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CONTEMPORARY TOPICS IN FINANCE: A COLLECTION OF LITERATURE SURVEYS

Iris Claus

University of Waikato

Leo Krippner

Reserve Bank of New Zealand

"For there was once a time when no such thing as money existed .. But it did not always and so easily happen that when you had something which I wanted, I for my part, had something that you were willing to accept. So a material was selected which, being given a stable value by the state, avoided the problems of barter by providing a constant medium of exchange."

Julius Paulus Prudentissimus, about 230 A.D. (translation by A. Watson, 1985)

Finance has always played a critical role in economies, given it is at the heart of consumption, saving, and investment decisions by individuals, firms, and governments. As a practical and professional field, finance facilitates the efficient exchange of funds within economies between lenders, investors, and borrowers. Therefore, it is understandable that finance is continually evolving in practice.

However, it is important that the practical evolution of finance is complemented by active academic and policy related research. As a simple historical example, money, which lies at the core of finance and economics, has existed in practice for thousands of years, as has the temptation for its exploitation by authorities. The introductory quote is actually part of an academic argument on the key properties of money (an efficient medium of exchange, a secure store of value, and a stable unit of account) that successfully convinced Gordian III at the time against debasing the currency of Rome.

Following the theme of best practice being complemented by best research, this book comprises a collection of up-to-date reviews on eleven contemporary topics in finance. We have broadly grouped these into the three categories discussed in the following paragraph.

Developments in finance practice, research, policy, and regulation can be triggered by many catalysts. One such catalyst is exceptional financial and economic events that can lead policy makers, researchers, and society in general to question and revisit the parameters and limits under which the finance industry operates. A broader avenue, for research in particular, is the passage of time, which allows previously new forms of financing to be bedded in, while new empirical methods and data become available for quantitative analysis. A third catalyst is technological innovations, which can alter the efficiency of existing financial transactions and flows of funding, or create new ones.

The most exceptional financial and economic event in recent history is, of course, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the associated Great Recession. The first three articles in this book relate to those events. They review the literature on the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy, the costs of implicit bank debt guarantees, and drivers of financial fraud. Estimation of inflation risk premia, advances in finance and productivity, and less traditional forms of finance including business angels, venture capital, microfinance, and relationship lending are reviewed in the next six articles. The last two reviews are on new topics in finance that have arisen from technological advances; crowdfunding and innovation and an introduction to crypto-currencies.

The immediate challenges of the GFC and Great Recession were to stabilize financial markets and the economy, and ultimately setting them on a course for an eventual recovery. Hence, in "A survey of the international evidence and lessons learned about unconventional monetary policies: Is a 'new normal' in our future?" Pierre Siklos, Domenico Lombardi, and Samantha St. Amand discuss the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy (UMP) and implications for the future. UMP is defined as any policy action, other than the conventional setting of short-term interest rates undertaken prior to the GFC of 2007/08 that influences economic activity and/or moderates shocks to the financial system to achieve a stated monetary policy objective. UMP therefore includes the well-known quantitative easing (QE) actions, where central banks change the size and/or composition of their balance sheet, forward guidance policies, where central banks change market expectations of interest rates by sending signals about the future policy path, and inflation target announcements that can change expected inflation and hence real interest rates.

The authors find considerable evidence that UMP can be powerful in offsetting the negative economic effects of a financial crisis. In that context, the evidence suggests that a successful monetary policy response should be forceful, that a joint response from both the fiscal and monetary authorities is desirable, and that the policy response should be persistent until confidence and the conditions for full recovery are in place. From these perspectives, the authors provide a retrospective on the case of UMP in Japan, given that it so far shows few signs of producing the aimed-for economic outcomes despite long and varied attempts. They also raise related questions for the euro area, given that the specific structure of its financial system and macroeconomic policy making processes may limit the desired co-ordinated response.

Regarding the aftermath of a financial crisis, the authors interpret the evidence as showing that UMP is not necessarily sufficient or capable of promoting stronger long-term economic growth on its own. Consistent with this, central banks have been reluctant to claim that they can restore growth to pre-crisis conditions without supporting fiscal and structural policies also being enacted.

The GFC was also a catalyst for revisiting the topic, and policy framework, around implicit government guarantees for banks, given that the banking system and many individual banks received unprecedented government support at the time, although the topic also has plenty of pre-GFC history. "Limiting implicit bank debt guarantees" by Sebastian Schich reviews the literature, noting that implicit government guarantees exist for banks essentially due to the expectation by market participants that public authorities might bailout the creditors of banks that are considered to be "too big to fail" (TBTF). The policy response to the GFC might have further entrenched that perception.

While implicit bank debt guarantees might benefit some stakeholders in the short term, they create economic costs as well as additional risks. In particular, they tend to weaken market discipline, encourage bank leverage and risk-taking, and distort competition between banks and non-banks, between small and large banks, and between banking sectors from different countries. They also create contingent liabilities for the sovereign and the taxpayer.

Policy measures to limit the value of implicit guarantees, and hence their costs, differ from country to country. One overarching goal is to strengthen bank balance sheets, thus making guarantees less valuable. Another avenue is to make bank failure resolution smoother and more effective, thus reducing the perception that implicit guarantees exist. Explicitly charging a user fee, as a disincentive for banks to "use" such guarantees, is considered less attractive, given the difficulty of making appropriate valuations and also potentially reinforcing the perception that guarantees exist. The approach of identifying some banks as globally systemically important and subjecting them to a special and more intrusive regulatory treatment may be seen as an indirect charge for the "use" of implicit guarantees. However, Schich finds little evidence that this specific approach has been successful so far.

Schich summarizes the measures of implicit guarantees which, while inherently difficult to value, can be used to assess progress regarding limiting TBTF. There is evidence that the values of implicit bank debt guarantees for banks have declined from their peaks attained during the GFC, but it is not clear whether the values have fallen below those prevailing before the crisis.

Open questions that remain are how much further should the value of implicit bank debt guarantees be reduced? And at what point can their level be considered low enough so that the costs of further efforts to reduce them would outweigh the benefits of doing so?

Another topic that has been given a new lease of life in the onset and the wake of the GFC is financial fraud, given the role of the subprime mortgage markets in that event, although the topic has had a long and colourful pedigree prior to the GFC. In "Financial fraud: A literature review", Arjan Reurink surveys the empirical literature on financial fraud from three perspectives. The first is financial statement fraud, which involves false statements about investment entities, the second is financial scams, which are deceptive and fully fraudulent schemes, and the third is fraudulent mis-selling practices, where the product or service is knowingly unsuitable for clients' needs.

Reurink finds that financial fraud is widespread throughout the financial industry, including the frequent involvement of established financial institutions, and is not simply attributable to a few "bad apples". Indeed, the literature review highlights four recent developments that scholars think have facilitated the occurrence of financial fraud. First, financial deregulation has resulted in new conflicts of interest and perverse incentive...