Asset Fire Sales Research Articles

Bank Specialization and Zombie Lending

We study whether banks internalize congestion externalities when lending to zombie firms. We conjecture that banks should be better informed about the presence of zombie firms and the congestion externalities that such firms exert on healthy borrowers in industries where banks are specialized and show that banks’ credit supply to zombie firms relates negatively to their industry specialization. This relation is stronger when congestion externalities are likely to have stronger adverse effects, namely when zombie firms take a higher fraction of resources in the industry or when the industry is geographically more concentrated. Additionally, this relation is weaker in industries with higher asset specificity as zombie firms’ default (and potential asset fire sales) could reduce healthy borrowers’ collateral value. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.01437 .

Regulating cash holdings: Assessing lost returns in mutual funds✰

Mutual funds have traditionally attracted retail investors seeking diversified market exposure. While the focus has historically been on asset liquidity and quality, recent attention has turned to assessing fund liquidity and the risks of asset fire sales. Our study analyzes Israeli mutual funds’ daily holdings and flows over an extensive eight-year period, revealing a significant issue: fund managers tend to maintain excessive cash levels, burdening the industry by more than 2 % of assets under management (AUM). These findings highlight the urgency of implementing advanced liquidity management tools to navigate redemption risks effectively. Moreover, our research stresses the need for flexible, market-oriented regulations and enhanced industry transparency. By establishing liquidity risk management guidelines, regulators can optimize investor returns and mitigate potential systemic risks associated with cash allocations in mutual funds.

Inequality and Asset Fire Sales

It is widely acknowledged that fire sales were a critical factor in inducing and exacerbating the financial crises of 2007--2008. The leverage of financial intermediaries, which is defined as the ratio of total assets to capital, is a key factor in causing fire sales. Why do financial intermediaries expand their balance sheets despite subsequently having to sell their assets at discounted prices? To examine this question, we incorporate financial intermediaries into a three-period incomplete market economy model, in which households face countercyclical and uninsured idiosyncratic income shocks. We demonstrate that countercyclical income inequality and market incompleteness result in leveraged investment and subsequent asset fire sales by financial intermediaries in equilibrium. The first contribution of this paper is that we demonstrate that the mechanism between asset prices and leverages could successfully solve the famed asset-pricing puzzles. The second contribution is that we analyze the impact of financial regulation on the welfare of ex ante homogeneous households.

Investor bias, risk and price volatility

PurposeThis study proposes a framework based on salience theory and shows that focusing on one type of risk (idiosyncratic or systemic) can explain overpricing of securities ex ante, and resales at low prices during crisis periods.Design/methodology/approachThe author consider an overlapping generations (OLG) model where each generation lives for two periods and there is no population growth. Agents (investors) start their lives with an endowment W > 0 and have mean-variance utility. They invest their endowment when young and consume when old. Each period, the young investors optimally choose their portfolio from different risky assets acquired from the old generation, all assumed to be in fixed supply.FindingsThe author show that investor salience bias can explain excess volatility of asset prices and the resulting fire-sales in periods of financial turmoil. A change in salience – from one component (idiosyncratic) to the other (systemic) – will generate excess volatility. Interestingly, higher risk aversion generally exacerbates the excess volatility of prices. Moreover, the model predicts that if a big systemic shock hits the financial system, due to salience bias the price of systemic assets falls sharply. This relates to the observed fire-sales of assets during the global financial crisis.Practical implicationsThe proposed model and results suggest that there may be a scope for intervention in financial markets during turbulences. In terms of ex ante policies the study suggests that investors and regulator should use better risk assessment technologies.Originality/valueThis is the first study constructing a tractable model based on the argument that investor salience may exacerbate the excess volatility of prices during financial downturns. The author relate salience to two types of risk; idiosyncratic and systemic and assume that investors' risk perception is biased towards the type of risk that is currently salient based on prior beliefs or past data. The author show that the diversification fallacy of the precrisis period, where seemingly safe assets were overpriced, can be explained by agents overweighing idiosyncratic risk and ignoring systemic risk.

