IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecb/ecbwps/20202380.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Financial policy in an exuberant world

Author

Listed:
  • Walther, Ansgar

Abstract

This paper studies optimal financial policy in a world where the financial sector can become excessively optimistic. I decompose the welfare effects of bank capital regulation to demonstrate the effects of exuberance and its interaction with incentive problems in banking. The optimal policy depends not only on the extent, but also on the type of optimism. For example, it is markedly different when the exuberance of banks focuses on neglected downside risk, as opposed to overstated upside opportunities. A central normative conclusion is that “leaning against the wind”, by tightening capital requirements in exuberant times, can be counterproductive. I show that two natural metrics, describing the distortion in perceived upside and downside risk, are sufficient statistics for the policy implications of exuberance. My results shed light on the diverse empirical evidence on the relationship between bank capital and risk-taking. Finally, I investigate the sensitivity of these insights under different assumptions about government rationality and paternalism. JEL Classification: G01, G21, G40

Suggested Citation

  • Walther, Ansgar, 2020. "Financial policy in an exuberant world," Working Paper Series 2380, European Central Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20202380
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2380~1813b69339.en.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David López-Salido & Jeremy C. Stein & Egon Zakrajšek, 2017. "Credit-Market Sentiment and the Business Cycle," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(3), pages 1373-1426.
    2. Gabriel Jiménez & Steven Ongena & José‐Luis Peydró & Jesús Saurina, 2014. "Hazardous Times for Monetary Policy: What Do Twenty‐Three Million Bank Loans Say About the Effects of Monetary Policy on Credit Risk‐Taking?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 82(2), pages 463-505, March.
    3. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2009. "Varieties of Crises and Their Dates," Introductory Chapters, in: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton University Press.
    4. Acharya, Viral V. & Yorulmazer, Tanju, 2007. "Too many to fail--An analysis of time-inconsistency in bank closure policies," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 1-31, January.
    5. Emmanuel Farhi & Iván Werning, 2016. "A Theory of Macroprudential Policies in the Presence of Nominal Rigidities," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 84, pages 1645-1704, September.
    6. Òscar Jordà & Björn Richter & Moritz Schularick & Alan M Taylor, 2021. "Bank Capital Redux: Solvency, Liquidity, and Crisis," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 88(1), pages 260-286.
    7. Van den Heuvel, Skander J., 2008. "The welfare cost of bank capital requirements," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(2), pages 298-320, March.
    8. Todd Keister, 2016. "Bailouts and Financial Fragility," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 83(2), pages 704-736.
    9. Anton Korinek & Alp Simsek, 2016. "Liquidity Trap and Excessive Leverage," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(3), pages 699-738, March.
    10. Reinhart, Karmen & Rogoff, Kenneth, 2009. ""This time is different": panorama of eight centuries of financial crises," Ekonomicheskaya Politika / Economic Policy, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, vol. 1, pages 77-114, March.
    11. Luc Laeven & Fabian Valencia, 2020. "Systemic Banking Crises Database II," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 68(2), pages 307-361, June.
    12. Emmanuel Farhi & Jean Tirole, 2012. "Collective Moral Hazard, Maturity Mismatch, and Systemic Bailouts," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(1), pages 60-93, February.
    13. Gromb, Denis & Vayanos, Dimitri, 2002. "Equilibrium and welfare in markets with financially constrained arbitrageurs," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2-3), pages 361-407.
    14. Guido Lorenzoni, 2008. "Inefficient Credit Booms," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 75(3), pages 809-833.
    15. Kraus, Alan & Litzenberger, Robert H, 1973. "A State-Preference Model of Optimal Financial Leverage," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 28(4), pages 911-922, September.
    16. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2014. "This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 15(2), pages 215-268, November.
    17. Freixas, Xavier, 1999. "Optimal Bail-Out, Conditionality and Creative Ambiguity," CEPR Discussion Papers 2238, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    18. Ing-Haw Cheng & Sahil Raina & Wei Xiong, 2014. "Wall Street and the Housing Bubble," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(9), pages 2797-2829, September.
    19. Dean Corbae & Pablo D'Erasmo, 2014. "Capital requirements in a quantitative model of banking industry dynamics," Working Papers 14-13, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    20. Reinhart, Carmen & Rogoff, Kenneth, 2009. "This Time It’s Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly-Preface," MPRA Paper 17451, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    21. Alp Simsek, 2013. "Belief Disagreements and Collateral Constraints," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(1), pages 1-53, January.
