Search results

Insurance and asset holdings are modeled as the jointly determined outcomes of a constrained optimization problem. Consequently, (1) full coverage may be optimal despite limited premium loading, (2) insurance is normal if insurable assets are normal, (3) insurance cannot be a Giffen good, and (4) insurance is a complement to price‐elastic assets.

This paper aims to propose a new method for credit risk allocation among economic agents.

The paper considers a pool of bank loans subject to a credit risk and develops a method for decomposing the credit risk into idiosyncratic and systematic components. The systematic component accounts for the aggregate statistical difference between credit defaults in a given period and the long‐run average of these defaults.

The paper shows how financial contracts might be redesigned to allow for banks to manage the idiosyncratic component for their own accounts, while allowing the systematic component to be handled separately. The systematic component can be retained, passed off to the capital markets, or shared with the borrower. In the latter case, the paper introduces a type of floating interest rate, in which the rate is set in arrears, based on a composite index for the systematic risk. This increases the efficiency of risk sharing between borrowers, lenders and the capital market.

The paper has several practical implications that are of value for financial engineers, loan market participants, financial regulators, and all economic agents concerned with credit risk. It could lead to a new class of structured notes being traded in the market.

The paper also illustrates the potential benefits of risk decomposition. Of course, as with any innovation, the implementation of the structured contracts would raise practical issues not addressed here. The paper also makes several simplifications: market risk is ignored; the level of default is constant and identical among borrowers. These simplifications could be lifted in future research on this theme.

Insurance and Reinsurance companies, by underwriting risk portfolios not only across traditional insurance categories but also across national currencies, are assuming a new form of financial risk for which they have not yet developed the necessary risk management tools.

This chapter investigates the predictability of the European monetary policy through the eyes of the professional forecasters from a large investment bank. The analysis is based on forward-looking Actual and Perceived Taylor Rules for the European Central Bank which are estimated in real-time using a newly constructed database for the period April 2000–November 2009. The former policy rule is based on the actual refi rate set by the Governing Council, while the latter is estimated for the bank’s economists using their main point forecast for the upcoming refi rate decision as a dependent variable. The empirical evidence shows that the pattern of the refi rate is broadly well predicted by the professional forecasters even though the latter have foreseen more accurately the increases rather than the policy rate cuts. Second, the results point to an increasing responsiveness of the ECB to macroeconomic fundamentals along the forecast horizon. Third, the rolling window regressions suggest that the estimated coefficients have changed after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in October 2008; the ECB has responded less strongly to macroeconomic fundamentals and the degree of policy inertia has decreased. A sensitivity analysis shows that the baseline results are robust to applying a recursive window methodology and some of the findings are qualitatively unaltered from using Consensus Economics forecasts in the regressions.

This chapter estimates a regime switching Taylor Rule for the European Central Bank (ECB) in order to investigate some potential nonlinearities in the forward-looking policy reaction function within a real-time framework. In order to compare observed and predicted policy behavior, the chapter estimates Actual and Perceived regime switching Taylor Rules for the ECB. The former is based on the refi rate set by the Governing Council while the latter relies on the professional point forecasts of the refi rate performed by a large investment bank before the upcoming policy rate decision. The empirical evidence shows that the Central Bank’s main policy rate has switched between two regimes: in the first one the Taylor Principle is satisfied and the ECB stabilizes the economic outlook, while in the second regime the Central Bank cuts rates more aggressively and puts a higher emphasis on stabilizing real output growth expectations. Second, the results point out that the professional forecasters have broadly well predicted the actual policy regimes. The estimation results are also robust to using consensus forecasts of inflation and real output growth. The empirical evidence from the augmented Taylor Rules shows that the Central Bank has most likely not responded to the growth rates of M3 and the nominal effective exchange rate and the estimated regimes are robust to including these additional variables in the regressions. Finally, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers the policy rate has switched to a crisis regime as the ECB has focused on preventing a further decline in economic activity and on securing the stability of the financial system.