System‐Wide Runs and Financial Collapse

AbstractThis paper presents a model in which small shocks to asset values can trigger system‐wide runs. When lenders cannot distinguish which financial institutions have suffered losses after an adverse shock to asset values, healthier institutions can differentiate themselves from weaker firms by offering to borrow less at more favorable prices. However, to successfully separate, the healthy institutions must liquidate a fraction of their portfolio causing asset fire sales. Fire sales worsen the balance sheet integrity of the firms and, if too severe, this leads to a complete collapse of the financial system: a system‐wide run.

Uncertainty and the Shadow Banking Crisis: Estimates from a Dynamic Model

Shadow banks play an important role in the modern financial system and are arguably the source of key vulnerabilities that led to the 2007–2009 financial crisis. I develop a quantitative framework with uncertainty fluctuations and endogenous bank default to study the dynamics of shadow banking. I argue that the increase in asset return uncertainty during the crisis results in a spread spike, making it more costly for shadow banks to roll over their debt in the short-term debt market. As a result, these financial institutions are forced to deleverage, leading to a decrease in credit intermediation. The model is estimated using a bank-level data set of shadow banks in the United States. The parameter estimates imply that uncertainty shocks can explain 72% of asset contraction and 70% of deleveraging in the shadow banking sector. Maturity mismatch and asset fire-sales amplify the impact of the uncertainty shocks. First-moment shocks to bank asset return, financial shocks, or fire-sale cost shocks alone cannot reproduce the large interbank spread spike, dramatic deleveraging, or contraction in the U.S. shadow banking sector during the crisis. The model also allows for policy experiments. I analyze how unconventional monetary policies can help to counter the rise in the interbank spread, thus stabilizing the credit supply. Taking bank moral hazard into consideration, I find that government bailout might be counterproductive as it might result in more aggressive risk-taking among shadow banks, especially when bailout decisions are based on bank characteristics. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

From agent-based modeling to actor-based reactive systems in the analysis of financial networks

We present a new framework for the analysis of financial networks, called Actor-based Reactive Systems (ARS), that pushes further the Agent-Based approach (ABM) by resorting to ideas coming from the study of distributed systems in computer science. Two distinctive features, namely a fundamentally different management of time and a fully decentralized control logic, have a profound impact in terms of expressiveness of analysis, flexibility of modeling, and efficiency of experimentation. To illustrate the feasibility of the framework, we develop a realistic case study by analyzing the systemic risk of a model of the European banking network with a nontrivial contagion procedure, that combines an initial asset shock with the negative feedback loop triggered by asset fire sales. We show that, compared to ABMs, ARSs bring about finer-grained analyses, with a greater degree of heterogeneity and adaptivity of economic agents. Moreover, the very low computational cost and the detailed account of the system’s execution support the design and the development of very flexible stress tests to rapidly experiment with many hypothetical scenarios in a test-oriented style.

Bank Specialization and Zombie Lending

Bank specialization leads to expertise, including knowledge on zombie borrowers and the negative impact they exert on healthy borrowers. This induces specialized banks to reduce zombie lending. The reduction in zombie lending is larger when the scope and opportunity cost of negative spillovers to healthy borrowers is larger; namely, when the fraction of sectoral labor stuck in zombie firms is larger or when the sector is expected to grow faster. Additionally, specialized banks reduce zombie lending less in sectors with higher asset specificity, as zombie firms' default (and potential asset fire sales) could trigger reductions in healthy borrowers' collateral values.

Endogenous Asset Fire Sales and Bank Lending Incentives

This paper examines the impact of banks’ lending incentives on asset prices and bank cash holdings under liquidity risk. Banks make lending decisions based on the tradeoff between costs (fire sales of illiquid assets) and benefits (high returns from bank loans). This paper shows fire sales of assets can be an endogenous outcome, even if banks are endowed with enough cash to meet liquidity shocks. This paper also helps explain why banks have kept a large amount of cash without lending after government capital injections in the 2008 financial crisis. The model further provides policy implications for government intervention.

Fire-Sale Vulnerabilities of Banks: Bank-Specific Risks under Stress and Credit Drawdowns

One channel of shock propagation in the financial system is fire-sale-driven spillover that can take place through asset fire sales and the resulting effect of depressed asset prices on the value of firms' assets. Heightened leverage then induces firms to de-lever, triggering another round of asset fire sales.

