IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/3279.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Model of the Reserve Asset

Author

Listed:
  • He, Zhiguo

    (University of Chicago)

  • Krishnamurthy, Arvind

    (Stanford University)

  • Milbradt, Konstantin

    (Northwestern University)

Abstract

A portion of the global wealth portfolio is directed towards a safe and liquid reserve asset, which recently has been the US Treasury bond. Our model links the determination of reserve asset status to relative fundamentals and relative debt sizes, by modeling two countries that issue sovereign bonds to satisfy investors' reserve asset demands. A sovereign's debt is more likely to be the reserve asset if its fundamentals are strong relative to other possible reserve assets, but not necessarily strong on an absolute basis. Debt size can enhance or detract from reserve asset status. If global demand for the reserve asset is high, a large-debt sovereign which offers a savings vehicle with better liquidity is more likely to be the reserve asset. If demand for the reserve asset is low, then large debt size is a negative as it carries more rollover risk, leading to a riskier vehicle for saving. When global demand is high, countries may make fiscal/debtstructuring decisions to enhance their reserve asset status. These actions have a tournament feature, and are self-defeating: countries may over-expand debt size to win the reserve asset tournament. Coordination can generate benefits. We use our model to study the benefits of "Eurobonds"--i.e. a coordinated common Europe-wide sovereign bond design. Eurobonds deliver welfare benefits only when they make up a sufficiently large fraction of countries' debts. Small steps towards Eurobonds may hurt countries and not deliver welfare benefits.

Suggested Citation

  • He, Zhiguo & Krishnamurthy, Arvind & Milbradt, Konstantin, 2015. "A Model of the Reserve Asset," Research Papers 3279, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:3279
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/model-reserve-asset
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ricardo J Caballero & Emmanuel Farhi & Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, 2021. "Global Imbalances and Policy Wars at the Zero Lower Bound [“Safe Assets”]," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 88(6), pages 2570-2621.
    2. Ricardo J Caballero & Emmanuel Farhi, 2018. "The Safety Trap," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(1), pages 223-274.
    3. Emmanuel Farhi & Matteo Maggiori, 2018. "A Model of the International Monetary System," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 133(1), pages 295-355.
    4. Rey, Hélène & Gourinchas, Pierre-Olivier, 2016. "Real Interest Rates, Imbalances and the Curse of Regional Safe Asset Providers at the Zero Lower Bound," CEPR Discussion Papers 11503, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Altermatt, Lukas, 2019. "Savings, asset scarcity, and monetary policy," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 182(C), pages 329-359.
    6. Gary B. Gorton, 2016. "The History and Economics of Safe Assets," NBER Working Papers 22210, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Canhui Hong, 2018. "Flight-to-quality debt crises," 2018 Meeting Papers 166, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    8. Golec, Pascal & Perotti, Enrico, 2017. "Safe assets: a review," Working Paper Series 2035, European Central Bank.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:3279. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.