Interest Rates and Inflation: What’s Next for the Federal Reserve?
Professor Pierre Yared describes why the U.S. economy is unlikely to see an economic downturn comparable with the 1970s.
Professor Pierre Yared describes why the U.S. economy is unlikely to see an economic downturn comparable with the 1970s.
Tano Santos, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance and Director of Columbia Business School’s Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing, discusses the school’s approach to value investing and finance.
This paper studies systemic risk in the interbank market. We first establish that in the German interbank lending market, a few large banks intermediate funding flows between many smaller periphery banks. We then develop a network model in which banks trade off the costs and benefits of link formation to explain these patterns. The model is structurally estimated using banks' preferences as revealed by the observed network structure before the 2008 financial crisis.
We demonstrate a novel link between relationship-specific investments and risk in a setting where division managers operate under moral hazard and collaborate on joint projects. Specific investments increase efficiency at the margin. This expands the scale of operations and thereby adds to the compensation risk borne by the managers. Accounting for this investment/risk link overturns key findings from prior incomplete contracting studies.
Bank bond portfolios remained deeply underwater in the fourth quarter of 2022, reducing banks' access to liquidity in the first quarter when deposits became far more precious.
Todd Baker is a financial services executive whose career has led him from corporate law to C-suite strategic business leadership roles at several of the largest domestic and international banks and roles as an academic, consultant, writer, speaker and commentator on banking, financial technology, consumer financial access and regulation issues.
Brett House is Professor of Professional Practice in the Economics Division at Columbia Business School. His research and writing are focused on macroeconomics and international finance, with interests in fiscal issues, monetary policy, international trade, financial crises, and debt markets. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and international media.
Yiming Ma is an Associate Professor in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School. She received her Ph.D. in Finance from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2018 and a B.A. in Economics & Mathematical and Global Affairs from Yale University in 2013.
Professor Tetlock's research interests include behavioral finance, asset pricing, and prediction markets. One area of his research examines how firms' stock market prices respond to the content of news stories. His 2007 Journal of Finance study on the impact of negative words, such as "flaw" and "ruin," won the Smith-Breeden Prize for the best article in asset pricing. His research has been featured in popular press outlets such as Business Week, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Professor Bruce C. N. Greenwald is the Robert Heilbrunn Professor Emeritus of Finance and Asset Management at Columbia Business School and the academic Director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing. Described by the New York Times as "a guru to Wall Street's gurus," Greenwald is an authority on value investing with additional expertise in productivity and the economics of information.
Harry Mamaysky is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School, where he serves as the Director of the Program for Financial Studies. He is also on the Steering Committee of the Columbia-IBM Center for Blockchain and Technology. Harry teaches capital markets and asset pricing to MBA, Masters and PhD students, as well as Executive Education courses on the use of text data in finance, and on corporate bonds. He has consulted for a quantitative investment firm and for a nationally recognized statistical rating organization.
Professor Nissim earned his PhD in Accounting at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined Columbia Business School in 1997. He was granted tenure in 2005, and full professorship in 2007. He served as the Chair of the Accounting Division during the years 2006–2009 and 2014–2016.
Michael Giliberto retired in 2010 as a Managing Director at JPMorgan Asset Management, the global investment management business of JPMorgan Chase. Mr. Giliberto oversaw U.S. real estate portfolio management and global strategy and research within the Global Real Assets Group.
Karl Mergenthaler, CFA is an Executive Director in the J.P. Morgan Investment Analytics & Consulting Group. His principal responsibility is to provide analytical and consulting services to pension funds and other institutional investors. Karl has more than 14 years of experience in the financial services industry. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan in 2007, Karl was an equity analyst and portfolio manager at Avatar Associates, where he was actively involved in the management of portfolios of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).
Jesse Schreger is an associate professor of macroeconomics in the Economics Division at Columbia Business School. His research is primarily on international finance and macroeconomics, focusing on sovereign debt and exchange rates. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of International Economics.
Matthew Dell Orfano is a Senior member at Discovery Capital, focusing globally on multiple sectors, thematic trade construction, and special situations, in addition to managing their data efforts. He is responsible for individual positions and the internal thematically driven portfolio, which assimilates bottoms-up analysis and macro thematic from over 55 countries into actionable insights.
In this paper, I estimate the magnitude of an informational friction limiting credit reallocation to firms during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Because lenders rely on private information when deciding which relationship to end, borrowers looking for a new lender are adversely selected. I show how to separately identify private information from information common to all lenders but unobservable to the econometrician by using bank shocks within a discrete choice model of relationships.
We decompose long-term nominal bond yields into real and inflation components in an international context using inflation-linked and nominal bonds. In contrast to extant results, real rate variation dominates the variation in inflation-linked and nominal yields. Cross-country nominal and inflation-linked yield correlations have declined since the Great Recession. Real rates are the main source of the correlation between nominal yields. Our results are robust to various alternative measurements of inflation expectations and the liquidity premium.
We use discounted cash flow analysis to measure the projected fiscal capacity of the U.S. federal government. We apply our valuation method to the CBO’s projections for the U.S. federal government’s primary deficits between 2022 and 2052 and projected debt outstanding in 2052. The discount rate for projected cash flows and future debt must include a GDP or market risk premium in recognition of the risk associated with future surpluses. Despite current low interest rates, we find that U.S. fiscal capacity is more limited than commonly thought.
We study the competitive provision and endogenous acquisition of political information. Our main result identifies a natural equilibrium channel through which a more competitive market decreases the efficiency of policy outcomes. A critical insight we put forward is that competition among information providers leads to informational specialization: firms provide relatively less information on issues that are of common interest and relatively more information on issues on which agents’ preferences are heterogeneous.
Information provision in games influences behavior by affecting agents' beliefs about the state, as well as their higher-order beliefs. We first characterize the extent to which a designer can manipulate agents' beliefs by disclosing information. We then describe the structure of optimal belief distributions, including a concave-envelope representation that subsumes the single-agent result of Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011). This result holds under various solution concepts and outcome selection rules.
We consider a portfolio selection problem for an investor who consumes at the end of a finite horizon. With important qualifications on the sufficiency part, we show that convergence of the optimal investment policy as the horizon becomes distant occurs if and only if the corresponding Arrow-Pratt coefficient of relative risk aversion converges as wealth increases. A major step in the proof shows that convergence of the Arrow-Pratt coefficient of relative risk aversion is equivalent to regular variation of the marginal utility function.