Global liquidity flows are largely channeled through banks and nonbank financial institutions. The common drivers of global liquidity flows include monetary policy in advanced economies and risk conditions. At the same time, the sensitivities of liquidity flows to changes in these drivers differ across institutions and have been evolving over time. Microprudential regulation of banks plays a role, influencing leverage and capitalization, changing sensitivities to shocks, and also driving risk migration from banks to nonbank financial institutions. Risk sensitivities and flightiness of global liquidity are now strongest in more leveraged nonbank financial institutions, raising challenges in stress episodes. Current policy initiatives target linkages across different types of financial institutions and associated risks. Meanwhile, significant gaps remain. This paper concludes by discussing policy options for addressing systemic risk in banks and nonbanks.
This paper studies large sample classical and Bayesian inference in a prototypical linear DSGE model and demonstrates that inference on the structural parameters based on a Gaussian likelihood is unaffected by departures from Gaussianity of the structural shocks. This surprising result is due to a cancellation in the asymptotic variance resulting into a generalized information equality for the block corresponding to the structural parameters. The underlying reason for the cancellation is the certainty equivalence property of the linear rational expectation model. The main implication of this result is that classical and Bayesian Gaussian inference achieve a semi-parametric efficiency bound and there is no need for a “sandwich-form” correction of the asymptotic variance of the structural parameters. Consequently, MLE-based confidence intervals and Bayesian credible sets of the deep parameters based on a Gaussian likelihood have correct asymptotic coverage even when the structural shocks are non-Gaussian. On the other hand, inference on the reduced-form parameters characterizing the volatility of the shocks is invalid whenever the structural shocks have a non-Gaussian density and the paper proposes a simple Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm that achieves correct large sample inference for the volatility parameters.
Does the effect of monetary policy depend on the prevailing level of inflation? In order to answer this question, we construct a parsimonious nonlinear time series model that allows for inflation regimes. We find that the effects of monetary policy are markedly different when year-over-year inflation exceeds 5.5 percent. Below this threshold, changes in monetary policy have a short-lived effect on prices, but no effect on the unemployment rate, giving a potential explanation for the recent “soft landing” in the United States. Above this threshold, the effects of monetary policy surprises on both inflation and unemployment can be larger and longer lasting.
Increasing personal bankruptcy protection raises consumers’ desire to borrow and lenders’ cost of extending credit; the impact on equilibrium borrowing is ambiguous. Using bankruptcy protection changes between 1999 and 2005 across U.S. states, we find that borrowers respond to greater protection by increasing their unsecured debt. Border county estimates suggest that local economic conditions do not drive these results. Borrowers pay more for protection through higher interest rates, yet delinquency is unaffected. Remarkably, our results indicate that rising borrower demand outstripped decreasing supply. Increased protections did not reduce the aggregate level of household debt but affected the composition of borrowing.
We examine the effect of undiagnosed memory disorders on credit outcomes using individually-matched nationally representative credit reporting and Medicare data. We find effects of early stage disease, years before diagnosis, on a wide range of financial outcomes, including credit card account payment delinquency and amount of delinquent balance, credit utilization among credit card account holders, mortgage delinquency and delinquent balance amount, and credit scores. Effects are pervasive, affecting seniors in single and coupled households, racial/ethnic minorities and non-minorities, and older adults living in areas with higher and lower education levels. Early stage effects are greater among singles and Black individuals.
