Macroprudential policy involves using mainly prudential but sometimes also monetary and fiscal tools to reduce systemic risk and achieve financial stability. It is motivated by externalities associated with the buildup of systemic risk over time due to strategic complementarities, fire sales and credit crunches related to a generalized sell-off of assets, and strong cross-institutional interconnectedness. Macroprudential tools apply to both banks and nonbank financial institutions and to different classes of borrowers to the extent that they come with systemic risks.
Both advanced economies (AEs) and emerging market economies (EMEs) have steadily increased their use of macroprudential measures since the mid-1990s. Empirical evidence suggests that tighter macroprudential policy has improved banking system resilience and that tools such as lower caps on loan-to-value or debt service ratios have helped reduce housing credit and price growth. Evidence shows that while tightening macroprudential policy is generally effective, relaxing it is less so. By moderating fluctuations in general bank credit, housing/household credit, or house prices, macroprudential policy tends to reduce the severity and likelihood of future crises as well as the volatility of growth, but recent studies also show that it slows output growth.
As financial globalization progresses, macroprudential policy may become less effective due to regulatory arbitrage and cross-border leakages, especially in financially more open AEs and EMEs, also given the limited scope for international coordination and the lack of an internationally agreed-upon macroprudential framework. To deal with the associated externally driven risks, many EMEs use foreign exchange (FX)-related macroprudential tools, e.g., FX liability-based reserve requirements, limits on currency mismatch or FX positions, and FX liquidity requirements. In EMEs, FX intervention can also play a macroprudential role. In contrast, AEs rarely use such instruments but use macroprudential capital buffers more actively than EMEs. Recent evidence suggests both positive and negative international spillover effects of these and other macroprudential policies.
These and other findings point to the need to build formal models that have a macro-financial stability framework (MFSF) at their core. The framework incorporates the relevant policy tools, their individual effects, and interactions, and captures the channels of financial risk-taking and their implications for global and domestic financial conditions. Such an MFSF includes monetary policy to ensure macroeconomic stability and assist with financial stability, fiscal policy to guarantee fiscal sustainability and limit cyclical economic fluctuations, and macroprudential policy to complement monetary and fiscal policies by strengthening the resilience of the financial system and limiting the buildup of financial imbalances. Research is underway to develop such models, but considerable scope for further work in this area exists.
Article
Stijn Claessens, Aaron Mehrotra, and Ilhyock Shim
Article
Andrew Y. Chen and Tom Zimmermann
Researchers are more likely to share notable findings. As a result, published findings tend to overstate the magnitude of real-world phenomena. This bias is a natural concern for asset pricing research, which has found hundreds of return predictors and little consensus on their origins.
Empirical evidence on publication bias comes from large-scale metastudies. Metastudies of cross-sectional return predictability have settled on four stylized facts that demonstrate publication bias is not a dominant factor: (a) almost all findings can be replicated, (b) predictability persists out-of-sample, (c) empirical t-statistics are much larger than 2.0, and (d) predictors are weakly correlated. Each of these facts has been demonstrated in at least three metastudies.
Empirical Bayes statistics turn these facts into publication bias corrections. Estimates from three metastudies find that the average correction (shrinkage) accounts for only 10%–15% of in-sample mean returns and that the risk of inference going in the wrong direction (the false discovery rate) is less than 10%.
Metastudies also find that t-statistic hurdles exceed 3.0 in multiple testing algorithms and that returns are 30%–50% weaker in alternative portfolio tests. These facts are easily misinterpreted as evidence of publication bias. Other misinterpretations include the conflating of phrases such as “mostly false findings” with “many insignificant findings,” “data snooping” with “liquidity effects,” and “failed replications” with “insignificant ad-hoc trading strategies.”
Cross-sectional predictability may not be representative of other fields. Metastudies of real-time equity premium prediction imply a much larger effect of publication bias, although the evidence is not nearly as abundant as it is in the cross section. Measuring publication bias in areas other than cross-sectional predictability remains an important area for future research.
Article
Alon Brav, Andrey Malenko, and Nadya Malenko
Passively managed (index) funds have grown to become among the largest shareholders in many publicly traded companies. Their large ownership stakes and voting power have attracted the attention of market participants, academics, and regulators and have sparked an active debate about their corporate governance role. While many studies explore the governance implications of passive fund growth, they often come to conflicting conclusions.
