Working Papers
2023
March 17, 2023
Derivative Margin Calls: A New Driver of MMF Flows
Description: During the March 2020 market turmoil, euro area money-market funds (MMFs) experienced significant outflows, reaching almost 8% of assets under management. This paper investigates whether the volatility in MMF flows was driven by investors’ liquidity needs related to derivative margin payments. We combine three highly granular unique data sources (EMIR data for derivatives, SHSS data for investor holdings of MMFs and Refinitiv Lipper data for daily MMF flows) to construct a daily fund-level panel dataset spanning from February to April 2020. We estimate the effects of variation margin paid and received by the largest holders of EURdenominated MMFs on flows of these MMFs. The main findings suggest that variation margin payments faced by some investors holding MMFs were an important driver of the flows of EUR-denominated MMFs domiciled in euro area.
March 17, 2023
Monetary Policy Implications of Central Bank Digital Currencies: Perspectives on Jurisdictions with Conventional and Islamic Banking Systems
Description: Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) promise many benefits but, if not well designed, they could have undesired consequences, including for monetary policy. Issuing an unremunerated CBDC or a wholesale CBDC does not change the objectives of monetary policy or the operational framework for monetary policy. CBDCs can, however, induce changes in the retail, wholesale and cross border payments that have negative spillover effects on monetary policy, through their effects on money velocity, bank deposit disintermediation, volatility of bank reserves, currency substitution, and capital flows. Countries most vulnerable are those with banking systems dominated by small retail deposits and demand deposits, low levels of digital payments and weak macro fundamentals. Proposed CBDC design features, such as caps on CBDC holdings and unremunerating the CBDC can moderate disintermediation risks, but they are not sufficient. Central banks will need to ensure that unintended macroeconomic risks are comprehensively identified and mitigated.
March 17, 2023
Debt Mutualization in the Euro Area: A Quantitative Exploration
Description: This paper explores the feasibility of an idea proposed first by the German Council of Economic Experts in 2011 and revisited by Italian and French authorities in 2021: the one-off mutualization of some European legacy debt through the creation of a European Debt Management Agency (EDMA). The paper does not argue in favor or against these proposals or make a proposal of its own. Rather it outlines a conceptual framework that can be used to quantify the contours of mutualization proposals and draws lessons from the debt assumption in the United States in 1790. The framework suggests that by capitalizing the convenience yield on European-wide safe assets, the EDMA could issue up to 15 percent of euro area GDP, helping to put national debts on a sounder trajectory. The analysis suggests that, without mutualization, some euro area countries are likely to experience decreasing debt-to-GDP ratios over the forecast period. This is not the case for Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, and Spain, where further fiscal consolidation would be needed. For these countries, we consider the effects of a debt mutualization equivalent to 26 percent of their GDP. For Italy, this operation alone is enough to ensure a decreasing debt-to-GDP path. For the others, the news is more mixed: while the additional fiscal consolidation is smaller, 1.3 to 2.3 percent of GDP are still required to reduce debt with 95 percent probability.
March 10, 2023
Public versus Private Cost of Capital with State-Contingent Terminal Value
Description: The economic debate underlines the reasons why discount rates of infrastructure projects should be similar, regardless the public or private source of financing, during the forecast period when flows are risky but predictable. In contrast, we show that the incompleteness of contracts between governments and private firms beyond the forecast period (i.e., when flows of net social benefits are state-contingent) entails expected terminal values that are systematically larger under government rather than private financing. This effect provides a new rationale for applying a lower discount rate in the assessment of projects under public financing as compared to private financing.
March 10, 2023
The Heterogeneous Effects of U.S. Monetary Policy on Non-Bank Finance
Description: Using flow of funds and high frequency data from the Investment Company Institute, we study the effects of monetary policy shocks on the size of non-bank assets as well as on flows into long-term mutual funds and returns on their assets. Consolidating chains of non-bank intermediation to avoid double counting, we find that contractionary monetary policy shocks shrink the assets of non-banks reliant on long-term funding, while increasing those of nonbanks reliant on short-term funding. Contractionary shocks also cause sustained outflows from long-term mutual funds and reduce their returns. Using a Markov-Switching VAR, we find these effects to be more prevalent after the Global Financial Crisis, and show that monetary policy shocks had the opposite effects in some earlier periods. Policymakers will thus have to contend with a complex and heterogeneous transmission of monetary policy to financial and macroeconomic outcomes through the non-banks.
