined without requiring agents to use a particular currency to purchase a country's goods. Strategic complementarities in portfolio choices and information acquisition decisions generate multiple equilibria with different types of payment arrangements. While some inflation can benefit the country issuing an international currency, the threat of losing international status puts an inflation discipline on the issuing country. When monetary authorities interact in a simple policy game, the temptation to inflate can lead optimal policy to deviate from the Friedman rule. The third chapter is joint work with Sebastien Lotz and studies the choice of payment instruments in a simple model where both money and credit can be used as means of payment. We endogenize the acceptability of credit by allowing retailers to invest in a costly record-keeping technology. Our framework captures the two-sided market interaction between consumers and retailers, leading to strategic complementarities that can generate multiple steady-state equilibria. In addition, limited commitment makes debt contracts self-enforcing and yields an endogenous upper bound on credit use. Our model can explain why the demand for credit declines as inflation falls, and how hold-up problems in technological adoption can prevent retailers from accepting credit as consumers continue to coordinate on cash usage.

Three Essays on Monetary Economics

Three Essays on Monetary Economics
Author: Haitao Xiang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Banks and banking
ISBN:

The thesis consists of three studies on money, banking and monetary policy with modern monetary economic theory based on explicit micro-foundations. As an introduction to the approach adopted by micro-founded monetary theory, the introductory chapter demonstrates the roles of money and capital in a quasi-linear environment with explicit informational frictions. When capital serves as the only record-keeping device, there could be two possible stationary equilibria: one is first-best and the other is not. In a suboptimal equilibrium, consumers are constrained by their capital rental income. Introducing fiat money, a better record-keeping technology with higher rate of return, can improve welfare by relaxing the liquidity constraint. Chapter 2 studies the role of banking in financing investment. It is revealed that banking can mitigate underinvestment, raise capital-labour ratio, and improve welfare; and this effect is greatest under moderate inflation. In Chapter 3, I introduce a record-keeping cost related to bank borrowing, and study the effects of such a banking cost on economic allocations and welfare, as well as its monetary policy implications. Main findings are: Costly banking emerges endogenously only with relatively high inflation and/or relatively low banking cost; the existence of costly banking may improve or reduce welfare relative to the case without banking; with higher inflation rate or banking cost, more people would choose not to deal with banks, which means larger welfare loss; inflation is less harmful with banking than without banking. In Chapter 4, I investigate the trade-off between distribution effect and production effect of monetary policy with presence of idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. When liquidity shocks are observable, a type-contingent money transfer policy can desirably redistribute purchasing power among consumers. When the shocks are unobservable, an illiquid bond policy restores credit transactions on money through bond-money exchanges. Both policies have positive distribution effect, but the resulting inflation hampers production efficiency. I derive a sufficient condition under which the overall welfare can be improved by an inflationary monetary policy: if consumers are relative-risk-averse enough, the trade-off between distribution efficiency gain and production efficiency loss would result in net welfare enhancement.

Essays on Liquidity, Monopolistic Competition, and Search Frictions

Essays on Liquidity, Monopolistic Competition, and Search Frictions
Author: Mario Rafael Silva
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN: 9780355307344

I study the interactions between liquidity constraints, monopolistic competition, and search frictions for product markets, labor markets, and credit markets. Monopolistic competition is especially important for three different reasons. First, there is an externality that links the demand of firms to the state of the economy. Second, under free entry, the product space is influenced by policy and interacts with liquidity constraints. Third, monopolistic competition generates markups, which can augment other wedges and thereby interact with liquidity constraints.The first chapter considers the role played by endogenous variety and monopolistic competition in the long-run transmission of monetary policy. The combination of free entry and product variety gives rise to both an intensive margin (quantity of particular good) and extensive margin (extent of variety), and search frictions imply that firm entry involves a congestion externality. Inflation generally reduces variety. Under constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) preferences, firms are inefficiently small, with the inefficiency increasing in product differentiation and the extent of search frictions. The Friedman rule, which involves contracting the money supply at the rate of time preference, is the best policy under CES preferences. In contrast, with variable elasticity of demand, inflation can increase firm size, reduce markups, and raise welfare, even though output is lower. Under CES preferences, the welfare cost of inflation is high; moreover, it increases monotonically with the markup and is higher with endogenous variety than with a fixed variety alternative.The second chapter departs from the dramatic growth of revolving credit since 1970 relative to both consumption and consumer credit. Importantly, revolving credit primarily determines short-run household liquidity and comoves positively with product variety. I augment the Mortensen-Pissarides model with an endogenous borrowing constraints and free entry of monopolistically competitive firms. Unemployment is amplified from a two-way feedback: higher debt limits encourage firm entry and raise product variety (the entry channel), and greater variety makes default more costly and thereby raises the equilibrium debt level (the consumption value channel). I compare the model to a counterfactual economy in which either channel is shut down and find that mean amplification exceeds 50%. Furthermore, only the model economy generates a procyclical response of the credit-to-consumption ratio, as observed in the data.The third chapter examines the role of corporate finance and imperfect competition in the pass through of monetary policy to the real lending rate and its transmission into investment. Monopolistically competitive entrepreneurs can finance investment opportunities using bank-issued credit or money. They seek loans in an over-the-counter market where the terms of the contract (loan size, interest rate, and down payment) are negotiated subject to pledgeability constraints. I investigate pass through of the policy rate to the real lending rate and its transmission to output and investment, taking into account the interplay of (1) heterogeneous financial frictions from limited enforcement and (2) aggregate demand externalities from monopolistic competition. Whereas returns to scale or product diversity are not important for the pass through, the former substantially affect the transmission of policy to investment and output. Furthermore, financial frictions interact positively with demand complementarities from monopolistic competition. Greater dispersion of financial frictions reduces investment and output and also increases transmission unevenly across the range of nominal policy rates, having a maximal effect at about a policy rate of 9%.

