Financial services

Summary

Financial services are economic services provided by the finance industry, which together encompass a broad range of service sector firms that provide financial management, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance companies, accountancy companies, consumer-finance companies, stock brokerages, investment funds, individual asset managers, and some government-sponsored enterprises. History Global financial system#History of international financial architecture The term "financial services" became more prevalent in the United States partly as a result of the GrammLeachBliley Act of the late 1990s, which enabled different types of companies operating in the U.S. financial services industry at that time to merge. Companies usually have two distinct approaches to this new type of business. One approach would be a bank that simply buys an insurance company or an investment bank, keeps the original brands of the acquired firm, and adds the acquisition to

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_services

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Financial Stability and the Macroeconomy

Corinne Dubois

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 drew attention to the essential role of banks for the macroeconomy and to the importance of having a resilient financial sector. A vulnerability in the financial sector spills over to the real economy and can drive it into a deep recession. Following the financial crisis, policy makers have issued rules and regulations aimed at strengthening the banks. My dissertation considers some of those measures, namely bank liquidity regulation and deposit insurance, and tries to assess their effectiveness in stabilizing the financial sector and the economy in general. The first chapter (joint with Prof. Luisa Lambertini) develops a model with regulated banks and a hedge fund to analyze the behavior of wholesale funding and the macroeconomic consequences of liquidity regulation. Banks raise deposits and subordinated wholesale funding from the hedge fund. Wholesale funding amplifies shocks: it is curtailed in economic downturns to avoid leveraging up and risk-taking by banks, further depressing credit and economic activity. By making banks safer, liquidity regulation increases wholesale funding and bank loans at the steady state. However, flat liquidity regulation requiring banks to hold a constant fraction of liquid assets can have unintended consequences and increase macroeconomic volatility. Our model further shows that cyclically adjusted regulation stabilizes the response of the economy to shocks. We also provide empirical evidence suggesting that liquidity helps contain the contraction in wholesale funding and loans during times of funding stress. The second chapter explores the macroeconomic and welfare implications of harmonizing or joining deposit insurance in the Eurozone. I develop a two-country model to represent the core and periphery countries in the Eurozone. The model features fragile banks that can be subject to endogenous and costly runs. The two countries are financially integrated through an international interbank market. I introduce deposit insurance and compare different insurance regimes in steady state and along the business cycle. The model emphasizes that financial integration implies co-movement in asset prices and the transmission of shocks across the border. I find that when deposit insurance has lower coverage in the periphery than in the core, financial stability is undermined in both regions due to higher asset price volatility and a higher probability of deposit runs. Hence, either harmonizing or joining deposit insurance leads to substantial welfare benefits for both countries. In the third chapter, I develop a macroeconomic model with multiple equilibria and bank runs to analyze deposit insurance. A bank run is a sunspot equilibrium, and it is caused by a self-fulfilling panic of all depositors. The model features a unique no-run equilibrium when macroeconomic conditions are good, but an unexpected negative shock may open up the possibility of a run equilibrium. A bank run is a rare but costly event that drives the economy in a long and severe recession. I analyze the introduction and build-up of a deposit insurance fund and show that it reduces the cost and probability of bank runs. The dynamic simulation of the model reveals that deposit insurance diminishes macroeconomic and financial instability following a technological shock.