March 10, 2023
Who Pays for Your Rewards? Redistribution of the Credit Card Market
Description: We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution between consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers. To probe the underlying mechanisms, we exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level and show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving naive consumers with higher unpaid balances. Naive consumers also follow a sub-optimal balance-matching heuristic when repaying their credit cards, incurring higher costs. Banks incentivize the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable cards without rewards. We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.
March 10, 2023
Sectoral Impact and Propagation of Weather Shocks
Description: Local weather shocks have been shown to affect local economic output, however, little is known about their propagation through production networks. Using a six-sector global dataset over the past fifty years, this paper examines the effect of weather fluctuations and extreme weather events on sectoral economic production and the transmission of weather shocks across sectors, countries and over time. I document that agriculture is the most harmed sector by heat shocks, droughts and cyclones. Using input-output interlinkages, I find that sectors at later stages of the supply chain suffer from substantial and persistent losses over time due to domestic and foreign heat shocks in other sectors. A counterfactual analysis of the average annual output loss accounting for heat shocks across trade partners shows a substantial underestimation of the economic cost of temperature increases since 2000.
March 10, 2023
Heterogeneous Spending, Heterogeneous Multipliers
Description: Do local fiscal multipliers depend on what the government purchases? We find that government purchases of services have larger effects on employment than spending on goods. Industries producing services are more labor-intensive than industries producing goods. This heterogeneity in labor intensity is an important mechanism behind these results. Spending directed toward labor-intensive industries generates stronger increases in employment and labor income relative to spending toward non-labor-intensive industries.
March 10, 2023
Optimal Monetary and Macroprudential Policies under Fire-Sale Externalities
Description: I provide an integrated analysis of monetary and macroprudential policies in a model economy featuring a financial friction and a nominal wage rigidity. In this set-up, the monetary authority faces a trade-off between macroeconomic and financial stability: While expansionary counter-cyclical monetary policy prevents involuntary unemployment, it also amplifies an inefficient reallocation of capital across sectors. The main contribution of the analysis is threefold: First it highlights a novel channel through which monetary policy can impact financial stability. Second, it shows that, by itself, monetary policy can significantly mitigate the wedge between the constrained efficient and the competitive allocation. Third, regardless of the availability of macroprudential tools, stabilizing demand is usually not optimal for monetary policy.
March 10, 2023
Deconstructing ESG Scores: How to Invest with your own Criteria?
Description: Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores are a key tool for asset managers in designing and implementing ESG investment strategies. They, however, amalgamate a broad range of fundamentally different factors, creating ambiguity for investors as to the underlying drivers of higher or lower ESG scores. We explore the feasibility and performance of more targeted investment strategies based on specific ESG categories, by deconstructing ESG scores into their granular components. First, we investigate the characteristics of the various categories underlying ESG scores. Not all types of ESG categories lend themselves to more focused strategies, which is related to both limits to ESG data disclosure and the fundamental challenge of translating qualitative characteristics into quantitative measures. Second, we consider an investment scheme based on the exclusion of firms with the lowest scores in a given category of interest. In most cases, this strategy allows investors to substantially improve the ESG category score, with a marginal impact on financial performance relative to a broad stock market benchmark. The exclusion results in regional and sectoral biases relative to the benchmark, which may be undesirable for some investors.We then implement a “best-in-class” strategy by excluding firms with the lowest category scores and reinvesting the proceeds in firms with the highest scores, maintaining the same regional and sectoral composition. This approach reduces the tracking error of the portfolio and slightly improves its risk-adjusted performance, while still yielding a large gain in the targeted ESG category score.