MACROPRUDENTIAL SUPERVISION AND AGENTS’ INFORMATION: WHAT STRESS TESTS REALLY TELL THE MARKETS

Central bank’s macroprudential supervisory activities have to fulfill three distinct tasks: (i) assessing the banking system’s vulnerability to exogenous adverse turbulence, (ii) evaluating the risk of systemic crisis originating from idiosyncratic shocks, and (iii) measuring financial market’s sensitivity to policy stimuli. Given that macroprudential stress tests are the centerpiece of this policy approach, it is important to establish whether they are up to the task. We study how the 2011–2018 European Banking Authority stress tests affected market risk perception and show that they provided agents with valuable information on the policy stances and the vulnerabilities of the banking system, carrying out the above tasks successfully, especially the second and third tasks.

Stress Spillovers among Financial Markets: Evidence from Spain

Using a unique database, this paper examines the interconnection among stress indicators of the Spanish financial markets during the period of January 1999 to April 2021, applying both the connectedness framework and the Time-Varying Parameter Vector Autoregressive connectedness approach. Our results suggest that 15.67% of the total variance of forecast errors was explained by shocks across the six financial market stress indices examined, indicating that the remaining 84.33% of variation was due to idiosyncratic shocks. Nevertheless, we find that stress connectedness varies over time, with a surge during periods of increasing economic and financial instability, mainly driven by high levels of pandemic and economy policy uncertainty and real economy worsening. Financial intermediaries were the main generators of stress during three out of four recent major financial crises in Spain, while their role as stress transmitters to other markets has been reduced since the onset of the COVID-19 health crisis. Our results also indicate that the COVID-19 outbreak represents a relevant event in the transmission of stress among all market segments.

International Measures of Common Inflation

A key challenge for monetary policymakers in achieving their inflation goals—particularly important at the current juncture—is to be able to distinguish between persistent inflationary changes and short-term idiosyncratic shocks. The most common approach for filtering out short-term price shocks from inflation is to focus on measures of "core" inflation, traditionally defined as the change in the consumer price index (CPI) excluding food and energy prices.

WEATHER VARIABILITY, AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY, AND FARMER SUICIDES IN INDIA

Globalization, commercialization, modernization, erratic climatic conditions, individual expectations, contagion, and government policies are some of the reasons attributed to farmers’ suicides. This study hypothesizes that farmer suicides in India are primarily linked to loss in agricultural productivity which in turn is affected by adverse weather and low penetration of irrigation networks. Using panel data of 16 major states in India, from 1996 to 2015 and Control Function (CF) approach, the study shows that keeping all other factors fixed, a one degree rise in temperature results in 4.8% higher farmer suicides through a 3.6% decline in agricultural productivity. Further, the study highlights the significant role played by the contagion factors influencing farmer suicides. The study argues for policy responses that address covariate shocks arising from weather vagaries, price volatility, and liquidity constraint as well as idiosyncratic shocks arising from farmer-specific characteristics.

The Granular Nature of Large Institutional Investors

Large institutional investors own an increasing share of the equity markets in the United States. The implications of this development for financial markets are still unclear. The paper presents novel empirical evidence that ownership by large institutions predicts higher volatility and greater noise in stock prices as well as greater fragility in times of crisis. When studying the channel, we find that large institutional investors exhibit traits of granularity (i.e., subunits within a firm display correlated behavior), which reduces diversification of idiosyncratic shocks. Thus, large institutions trade larger volumes and induce greater price impact. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance.

The Effect of Unsuccessful Past Repurchases on Future Repurchasing Decisions

We find that managers are less likely to repurchase stocks when they lose money on past stock repurchases but find no robust evidence that past gains on repurchases influence future repurchasing activity. This asymmetric sensitivity is strongest for young CEOs and those with the shortest tenure. Also, future repurchases are more sensitive to past repurchase losses for CEOs whose previous lifetime experience with the stock market is unfavorable. The sensitivity of future repurchases to past losses costs firms, on average, about 3.7% per year. When this cost is decomposed into systematic and idiosyncratic components, we find that nearly half (1.8%) comes from mistiming idiosyncratic shocks. Past losses on repurchases have a significant and negative impact on the CEO’s future bonus and increase the likelihood that future CEO termination is involuntary. We also find that negative outcomes from past repurchases encourage the subsequent use of dividends. Our findings suggest that outcomes of past repurchases have economically significant consequences through both nonbehavioral (career concerns) and behavioral (snakebite effect) factors. This paper was accepted by Tyler Shumway, finance.