Martin Kuncl

Monetary easing redistributes from savers, some of whom are retired and not adjusting labor supply, to borrowers who reduce their labor supply. This results in persistently lower aggregate labor and output. Hence the interaction of labor supply heterogeneity with heterogeneity in net nominal positions of households creates a monetary policy trade-off whereby short-term economic stimulus is followed by lower output over the medium term. The policy trade-off is stronger in economies with more nominal household debt and a larger wealth share of retired households but weakened by a more aggressive monetary policy stance and under price-level targeting.

The neutral rate of interest is an important concept and communication tool for central banks. We develop a structural macroeconomic model to study the determinants of the neutral real rate of interest in a small open economy. The model captures domestic factors such as population aging, declining productivity, rising government debt, and inequality. Foreign factors are captured by changes in the global neutral real rate. We use the model to evaluate secular dynamics of the neutral rate in Canada from 1980--2018 and find that changes in both foreign and domestic factors resulted in a protracted neutral rate decline.

We study third-party loan guarantees in a model in which lenders can screen and sell loans before maturity when in need of liquidity. Loan guarantees improve market liquidity, reduce lending standards, and can have a positive overall welfare effect. Guarantees improve the average quality of non-guaranteed loans traded and thus the market liquidity of these loans due to selection. This positive pecuniary externality provides a rationale for guarantee subsidies. Our results contribute to a debate about reforming government-sponsored mortgage guarantees by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, suggesting that the excessively high subsidies to these guarantees should be reduced but not completely eliminated.

This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous lending opportunities and asymmetric information about the quality of securities. Issuers of securities can signal their quality by providing recourse to security buyers. I find that signaling increases the variation in the degree of asymmetric information over the business cycle, which creates the documented growth asymmetry in the cycle. In particular, in the boom stage of the business cycle, security quality remains private information and lower-quality securities accumulate on the balance sheets of lenders. This inefficient allocation of capital implies a deeper drop in output in a subsequent recession proportional to the length of the preceding boom.

Several countries now require banks or money market funds to impose state-contingent costs on short-term creditors to absorb financial stress. We study these requirements as part of the broader prudential toolkit in a model with five key ingredients: banks may face an aggregate stress state with high withdrawals; a fire-sale externality motivates a mix of non-contingent and state-contingent regulation; banks may use shadow technologies to circumvent regulation; parameters of the shadow technologies may be private information; and bailouts may occur. We characterize the optimal policy for various combinations of these ingredients and demonstrate that the threat of shadow activities constrains state-contingent regulation more than noncontingent regulation, especially when imperfect information and limited commitment coexist. The planner triggers shadow activities with positive probability under imperfect information, and shadow activities that deplete resources in the stress state elicit larger bailouts under limited commitment, rendering the requirement of state-contingent costs a weak instrument.

Markets for securitized assets were characterized by high liquidity prior to the recent financial crisis and by a sudden market dry-up at the onset of the crisis. A general equilibrium model with heterogeneous investment opportunities and information frictions predicts that, in boom periods or mild recessions, the degree of adverse selection in resale markets for securitized assets is limited because of the reputation-based guarantees by asset originators. This supports investment and output. However, in a deep recession, characterized by high dispersion of asset qualities, there is a sudden surge in adverse selection due to an economy-wide default on reputation-based guarantees, which persistently depresses the output in the economy. Government policy of asset purchases limits the negative effects of adverse selection on the real economy, but may create a negative moral hazard problem.