Three Essays On Asset Prices Credit Risk And Monetary Policy PDF Download

This dissertation analyzes the determinants of asset prices and the effect of monetary policy on not only asset prices, but also on other macroeconomic outcomes such as asset market trade volume and welfare in an environment with search frictions. The analysis in such an environment helps to examine an important component of determining asset prices: liquidity, which is assets' ability to facilitate transactions. Hence, the dissertation particularly examines the effect of monetary policy on asset prices that the traditional asset pricing models without search frictions may be missing, and also explain some phenomena which are often considered abnormal in macroeconomics and international macroeconomics such as negative nominal yields and the Uncovered Interest Parity puzzle. The dissertation consists of three stand-alone papers and I provide their abstracts as follows. The first chapter is "Money, Asset Prices and the Liquidity Premium". This paper examines the effect of monetary policy on the market value of the liquidity services that financial assets provide, known as the liquidity premium. Money supply and nominal interest rates have positive effects on the liquidity premium, but asset supply has a negative effect. This implies that liquid financial assets aresubstantive substitutes for money, and that the opportunity cost of holding money plays a key role in explaining variation in the liquidity premium and thus in asset prices. The higher cost of holding money due to higher money growth rates leads to a higher liquidity premium. My empirical analysis with U.S. Treasury data over the period from 1946 and 2008 confirms the theoretical predictions. The theory also suggests that the liquidity properties of assets can cause negative nominal yields when the cost of holding money is low and liquid assets are scarce. I present empirical findings in the U.S. and Switzerland to support this prediction. The second chapter is a joint paper with Kuk Mo Jung, titled "A Liquidity-Based Resolution of the Uncovered Interest Parity Puzzle". In this paper, a new monetary theory is set out to resolve the "Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP)" Puzzle. It explores the possibility that liquidity properties of money and nominal bonds can account for the puzzle. A key concept in our model is that nominal bondscarry liquidity premia due to their medium of exchange role as either collateral or a means of payment. In this framework, no-arbitrage ensures a positive comovement of real return on money and nominal bonds. Thus, when inflation in one country becomes relatively lower, i.e., real return on this currency is relatively higher, its nominal bonds should also yield higher real return. We show that their nominal returns can also become higher under the economic environment where collateral pledgeability and/or liquidity of nominal bonds and/or collateralized credit based transactions are relatively bigger. Since a currency with lower inflation is expected to appreciate, the high interest currency does indeed appreciate in this case, i.e., the UIP puzzle is no longer an anomaly in our model. Our liquidity based theory can in fact help understanding many empirical observations that risk based explanations find difficult to reconcile with. The third chapter is joint work with Athanasios Geromichalos, Jiwon Lee, and Keita Oikawa, titled "Over-the-Counter Trade and the Value of Assets as Collateral" and was published in Economic Theory in 2016. We study asset pricing within a general equilibrium model where unsecured credit is ruled out, and a real asset helps agents carry out mutually benecial transactions by serving as collateral. A unique feature of our model is that the agent who provides the loan might have a low valuation for the collateral asset. Nevertheless, the lender rationally chooses to accept the collateral because she can access a secondary asset market where she can sell the asset. Following a recent strand of the finance literature, based on the influential work of Duffie, Garleanu, and Pedersen (2005), we model this secondary asset market as an over-the-counter market characterized by search and bargaining frictions. We study how the asset's property to serve as collateral affects its equilibrium price, and how the asset price and the economy's welfare are affected by the degree of liquidity in the secondary asset market.