To understand how the growth in indexing can affect governance, it is important to understand fund managers’ incentives to be engaged shareholders. These incentives depend on fund managers’ compensation contracts, ownership stakes, assets under management, and costs of engagement. Major passive asset managers, such as the Big Three (BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard), may have incentives to be engaged even though they track the indices and their engagement efforts benefit all other funds that track the same indices. This is because such funds’ substantial ownership stakes in multiple firms can both increase the effectiveness of their engagement and create relatively large financial benefits from engagement despite the low fees they collect. However, there is a difference between large and small index fund families: the incentives of the latter are likely to be substantially smaller, and the empirical evidence appears to be consistent with this distinction.
The governance effects of passive fund growth also depend on where flows to passive funds come from, which investors are replaced by passive funds in firms’ ownership structures, how passive funds interact with other shareholders, and how their growth affects other asset managers’ compensation structures. Considering such aggregate effects and interactions can help reconcile the seemingly conflicting findings in the empirical literature. It also suggests that policymakers should be careful in using the existing studies to understand the aggregate governance effects of passive fund growth over the past decades.
Overall, the literature has made important progress in understanding and quantifying passive funds’ incentives to engage, their monitoring activities and voting practices, and their interactions with other shareholders. Based on the findings in the literature, there is yet no clear answer to whether passive fund growth has been beneficial or detrimental for governance, and there are many open questions remaining. These open questions suggest several important directions for future research in this area.
Article
Markowitz showed that an investor who cares only about the mean and variance of portfolio returns should hold a portfolio on the efficient frontier. The application of this investment strategy proceeds in two steps. First, the statistical moments of asset returns are estimated from historical time series, and second, the mean-variance portfolio selection problem is solved separately, as if the estimates were the true parameters. The literature on portfolio decision acknowledges the difficulty in estimating means and covariances in many instances. This is particularly the case in high-dimensional settings. Merton notes that it is more difficult to estimate means than covariances and that errors in estimates of means have a larger impact on portfolio weights than errors in covariance estimates. Recent developments in high-dimensional settings have stressed the importance of correcting the estimation error of traditional sample covariance estimators for portfolio allocation. The literature has proposed shrinkage estimators of the sample covariance matrix and regularization methods founded on the principle of sparsity. Both methodologies are nested in a more general framework that constructs optimal portfolios under constraints on different norms of the portfolio weights including short-sale restrictions. On the one hand, shrinkage methods use a target covariance matrix and trade off bias and variance between the standard sample covariance matrix and the target. More prominence has been given to low-dimensional factor models that incorporate theoretical insights from asset pricing models. In these cases, one has to trade off estimation risk for model risk. Alternatively, the literature on regularization of the sample covariance matrix uses different penalty functions for reducing the number of parameters to be estimated. Recent methods extend the idea of regularization to a conditional setting based on factor models, which increase with the number of assets, and apply regularization methods to the residual covariance matrix.
Article
Eric Monnet
The historical evolution of the role of central banks has been shaped by two major characteristics of these institutions: they are banks and they are linked—in various legal, administrative, and political ways—to the state. The history of central banking is thus an analysis of how central banks have ensured or failed to ensure the stability of the value of money and the credit system while maintaining supportive or conflicting relationships with governments and private banks. Opening the black box of central banks is necessary to understanding the political economy issues that emerge from the implementation of monetary and credit policy and why, in addition to macroeconomic effects, these policies have major consequences on the structure of financial systems and the financing of public debt. It is also important to read the history of the evolution of central banks since the end of the 19th century as a game of countries wanting to adopt a dominant institutional model. Each historical period was characterized by a dominant model that other countries imitated - or pretended to imitate while retaining substantial national characteristics - with a view to greater international political and financial integration. Recent academic research has explored several issues that underline the importance of central banks to the development of the state, the financial system and on macroeconomic fluctuations: (a) the origin of central banks; (b) their role as a lender of last resort and banking supervisor; (c) the justifications and consequences of domestic macroeconomic policy objectives - inflation, output, etc. -of central banks (monetary policy); (d) the special loans of central banks and their role in the allocation of credit (credit policy); (e) the legal and political links between the central bank and the government (independence); (f) the role of central banks concerning exchange rates and the international monetary system; (g) production of economic research and statistics.