Essays on Liquidity and Information

Essays on Liquidity and Information
Author: Pablo Daniel Kurlat
Publisher:
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation studies the interaction of liquidity and incomplete or asymmetric information. In Chapter 1, I study a dynamic economy with illiquidity due to adverse selection in financial markets. Investment is undertaken by borrowing-constrained entrepreneurs. They sell their past projects to finance new ones, but asymmetric information about project quality creates a lemons problem. The magnitude of this friction responds to aggregate shocks, amplifying the responses of asset prices and investment. Indeed, negative shocks can lead to a complete shutdown in financial markets. I then introduce learning from past transactions. This makes the degree of informational asymmetry endogenous and makes the liquidity of assets depend on the experience of market participants. Market downturns lead to less learning, worsening the future adverse selection problem. As a result, transitory shocks can create highly persistent responses in investment and output. In Chapter 2, I study why firms can choose to be illiquid. Optimal incentive schemes for managers may involve liquidating a firm following bad news. Fragile financial structures, vulnerable to runs, have been proposed as a way to implement these schemes despite their ex-post inefficiency. I show that in general these arrangements result in multiple equilibria and, even allowing arbitrary equilibrium selection, they do not necessarily replicate optimal allocations. However, if output follows a continuous distribution and creditors receive sufficiently precise individual early signals, then there exists a fragile financial structure such that global games techniques select a unique equilibrium which reproduces the optimal allocation. In Chapter 3, I study speculative attacks against illiquid firms. When faced with a speculative attack, banks and governments often hesitate, attempting to withstand the attack but giving up after some time, suggesting they have some ex-ante uncertainty about the magnitude of the attack they will face. I model that uncertainty as arising from incomplete information about speculators' payoffs and find conditions such that unsuccessful partial defenses are possible equilibrium outcomes. There exist priors over the distribution of speculators' payoffs that can justify any possible partial defense strategy. With Normal uncertainty, partial resistance is more likely when there is more aggregate uncertainty regarding agents' payoffs and less heterogeneity among them.

Essays on Liquidity, Banking, and Monetary Policy

Essays on Liquidity, Banking, and Monetary Policy
Author: Jaevin Park
Publisher:
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2016
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

The first chapter develops a new theory of bank capital requirements. A general equilibrium banking model is constructed in which deposit claims backed by bank assets support secured credit arrangements with limited commitment. Bank capital, a contingent claim on bank assets, is costly to hold when the value of assets is insufficient to support an efficient credit arrangement. However, if there is non-diversifiable aggregate risk, requiring banks to hold additional bank capital in the high-return state can be beneficial since it can relax the limited commitment constraint in the low-return state by affecting asset prices. Thus bank capital requirements can improve economic welfare by trading off the opportunity cost of holding additional bank capital for the benefit from sharing consumption risk. The second chapter contains a study of how private information can restrict liquidity insurance and the implementation of monetary policy. Lack of record-keeping implies that recognizable assets are essential for trade and also generates a private information problem when agents are subject to idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. A banking arrangement with self-selection that improves liquidity provision through the use of two different liquid assets is considered. It is found that when the incentive constraint binds with asset scarcity, there exists a liquidity premium on illiquid assets which reveals private information. The model is extended to include monetary policy, specifically Open-Market-Operations. It is shown that liquidity trap can exist when truth-telling incentive constraints bind.

Financial Crises Explanations, Types, and Implications

Financial Crises Explanations, Types, and Implications
Author: Mr.Stijn Claessens
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 66
Release: 2013-01-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475561008

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper briefly reviews theoretical and empirical studies on developments in these markets around financial crises. Second, what are the major types of financial crises? The paper focuses on the main theoretical and empirical explanations of four types of financial crises—currency crises, sudden stops, debt crises, and banking crises—and presents a survey of the literature that attempts to identify these episodes. Third, what are the real and financial sector implications of crises? The paper briefly reviews the short- and medium-run implications of crises for the real economy and financial sector. It concludes with a summary of the main lessons from the literature and future research directions.

Finance, Financial Sector Policies, and Long-run Growth

Finance, Financial Sector Policies, and Long-run Growth
Author: Asli Demirguc-Kunt
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2008
Genre: Access to Finance
ISBN:

Abstract: The first part of this paper reviews the literature on the relation between finance and growth. The second part of the paper reviews the literature on the historical and policy determinants of financial development. Governments play a central role in shaping the operation of financial systems and the degree to which large segments of the financial system have access to financial services. The paper discusses the relationship between financial sector policies and economic development.