Fire Sales, the LOLR and Bank Runs With Continuous Asset Liquidity

Bank's asset fire sales and recourse to central bank credit are modelled with continuous asset liquidity, allowing to derive the liability structure of a bank. Both asset sales liquidity and the central bank collateral framework are modeled as power functions within the unit interval. Funding stability is captured as a strategic bank run game in pure strategies between depositors. Fire sale liquidity and the central bank collateral framework determine jointly the ability of the banking system to deliver maturity transformation without endangering financial stability. The model also explains why banks tend to use the least liquid eligible collateral with the central bank and why a sudden non-anticipated reduction of asset liquidity, or a tightening of the collateral framework, can trigger a bank run. The model also shows that the collateral framework can be understood, beyond its aim to protect the central bank, as financial stability and non-conventional monetary policy instrument.

De-Leverage and illiquidity contagion

Abstract This paper investigates how variations in stock-level leverage lead to dynamic intraday trading behavior and illiquidity transmission across different stocks by utilizing a unique, precise, stock-level margin trading dataset. We document that leveraged investors’ need to meet margin call requirements and liquidity demands due to prior market drops results in subsequent selloffs in otherwise stable stocks, particularly in trading sessions in which there is little new information. This effect exists both within and across different industries and is stronger for stocks with less information asymmetry, better liquidity, higher past stock performance, and even during trading suspension. We also find strong evidence on the volatility spillover induced by leverage. Taken together, such findings suggest that our results are driven by illiquidity contagion instead of information spillover. Our study contributes to the research on asset fire sales, margin trading, and funding liquidity during the intraday deleveraging process in financial market turmoil.

Interfund Lending in Mutual Fund Families: Role in Liquidity Management

AbstractThe Investment Company Act of 1940 restricts interfund lending and borrowing within a mutual fund family, but families can apply for regulatory exemptions to participate in such transactions. We find that the monitoring mechanisms and investment restrictions influence the family’s decision to apply for the interfund lending programs. We document several benefits of such programs for equity funds. First, participating funds reduce cash holdings and increase investments in illiquid assets. Second, fund investors exhibit less run-like behavior. Third, it helps mitigate asset fire sales after extreme investor redemptions. Offsetting these benefits, money market funds in participating families experience investor outflows.Received May 26, 2018; editorial decision November 27, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Simulating Stress in the UK Corporate Bond Market: Investor Behaviour and Asset Fire-Sales

We build a framework to simulate stress dynamics in the UK corporate bond market. This quantifies how the behaviours and interactions of major market participants, including open-ended funds, dealers, and institutional investors, can amplify different types of shocks to corporate bond prices. We model market participants’ incentives to buy or sell corporate bonds in response to initial price falls, the constraints under which they operate (including those arising due to regulation), and how the resulting behaviour may amplify initial falls in price and impact market functioning. We find that the magnitude of amplification depends on the cause of the initial reduction in price and is larger in the case of shocks to credit risk or risk-free interest rates, than in the case of a perceived deterioration in corporate bond market liquidity. Amplification also depends on agents’ proximity to their regulatory constraints. We further find that long-term institutional investors (eg pension funds) only partially mitigate the amplification due to their slower-moving nature. Finally, we find that shocks to corporate bond spreads, similar in magnitude to the largest weekly moves observed in the past, could trigger asset sales that may test the capacity of dealers to absorb them.

Default cascades and systemic risk on different interbank network topologies

This paper examines the relationship between the topology of interbank networks and their ability to propagate localized, idiosyncratic shocks across the banking sector via banks’ interbank claims on one another. We begin by creating a wide variety of networks and heterogeneous balance sheet structures using a generative algorithm capable of replicating key characteristics of real-world interbank networks. On each network, we run a standard financial contagion model with cascading defaults. Our modeling framework differentiates between random and targeted shocks of varying magnitude. Interbank contagion comprises a direct channel via banks’ cross-exposures and an indirect channel due to liquidity effects and external asset fire sales. Last, we develop an empirical model to test which global features of the network, aggregate banking sector balance sheet and shock properties drive contagion dynamics. Our results show a strong stabilizing role played by system leverage across all specifications. Among the global network measures, average path length, network density and assortativity are shown to drive the number of failures in a manner consistent with their definition. Similarly, the centralities of the shocked banks (across all definitions) play a significant role in the default cascade. By contrast, allowing for liquidity effects diminishes the explanatory power of the network on both global and local scales. However, taking the change in asset price (primarily driven by liquidity effects) as the dependent variable reestablishes the link between the network structure and the extent of financial contagion.

