Financial crisis

  • 详情 China's Minsky moment? Stability leads to instability
    Hyman Minsky (1919–1996), a prominent post-Keynesian economist, argued that capitalist financial systems are inherently unstable. During prolonged prosperity, firms and financial institutions increase leverage and adopt more fragile forms of financing, shifting from hedge to speculative and Ponzi finance. This gradual buildup of financial fragility can eventually trigger a sudden collapse of asset values—later termed a “Minsky moment.” After the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, Minsky’s ideas gained renewed attention, and current financial developments once again bring his insights to the forefront.
  • 详情 Household debt overhang and bankruptcy abuse prevention 家庭债务积压与预防破产滥用
    Bankruptcy abuse prevention has been criticized for increasing foreclosure rates, imposing negative impacts on housing markets, and aggravating the financial crisis. By contrast, this paper documents that bankruptcy abuse prevention reduces household debt overhang, a phenomenon harmful to home values and housing markets. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that households in recourse states increased their home improvement and maintenance expenditures after the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, a period during which the households paid considerable attention to the downside risk of the housing market, and that the effects vary by home equity level. The results remain unchanged with alternative specifications and cannot be explained by credit changes, judicial and nonjudicial foreclosures, homestead exemption, house sales, or heterogeneous expectations. Last but not least, we use entropy balancing to eliminate the differences between the treatment and control groups and get similar results. 预防破产滥用的政策被认为推高止赎率、对住房市场造成负面影响以及加剧金融危机而饱受批评。与之相反,本文证明破产滥用预防能够缓解家庭债务积压(debt overhang)—— 而债务积压恰恰是一种损害房屋价值与住房市场的现象。采用双重差分(DID)分析,我们发现:在《破产滥用预防与消费者保护法案》(BAPCPA)实施后,**追索权州(recourse states)**的家庭增加了住房改善与维护支出;该时期家庭对住房市场的下行风险高度关注,且上述效应因房屋净值水平的不同而存在异质性。在多种替代设定下结果依然稳健,且不能被信贷变化、司法与非司法止赎、宅基地豁免、房屋销售或异质性预期所解释。最后,我们使用熵平衡(entropy balancing)方法消除处理组与控制组之间的差异,同样得到了一致的结果。
  • 详情 The Stability Gap Model: A Structural Measure of Financial Fragility & Its Application in Portfolio Risk Management
    Financial crises rarely erupt without warning; they are preceded by long periods of hidden fragility. Yet traditional market indicators such as the VIX capture only realized volatility, offering little foresight. This paper introduces the Stability Gap Model (SGM), developed iteratively from a simple intuition: fragility arises when risk-taking diverges from fundamentals and systemic buffers are insufficient. We trace the evolution of the model from its original formulation, through corrections and extensions, to its present form. The Classic SGM captures instantaneous imbalance, while the Beta SGM incorporates memory of past shocks. Empirical analysis demonstrates that the SGM provided clear early warnings ahead of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the 2011 Eurozone debt episode, the 2015 China/oil slowdown, and the 2018 tightening cycle, while also trending upward in 2019 before the COVID-19 crash. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the model's utility in assessing fragility in hedge funds and proposes its application as a universal framework for stability analysis across diverse systems, from corporate finance to supply chains.
  • 详情 The Adverse Consequences of Quantitative Easing (QE): International Capital Flows and Corporate Debt Growth in China
    The economic institutionalist literature often suggests that sub-optimal institutional arrangements impart unique distortions in China, and excessive corporate debt is a symptom of this condition. However, lax monetary policies after the global financial crisis, and specifically, quantitative easing have led to concerns about debt bubbles under a wide range of institutional regimes. This study draws on data from Chinese listed firms, supplemented by numerous macroeconomic control variables, to isolate the effect of international capital flows from other drivers of firm leverage. We conclude that the rise in, and distribution of, Chinese corporate debt can partly be as-cribed to the effects of monetary policy outside of China and that Chinese institutional features amplify these effects. Whilst Chinese firms are affected by developments in the global financial ecosystem, domestic institutional realities and distortions may unevenly add their own particular effects, providing further support for and extending the variegated capitalism literature.
