Contributions published at Banking (Jean-Charles Rochet)

The theory of acceptance sets and their associated risk measures plays a key role in the design of capital adequacy tests. The objective of this paper is to investigate the class of surplus-invariant acceptance sets. We argue that surplus invariance is a reasonable requirement from a regulatory perspective, since the corresponding capital adequacy tests do not depend on the surplus of a financial institution, which benefits exclusively its shareholders, but only on the default profile, which affects its liability holders. We provide a detailed analysis of surplus-invariant acceptance sets and their associated risk measures and we discuss the link with loss-based and excess-invariant risk measures, recently studied by Cont et al. (2013) and by Staum (2013), respectively.

We develop a measure of maximum sustainable government debt for advanced economies. How much investors are willing to lend to a country's government depends on how high a primary surplus they expect that government to generate, how fast they expect the country to grow, how volatile they expect that growth to be, and how much debt they expect the government will be able to raise in the future for the purpose of servicing the debt it seeks to raise today. This last observation points to the presence of a borrowing multiplier, which raises a country's borrowing well above what it would be, absent the ability to service maturing debt out of new debt's proceeds. Present debt is sustainable when implied future debt remains bounded. A country's probability of default displays a marked asymmetry around that country's maximum sustainable debt (MSD): it increases slowly below and rapidly above. We calibrate our measure for 23 OECD countries: Korea has the highest MSD at 281% of GDP and Greece the lowest at 89%. The probabilities of default at MSD are very low, from Norway's 0.27% to Korea's 0.81%. Most countries' actual debt-to-GDP ratios in 2010 are below MSD; some countries are above; these are generally the countries that have received some form of financial support in the wake of the financial crisis.

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This article examines how firms facing volatile input prices and holding some degree of market power in their product market link their risk management and their production or pricing strategies. This issue is relevant in many industries ranging from manufacturing to energy retailing, where firms rendered "risk averse" by financial frictions decide on and commit to their hedging strategies before their product market strategies. We find that commitment to hedging modifies the pricing and production strategies of firms. This strategic effect is channelled through the risk-adjusted expected cost, i.e., the expected marginal cost under the probability measure induced by shareholders’ "risk aversion". It has opposite effects depending on the nature of product market competition: commitment to hedging toughens quantity competition while it softens price competition. Finally, not commiting to the hedging position can never be an equilibrium outcome: committing is always a best response to non committing. In the Hotelling model, committing is a dominant strategy for all firms.

A general method to construct recombinant tree approximations for stochastic volatility models is developed and applied to the Heston model for stock price dynamics. In this application, the resulting approximation is a four tuple Markov process. The first two components are related to the stock and volatility processes and take values in a two-dimensional binomial tree. The other two components of the Markov process are the increments of random walks with simple values in {−1,+1}. The resulting efficient option pricing equations are numerically implemented for general American and European options including the standard put and calls, barrier, lookback and Asian-type pay-offs. The weak and extended weak convergences are also proved.

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This paper shows how to design incentive-based capital requirements that would prevent the bank from manufacturing tail risk. In the model, the senior bank manager may have incentives to engage in tail risk. Bank shareholders can prevent the manager from taking on tail risk via the optimal incentive compensation contract. To induce shareholders to implement this contract, capital requirements should internalize its costs. Moreover, bank shareholders must be given the incentives to comply with minimum capital requirements by raising new equity and expanding bank assets. Making bank shareholders bear the costs of compliance with capital regulation turns out to be crucial for motivating them to care about risk-management quality in their bank.

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Several recent papers have studied the impact of macroeconomic shocks on the financial policies of firms. However, they only consider the case where these macroeconomic shocks affect the profitability of firms but not the financial markets conditions. We study the polar case where the profitability of firms is stationary, but interest rates and issuance costs are governed by an exogenous Markov chain. We characterize the optimal dividend policy and show that these two macroeconomic factors have opposing effects: all things being equal, firms distribute more dividends when interest rates are high and less when issuing costs are high.

In a model where banks play an active role in monitoring borrowers, we analyze the impact of securitization on bankers’ incentives across different macroeconomic scenarios. We show that securitization can be part of the optimal financing scheme for banks, provided banks retain an equity tranche in the sold loans to maintain proper incentives. In economic downturns however securitization should be restricted. The implementation of the optimal solvency scheme is achieved by setting appropriate capital charges through a form of capital insurance, protecting the value of bank capital in downturns, while providing additional liquidity in upturns.