EPFL2018

I started my PhD studies in August 2014 with a strong desire to push my own limits without knowing precisely the areas I wanted to cover in detail. To me, it was clear that I was interested by many different fields, however, I was particularly concerned with behavioural finance and with the fact that simple actions could be followed by strong market reactions. It is in this context that my supervisor, Prof. Semyon Malamud, advised me to derive/measure the consequences of the large acceptance of the RiskMetrics variance model on the price of financial assets. Indeed, this method has the advantage of providing a simple formula to estimate the volatility of any financial asset, but above all, has been used significantly by practitioners in the financial industry. The question then arises, ``Is there a link between this method and the price of financial assets?'' In order to answer this question, I have designed a simple portfolio optimization model in which agents update volatility estimates with the RiskMetrics formula. Thanks to this simple idea my first project was born and I quickly realized that I could design an elegant model. With this framework I have been able to establish the existence of a risk factor of which the economic literature was unaware. Moreover, the empirical strategy allows me to estimate the relative risk aversion coefficient independently from established procedures. Importantly, my estimates are in line with the ones obtained with these (standard) approaches. Meanwhile, I was also interested in a topic that covers a large part of all trades and is known as ``over-the-counter markets''. These markets are characterized by their high level of decentralization. Indeed, every transaction is settled directly between a buyer and a seller. In these markets, the only way to secure a trade is to find another agent that is willing to take the counter-party. I became very interested in a series of books and articles that were modeling financial assets traded under these conditions. Hence, I have started to work in this field by solving different models. I was particularly interested in understanding how the price of assets traded with this constraint would react under stressful situations, that is, when agents had to liquidate their investments. After a trial and error process, I found that my model generated puzzling results. Indeed, this model made predictions that were against traditional wisdom. Above all, that model predicted that a large level of capital mobility could impair welfare. Hence, I had eventually found the link between all the fields I wanted to cover in my thesis, where I debate the optimal allocation of capital under different types of frictions. While my first article treats the case of a centralized market with an agent who forecasts volatility using a particular method, the second article concerns how capital flows across markets when agents are subject to searching frictions. My third article is based on the second and discusses the interaction between innovation and the competition between firms supplying the same products. This article focuses on how capital is used by firms to innovate and how firms grow.

EPFL2019

Essays on the Role of Policy and Venture Financing in Clean Technology Innovation

Matthias David van den Heuvel

This thesis aims to provide novel analyses and data that improve the understanding of the financing of investments in clean technologies. In particular, this thesis explores the role that private and public actors play in supporting young innovative firms. The first chapter of this thesis exploits original data on about 1000 startups that have participated in Venture Kick, the leading Swiss venture competition. We study the circumstances under which venture competitions' certification and cash prize impact startups' future survival and funding prospects. On the one hand, we observe that the certification only has a significant effect on startups whose quality can be more objectively assessed by experts (e.g., hard sciences startups). On the other hand, we find that the competition's cash prize only extends the runway of startups with low running costs (e.g., internet & mobile). These results highlight industry-specific heterogeneity in the effect of early-stage startup support, which bears implications for the design of entrepreneurial programs.The second chapter takes a step back and looks into the role of two prominent actors involved in financing new clean technologies: venture capital (VC) and governments. This essay examines the reasons behind the failure of the VC boom in clean energy startups in the early 2010s. We find that lackluster demand for clean energy products and a lower potential for outsized returns make clean energy firms less attractive to VC than startups in ICT or biotech. Conversely, characteristics such as high-capital intensity or long development timeframe seem to be less important. These findings suggest that the most effective way for governments to improve the attractiveness of early-stage clean energy investments is to implement demand-side policies rather than to provide direct financial support. With demand-side policies in place, governments could then try to plug the remaining funding gaps themselves by targeting startups with limited potential for outsized returns.In the second half of this thesis, the focus shifts onto governments' environmental policies and how they affect private investments in clean technologies. In the third chapter, we develop novel news-based indices of US environmental policy using text-mining techniques. We show that our general environmental policy index and sub-topic indices (e.g., renewables or climate negotiation) meaningfully capture the evolution of environmental policy in the United States. Using these indices, we find that greater salience of environmental policy is associated with increased VC investments in clean technologies and reduced stock returns for high-emissions firms. In the fourth and last chapter, we study the impact of policy uncertainty on private investment decisions. To do so, we construct a novel index of environmental policy uncertainty (EnvPU). This index reveals that uncertainty is pervasive in the history of environmental policy and is often synchronized with election cycles. We find that increases in our EnvPU index are associated with lower VC investments in cleantech startups and higher volatility in green firms' stocks. The findings from Chapters 3 and 4 suggest that, while the increased salience of environmental policy can boost investments, policymakers should ensure that their actions do not exacerbate policy uncertainty and hinder investments towards a low-carbon economy.

EPFL2022