  • 详情 Long and Short Memory in the Risk-Neutral Pricing Process
    This article proposes a semi-martingale approximation to a fractional Lévy process that is capable of capturing long and short memory in the stochastic process together with fat tails. The authors use the semi-martingale process in option pricing and empirically compare its performance to other option pricing models, including a stochastic volatility Lévy process. They contribute to the empirical literature by being the first to report the implied Hurst index computed from observed option prices using the Lévy process model. Calibrating the implied Hurst index of S&P 500 option prices in a period that covers the 2008 financial crisis, they find that the risk-neutral measure is characterized by a short memory in turbulent markets and a long memory in calm markets.
  • 详情 Contagion mechanism of liquidity risk in the interbank network
    Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, preventing financial crises has become one of the most important objectives of regulators and banks. Although previous studies have identified the phenomenon of risk contagion in the banking system, the underlying mechanisms of risk contagion are still unclear. This study delves into the multi-stage contagion mechanism of liquidity risk based on interbank lending linkages and clearing rules and introduces a new index to quantify bank liquidity risk. We find that the contagion of liquidity risk is primarily determined by the network structure of risk exposures between banks in default and is not significantly influenced by the lending relationships of banks that remain solvent. The empirical results suggest that banks with high risk should be prioritized for cash injections to improve system liquidity. These findings offer new insights into financial risk contagion and practical recommendations for regulatory authorities formulating intervention strategies and for banks conducting risk management.
  • 详情 Do Investors Herd Under Global Crises? A Comparative Study between Chinese and the United States Stock Markets
    This paper investigates the impact of two global crises, the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis, on herding behavior in the Chinese and U.S. stock markets. We find no evidence of herding behavior during these two global crises in the U.S. stock market, yet significant herding emerges under the COVID-19 crisis in Chinese mainland stock market. Additionally, the observed herding behavior in mainland China is primarily driven by sentiment. Our results reveal and explain the differences in the effects of financial crisis and public health crisis on herding behavior, as well as variations between emerging and developed stock markets.
  • 详情 Bank competition, interest rate pass-through and the impact of the global financial crisis: evidence from Hong Kong and Macao
    We examine the interest rate pass-through in Hong Kong (HK) and Macao to see if the monetary policy transmission mechanism has been impaired since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Our results show that, in the post-GFC period, both the long-run and short-run interest rate pass-through from policy rates to prime rates have disappeared in Macao and weakened significantly in HK. The long-term relationship between deposit rates and policy rates no longer exists in either market while the short-term relationship has been reduced significantly. The results indicate that the effectiveness of the monetary policy in HK and Macao has been seriously undermined after the GFC and alternative monetary policy tools were needed.
  • 详情 Research on Spillover Effect of Foreign Market Risk on Chinese Capital Market from Perspective of Full Financial Opening-up
    Starting from document research, this paper analyzes the mechanism of the risk spillover effect from developed capital markets to the Chinese capital market. After that, this paper conducts an empirical study on the risk spillover effect of developed capital markets on the Chinese capital market by using the DCC-GARCH model. Then the impact degree of global major stock market fluctuations on the Chinese stock market is measured. The analysis shows that there exists a significant risk spillover effect of developed capital markets on the Chinese capital market, but the effect began to weaken after the financial crisis and the size of the spillover effect can be affected by macro factors such as geographical locations, foreign trade, and foreign investment.
  • 详情 Ownership Networks and Firm Growth: What Do Forty Million Companies Tell Us About the Chinese Economy?
    The finance–growth nexus has been a central question in understanding the unprecedented success of the Chinese economy. With unique data on all the registered firms in China, we build extensive ownership networks, reflecting firm-to-firm equity investment relationships, and show that thesenetworks have been expanding rapidly since the 2000s, with more than five million firms in at least one network by 2017. Entering a network and increasing network centrality, both globally and locally, are associated with higher firm growth. Such positive network effects tend to be more pronounced for high productivity and privately owned firms. The RMB 4 trillion stimulus, mostly in the form of newly issued bank loans and launched by the Chinese government in November 2008 in response to the global financial crisis, partially ‘crowded out’ the positive network effects. Our analysis suggests that equity ownership networks and bank credit tend to act as substitutes for state-owned enterprises, but as complements for privately owned firms in promoting growth.