In this paper we study risk and liquidity management decisions within an insurance firm. Risk management corresponds to decisions regarding proportional reinsurance, whereas liquidity management has two components: distribution of dividends and costly equity issuance. Contingent on whether proportional or fixed costs of reinvestment are considered, singular stochastic control or stochastic impulse control techniques are used to seek strategies that maximize the firm value. We find that, in a proportional-costs setting, the optimal strategies are always mixed in terms of risk management and refinancing. In contrast, when fixed issuance costs are too high relative to the firm’s profitability, optimal management does not involve refinancing. We provide analytical specifications of the optimal strategies, as well as a qualitative analysis of the interaction between refinancing and risk management.

We present an overview of corporate-finance models where firms are subject to exogenous market frictions. These models, albeit quite simple, yield reasonable predictions regarding financing, pay-outs and default, as well as asset-pricing implications. The price to pay for the said simplicity is the need to use non-standard mathematical techniques, namely Singular and Impulse Stochastic Control. We explore the cases where a firm with fixed expected profitability has access to costly equity issuance as a refinancing possibility, and that where issuance is infinitely costly. We also present a model of bank leverage.

The theory of acceptance sets and their associated risk measures plays a key role in the design of capital adequacy tests. The objective of this paper is to investigate, in the context of bounded financial positions, the class of surplus-invariant acceptance sets. These are characterized by the fact that acceptability does not depend on the positive part, or surplus, of a capital position. We argue that surplus invariance is a reasonable requirement from a regulatory perspective, because it focuses on the interests of liability holders of a financial institution. We provide a dual characterization of surplus-invariant, convex acceptance sets, and show that the combination of surplus invariance and coherence leads to a narrow range of capital adequacy tests, essentially limited to scenario-based tests. Finally, we emphasize the advantages of dealing with surplus-invariant acceptance sets as the primary object rather than directly with risk measures, such as loss-based and excess-invariant risk measures, which have been recently studied by Cont, Deguest & He and by Staum, respectively.

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Recently much attention has been given in the literature to the problem of asset mispricing. In a market where investors are rational and there are no barriers to arbitrage, a basic principle of financial theory should hold: identical assets should have identical prices. The pair of Heineken and Heineken Holding stocks is an appealing example of the systematic violation of this principle. The two stocks have identical underlying cash flows, but one is always traded at a discount with respect to the other. In this work I try to explain the observed phenomena from the perspective of style investing. In an economy where agents allocate their capital among broader categories, also called styles, assets which are part of the same style tend to comove more than can be explained by fundamental risk factors, and assets which are part of different styles tend to commove less. Based on the main differences between Heineken and Heineken Holding stocks, I consider three investment categories: stocks which are part of the AEX index, stocks with an ADR program and stocks which are traded on the US markets. The Heineken stock is a part of all three styles, while the .Heineken Holding stock is a part of none of them. Using the model presented in Barberis and Shleifer (2003) I study the price difference between the two stocks as a premium resulting from the market activity of style-investors. I analyze the comovement of this premium with three investment styles and uncover that the presence of an ADR program for the Heineken stock has the greatest impact on the price divergence of the two stocks. Furthermore I find that the model including all three investment styles explains up to 75% of the existing price difference between Heineken and Heineken Holding stock.

In this paper technology adoption behaviour under (regulatory) no-anticipation of new technology, and imperfect competition in a tradable permits scheme (rents market) is investigated. The inter-dependence between the incentive to adopt a new technology and the allowance price is explicitly modelled. A firm's longterm incentives to adopt a new technology depend on the future value of tradable permits (scarcity rents) and, ultimately, on the level of uncovered pollution emissions (permits demand) and the level of offered emission permits (permits supply)-both affected by the current technological status. In an imperfectly competitive permit market, the aggregate supply is the solution of a non-cooperative game that possesses a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. It is shown that this condition is also satisfied when a price-support instrument, which is contingent on the adoption of the new technology, is introduced. This is done to foster the firms' long-term incentives to adopt new technologies. The impact of the price-support contract on the scarcity rent value and on the technology adoption behaviour is both theoretically and numerically examined: (i) it creates a floating price floor that can be interpreted as a minimum price guarantee; (ii) the higher the minimum price guarantee, the higher the aggregate level of adoption and the earlier the adoption of new technologies.