    22. Raj Chetty, 2009. "Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Analysis: A Bridge Between Structural and Reduced-Form Methods," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 451-488, May.
    23. Emmanuel Farhi & Xavier Gabaix, 2020. "Optimal Taxation with Behavioral Agents," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(1), pages 298-336, January.
    24. Reinhart, Carmen & Rogoff, Kenneth, 2009. "This Time It’s Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly-Chapter 1," MPRA Paper 17452, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Francesco Cesarone & Raffaello Cesetti & Giuseppe Orlando & Manuel Luis Martino & Jacopo Maria Ricci, 2022. "Comparing SSD-Efficient Portfolios with a Skewed Reference Distribution," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 11(1), pages 1-20, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Vadim Elenev & Tim Landvoigt & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, 2021. "A Macroeconomic Model With Financially Constrained Producers and Intermediaries," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(3), pages 1361-1418, May.
    2. Dávila, Eduardo & Walther, Ansgar, 2020. "Does size matter? Bailouts with large and small banks," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(1), pages 1-22.
    3. Frederic Malherbe, 2020. "Optimal Capital Requirements over the Business and Financial Cycles," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 12(3), pages 139-174, July.
    4. Aikman, David & Haldane, Andrew & Hinterschweiger, Marc & Kapadia, Sujit, 2018. "Rethinking financial stability," Bank of England working papers 712, Bank of England.
    5. Gomes, João F. & Grotteria, Marco & Wachter, Jessica A., 2023. "Foreseen risks," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 212(C).
    6. Cesa-Bianchi, Ambrogio & Eguren Martin, Fernando & Thwaites, Gregory, 2019. "Foreign booms, domestic busts: The global dimension of banking crises," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 58-74.
    7. Emmanuel Farhi & Jean Tirole, 2018. "Deadly Embrace: Sovereign and Financial Balance Sheets Doom Loops," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(3), pages 1781-1823.
    8. Mircea Epure & Irina Mihai & Camelia Minoiu & José-Luis Peydró, 2024. "Global Financial Cycle, Household Credit, and Macroprudential Policies," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 70(11), pages 8096-8115, November.
    9. policy, Work stream on macroprudential & Policy, Monetary & Stability, Financial & Albertazzi, Ugo & Martin, Alberto & Assouan, Emmanuelle & Tristani, Oreste & Galati, Gabriele & Vlassopoulos, Thomas , 2023. "The role of financial stability considerations in monetary policy and the interaction with macroprudential policy in the euro area," Occasional Paper Series 272, European Central Bank.
    10. policy, Work stream on macroprudential & Albertazzi, Ugo & Martin, Alberto & Assouan, Emmanuelle & Tristani, Oreste & Galati, Gabriele & Vlassopoulos, Thomas, 2021. "The role of financial stability considerations in monetary policy and the interaction with macroprudential policy in the euro area," Occasional Paper Series 272, European Central Bank.
    11. Jeremy C. Stein, 2021. "Can Policy Tame the Credit Cycle?," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 69(1), pages 5-22, March.
    12. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    13. repec:zbw:bofrdp:2016_003 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Lovchikova, Marina & Matschke, Johannes, 2024. "Capital controls and the global financial cycle," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 163(C).
    15. Eduardo Dávila & Ansgar Walther, 2023. "Prudential Policy with Distorted Beliefs," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 113(7), pages 1967-2006, July.
    16. Albertazzi, Ugo & Barbiero, Francesca & Marqués-Ibáñez, David & Popov, Alexander & Rodriguez d’Acri, Costanza & Vlassopoulos, Thomas, 2020. "Monetary policy and bank stability: the analytical toolbox reviewed," Working Paper Series 2377, European Central Bank.
    17. de Haan, Jakob & Fang, Yi & Jing, Zhongbo, 2020. "Does the risk on banks’ balance sheets predict banking crises? New evidence for developing countries," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 254-268.
    18. Mikael Juselius & Mathias Drehmann, 2015. "Leverage dynamics and the real burden of debt," BIS Working Papers 501, Bank for International Settlements.
    19. Korinek, Anton & Sandri, Damiano, 2016. "Capital controls or macroprudential regulation?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(S1), pages 27-42.
    20. Demosthenes Tambakis, 2021. "A Markov chain measure of systemic banking crisis frequency," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(16), pages 1351-1356, September.
    21. Claudio Borio, 2011. "Rediscovering the Macroeconomic Roots of Financial Stability Policy: Journey, Challenges, and a Way Forward," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 3(1), pages 87-117, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    banking; behavioral finance; financial crises; macroprudential policy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G40 - Financial Economics - - Behavioral Finance - - - General

    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:ecb:ecbwps:20202380. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Official Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/emieude.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.