Inefficient Fire-Sales in Decentralized Asset Markets

Classic models of fire-sales that emphasize liquidity-constrained natural buyers can-notfully account for the asset fire-sales during the Financial Crisis of 2008. I present a modelto demonstrate that fire-sales may happen even when there is a sizable pool of naturalbuyers and in the absence of asymmetric information, due to a coordina-tion failureamong buyers. In particular, I show that when trade is decentralized and participation isendogenous, constrained asset demand and liquidity needs that are ex-pected to increaseover time create complementarity among buyers' decisions to wait. This complementaritymakes competitive markets prone to coordination failures and fire-sales which may beinefficient. I also discuss various policy options to eliminate the risk of fire-sales in such asetup.

Real estate prices and systemic banking crises

The collapse of real estate prices has historically jeopardized banking stability and triggered systemic banking crises. This paper studies risk contagion in a banking system in real estate price shock by adopting complex network theory. Modelling the real estate-related asset as a common exposure of banks to the real estate market, we propose a model that incorporates two main risk contagion channels, i.e., the financial network and asset fire sales, and reveal how the real estate price shock is transmitted and propagated across banks. We demonstrate that banking stability is highly sensitive to the real estate price shock. Moreover, due to the particularly low liquidity of the real estate market, the asset fire-sales of real estate assets overwhelms the financial network, playing the dominant role in risk contagion. Our model can be adopted by regulators to conduct stress testing and to forge effective risk management strategies.

Uncertainty and the Shadow Banking Crisis: Estimates from a Dynamic Model

Shadow banks play an important role in the modern financial system and are arguably the source of key vulnerabilities that led to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. I develop a quantitative framework with uncertainty fluctuations and endogenous bank default to study the dynamics of shadow banking. I argue that the increase in asset return uncertainty during the crisis results in a spread spike, making it more costly for shadow banks to roll over their debt in the short-term debt market. As a result, these banks are forced to deleverage, leading to a decrease in credit intermediation. The model is estimated using a bank-level dataset of shadow banks in the United States. The parameter estimates imply that uncertainty shocks can explain 72% of asset contraction and 70% of deleveraging in the shadow banking sector. Maturity mismatch and asset fire-sales amplify the impact of the uncertainty shocks. First-moment shocks to bank asset return, financial shocks, or fire-sale cost shocks alone can not reproduce the large interbank spread spike, dramatic deleveraging or contraction in the U.S. shadow banking sector during the crisis. The model also allows for policy experiments. I analyze how unconventional monetary policies can help to counter the rise in the interbank spread, thus stabilizing the credit supply. Taking bank moral hazard into consideration, I find that government bailout might be counterproductive as it might result in more aggressive risk-taking among shadow banks, especially when bailout decisions are based on bank characteristics.

A Theory of Endogenous Asset Fire Sales, Bank Runs, and Contagion

A Theory of Endogenous Asset Fire Sales, Bank Runs, and Contagion

DOUBLE CASCADE MODEL OF FINANCIAL CRISES

The scope of financial systemic risk research encompasses a wide range of interbank channels and effects, including asset correlation shocks, default contagion, illiquidity contagion, and asset fire sales. This paper introduces a financial network model that combines the default and liquidity stress mechanisms into a “double cascade mapping”. The progress and eventual result of the crisis is obtained by iterating this mapping to its fixed point. Unlike simpler models, this model can therefore quantify how illiquidity or default of one bank influences the overall level of liquidity stress and default in the system. Large-network asymptotic cascade mapping formulas are derived that can be used for efficient network computations of the double cascade. Numerical experiments then demonstrate that these asymptotic formulas agree qualitatively with Monte Carlo results for large finite networks, and quantitatively except when the initial system is placed in an exceptional “knife-edge” configuration. The experiments clearly support the main conclusion that when banks respond to liquidity stress by hoarding liquidity, then in the absence of asset fire sales, the level of defaults in a financial network is negatively related to the strength of bank liquidity hoarding and the eventual level of stress in the network.