Article
Jacob S. Sagi and Zipei Zhu
Private equity real estate (PERE) refers to professionally managed pooled investments in the real estate market available only to institutions (e.g., pension funds), private accredited investors, and high-net-worth individuals. In the ownership structure of PERE funds, general partners (GPs) serve as the active fund managers who raise an extensive amount of external capital from limited partners (LPs) to acquire and operate commercial real estate properties. Debt financing, namely the use of leverage, is prevalent in real estate investments and even more so in the setting of PERE funds. Though much empirical research is devoted to PERE fund performance, few studies directly investigate the role of financial leverage in PERE funds.
In an ideal friction-free setting, leverage creates no value and is essentially part of a zero-sum game of rights and privileges between various asset stakeholders. In practice, however, leverage seems far from irrelevant due to the existence of market frictions that could lead to value creation (or destruction) by its use. Financial economic theories indicate that leverage can amplify skill (or the lack thereof), reallocate cash flow rights, and shift incentives in the presence of market frictions. With PERE, existing work provides mixed or little evidence that leverage is employed to amplify skill and consistently hints that its use shifts the balance of benefits toward fund sponsors over their limited partners.
Based on data from Preqin and StepStone, a typical closed-end PERE fund targets roughly 65% debt to the value of total assets under management. Funds managing more risky real estate tend to use more leverage, and there is little evidence that fund terms are adjusted to reflect potential conflicts of interest posed by more intensive use of leverage. Rather, stylized facts raise concerns that the scope for conflict of interest may have increased over the past 10 years. Among these concerns is an increase in strategic longer-term use of subscription facilities. The bulk of evidence in the literature points to robust underperformance of high-leverage funds on a net-of-fee risk-adjusted basis. In other words, there is little evidence supporting the notion that leverage is employed to enhance skilled management and to benefit LPs. This suggests that a significant portion of PERE investors are not optimizing risk-return tradeoffs in allocating investments to high-leverage PERE funds. More work is needed to refine these findings and, more importantly, understand the source of market frictions behind them.
Article
William Quinn and John Turner
Financial bubbles constitute some of history’s most significant economic events, but academic research into the phenomenon has often been narrow, with an excessive focus on whether bubble episodes invalidate or confirm the efficient markets hypothesis. The literature on the topic has also been somewhat siloed, with theoretical, experimental, qualitative, and quantitative methods used to develop relatively discrete bodies of research.
In order to overcome these deficiencies, future research needs to move beyond the rational/irrational dichotomy and holistically examine the causes and consequences of bubbles. Future research in financial bubbles should thus use a wider range of investigative tools to answer key questions or attempt to synthesize the findings of multiple research programs.
There are three areas in particular that future research should focus on: the role of information in a bubble, the aftermath of bubbles, and possible regulatory responses. While bubbles are sometimes seen as an inevitable part of capitalism, there have been long historical eras in which they were extremely rare, and these eras are likely to contain lessons for alleviating the negative effects of bubbles in the 21st century. Finally, the literature on bubbles has tended to neglect certain regions, and future research should hunt for undiscovered episodes outside of Europe and North America.
Article
Vikas Agarwal and Honglin Ren
Hedge funds are dynamic, versatile, opaque, and, according to BarclayHedge, their assets under management have nearly doubled from $2.6 trillion in 2015 to $4.9 trillion in 2021. In the recent decade, whether hedge funds have delivered superior performance is in debate. Researchers conclude differently depending on the sample of hedge funds available for investigation. Recent research has made significant advances in understanding factors that contribute to or impair fund performance and in identifying potential sources of managerial skill. These include changes in disclosure requirements, examination of timing ability, the role of short selling and derivatives use, the effect of fund and manager characteristics, and applications of more advanced econometric techniques.
Recent research has also examined different risks hedge funds are exposed to and the risk management practices of hedge funds. Particularly, studies have focused on systematic risk, liquidity risk, and financial intermediary risk stemming from trading in the market and interacting with other market participants. With greater availability of novel data such as regulatory filings (e.g., Form PF), studies have improved understanding of types of risks hedge funds take on and implications of risk taking on fund performance, factors related to heterogeneous risks, and risk management process of hedge funds.
