Money supply | EPFL Graph Search

In macroeconomics, the money supply (or money stock) refers to the total volume of currency held by the public at a particular point in time. There are several ways to define "money", but standard measures usually include currency in circulation (i.e. physical cash) and demand deposits (depositors' easily accessed assets on the books of financial institutions). The central bank of a country may use a definition of what constitutes legal tender for its purposes. Money supply data is recorded and published, usually by a government agency or the central bank of the country. Public and private sector analysts monitor changes in the money supply because of the belief that such changes affect the price levels of securities, inflation, the exchange rates, and the business cycle. The relationship between money and prices has historically been associated with the quantity theory of money. There is some empirical evidence of a direct relationship between the growth of the money supply and

Credit Supply and the Macroeconomy

Abhik Mukherjee

The policy response to the recent financial crisis has broadly focused on two themes: 1) Increasing the banking sectorsâ resilience to future financial shocks: 2) Improving credit availability to households and firms via lowering both short and long-term interest rates and thereby affecting short-term output and inflation. This dissertation studies how banks and firms have responded to these policy measures. The dissertation comprises of three chapters. The first two analyze the impact of capital regulation on bank lending for two different jurisdictions - United States and Switzerland. The third evaluates the response of U.S. non-financial firms to lower interest rates. The first chapter is joint work with Luisa Lambertini. We estimate the impact of bank capital regulation on lending spreads. We use U.S. firm-level data on syndicated loans matched with Bank Holding Company (BHC) data for the lending banks in our panel regressions. We find that higher bank capital leads to an increase in the loan pricing. Further, we investigate if stress test failure under the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program and Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review leads to higher loan spreads, since financial institutions that failed were required to raise capital in the short run. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we find: 1) BHCs that failed the stress tests increased their loan pricing; 2) Loan pricing is higher for all banks after the commencement of the stress tests. These findings suggest that greater regulatory oversight and higher capital requirements have made syndicated loans more costly for firms. The second chapter is joint work with Luisa Lambertini, Dan Wunderli and Robert Bichsel. We use confidential loan-by-loan data of Swiss banks to study the impact of higher capital requirements on lending. Our data allows us to trace the link between bank capital and new credit granted at the bank level. Additionally bank-specific variation of capital targets allows us to analyze how deviation from the regulatory capital target impacts loan pricing and volume. We find that tighter capital regulation has small but statistically significant short-term effects on loan pricing and growth. We do not find a permanent effect of higher capital ratios on loan growth. In the third chapter, I study the behavior of U.S. non-financial corporates after the recent financial crisis. I document an increase in the real debt holdings and correspondingly the book leverage for these firms. Controlling for firm and time fixed-effects, I find a higher long-term debt to asset ratio to be associated with lower capital expenditures and growth in fixed capital post-crisis. This is also true for financially unconstrained firms, as determined by the Whited-Wu index, vis-a-vis pre-crisis. Moreover, firms with a higher share of long-term debt after the crisis appear to have a greater likelihood of repurchasing shares and larger dollar payouts to equity holders. The evidence points to the fact that any increase in long-term debt has had an impact on firms' capital structure but no positive effect on real investment.

EPFL2016

Energy arbitrage with thermostatically controlled loads

We investigate the potential for aggregations of residential thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs), such as air conditioners, to arbitrage intraday wholesale electricity market prices via non-disruptive direct load control. Since wholesale electricity prices reflect power system conditions, arbitrage provides a service to the grid, helping to balance real-time supply and demand. While previous work on the energy arbitrage problem has used simple energy storage models, we use high fidelity TCL-specific models which allow us to understand and quantify the full capabilities and constraints of these time-varying systems. We explore two optimization/control frameworks for solving the arbitrage problem, both based on receding horizon linear programming. Since we find that the first approach requires significant computation, we develop a second approach involving decomposition of the optimal control problem into separate optimization and control problems. Simulation results show that TCLs could save on the order of 10% of wholesale energy costs via arbitrage, with savings decreasing with price forecast error. © 2013 EUCA.

2013

Credit Supply and Corporate Policies

Erwan Morellec

This paper develops a model of corporate investment and financing decisions that differs from previous contributions by recognizing that firms may face uncertainty regarding their future access to credit markets. We show that accounting for credit supply uncertainty is critical in understanding corporate policy choices and use the model to explain a key set of stylized facts in corporate finance. Notably, our model provides an explanation for the conservative debt policy puzzle. The model also explains why firms may appear to time the market when issuing common stock. Finally, the model explains why negative shocks to the supply of credit may hamper investment even if firms have enough financial slack to fund all profitable investment opportunities internally.

Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series2010

Credit Supply and the Macroeconomy

Abhik Mukherjee

EPFL2016