Lastly, recent research has also studied the role of hedge funds in the asset market. Hedge funds possess stronger incentives, are less constrained, and are nimbler in their trading than other institutional investments. Studies have investigated the important role of hedge funds in contributing to price discovery, market efficiency, and liquidity in financial markets. Evidence suggests that the ability of hedge funds to arbitrage or provide liquidity depends on market conditions and funds’ funding conditions.
Article
Alon Brav, Wei Jiang, and Rongchen Li
Hedge fund activism refers to the phenomenon where hedge fund investors acquire a strict minority block of shares in a target firm and then attempt to pressure management for changes in corporate policies and governance with the aim to improve firm performance. This study provides an updated empirical analysis as well as a comprehensive survey of the academic finance research on hedge fund activism. Beginning in the early 1990s, shareholder engagement by activist hedge funds has evolved to become both an investment strategy and a remedy for poor corporate governance. Hedge funds represent a group of highly incentivized, value-driven investors who are relatively free from regulatory and structural barriers that have constrained the monitoring by other external investors. While traditional institutional investors have taken actions ex-post to preserve value or contain observed damage (such as taking the “Wall Street Walk”), hedge fund activists target underperforming firms in order to unlock value and profit from the improvement. Activist hedge funds also differ from corporate raiders that operated in the 1980s, as they tend to accumulate minority equity stakes and do not seek direct control. As a result, activists must win support from fellow shareholders via persuasion and influence, representing a hybrid internal-external role in a middle-ground form of corporate governance.
Research on hedge fund activism centers on how it impacts the target company, its shareholders, other stakeholders, and the capital market as a whole. Opponents of hedge fund activism argue that activists focus narrowly on short-term financial performance, and such “short-termism” may be detrimental to the long-run value of target companies. The empirical evidence, however, supports the conclusion that interventions by activist hedge funds lead to improvements in target firms, on average, in terms of both short-term metrics, such as stock value appreciation, and long-term performance, including productivity, innovation, and governance. Overall, the evidence from the full body of the literature generally supports the view that hedge fund activism constitutes an important venue of corporate governance that is both influence-based and market-driven, placing activist hedge funds in a unique position to reduce the agency costs associated with the separation of ownership and control.
Article
Christian A.L. Hilber and Olivier Schöni
Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities throughout the world. The main underlying cause for the “affordability crisis,” which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of strong and growing demand for housing in desirable areas in conjunction with tight long-term supply constraints—both physical and man-made regulatory ones. The affordability crisis tends to predominately affect low- and moderate-income households. Increasingly, however, middle-income households—which do not usually qualify for government support—are similarly affected. Policies that aim to tackle the housing affordability issue are numerous and differ enormously across countries. Key policies include mortgage subsidies, government equity loans, rent control, social or public housing, housing vouchers, low-income tax credits, and inclusionary zoning, among others. The overarching aim of these policies is to (a) reduce the periodic housing costs of or (b) improve access to a certain tenure mode for qualifying households. Existing evidence reveals that the effectiveness and the distributional and social welfare effects of housing policies depend not only on policy design but also on local market conditions, institutional settings, indirect (dis)incentives, and general equilibrium adjustments. Although many mainstream housing policies are ineffective, cost-inefficient, and/or have undesirable distributional effects from an equity standpoint, they tend to be politically popular. This is partly because targeted households poorly understand adverse indirect effects, which is exploited by vote-seeking politicians. Partly, it is because often the true beneficiaries of the policies are the politically powerful existing property owners (homeowners and landlords), who are not targeted but nevertheless benefit from positive policy-induced house price and rent capitalization effects. The facts that existing homeowners often have a voter majority and landlords additionally may be able to influence the political process via lobbying lead to the conundrum of ineffective yet politically popular housing policies. In addition to targeted policies for individuals most in need (e.g., via housing vouchers or by providing subsidized housing), the most effective policies to improve housing affordability in superstar cities for all income groups might be those that focus on the root causes of the problem. These are (a) the strongly and unequally growing demand for housing in desirable markets and (b) tight land use restrictions imposed by a majority of existing property owners that limit total supply of housing in these markets. Designing policies that tackle the root causes of the affordability crisis and help those in need, yet are palatable to a voter majority, is a major challenge for benevolent policymakers.
