Publications des chercheurs de PSE

This paper provides a household-level perspective on the rise of global saving and wealth since the 1980s. We calculate asset-specific saving flows and capital gains across the wealth distribution for the G3 economies-the U.S., Europe, and China. In the past four decades, global saving inequality has risen sharply. The share of household saving flows coming from the richest 10% of household increased by 60% while saving of middle class households has fallen sharply. The most important source for the surge in top-10% saving was the secular rise of global corporate saving whose ultimate owners the rich households are. Housing capital gains have supported wealth growth for middle-class households despite falling saving and rising debt. Without meaningful capital gains in risky assets, the wealth share of the bottom half of the population declined substantially in most G3 economies.

This paper provides a household-level perspective on the rise of global saving and wealth since the 1980s. We calculate asset-specific saving flows and capital gains across the wealth distribution for the G3 economies – the U.S., Europe, and China. In the past four decades, global saving inequality has risen sharply. The share of household saving flows coming from the richest 10% of household increased by 60% while saving of middle class households has fallen sharply. The most important source for the surge in top-10% saving was the secular rise of global corporate saving whose ultimate owners the rich households are. Housing capital gains have supported wealth growth for middle-class households despite falling saving and rising debt. Without meaningful capital gains in risky assets, the wealth share of the bottom half of the population declined substantially in most G3 economies.

This paper uses historical survey microdata to study the life-cycle wealth accumulation across U.S. birth cohorts over the last six decades. We uncover two key new trends: a marked steepening of the life-cycle wealth profile and increased dissaving among older adults. Using a theoretical model and wealth accumulation decompositions, we argue that these new trends were driven by the boom in asset prices since the 1980s: valuation gains led to higher life-cycle wealth and allowed households to increase consumption in retirement. Looking at aggregates, we find that shifts in the life-cycle wealth profile explain a large share of the increase in the aggregate wealth-income ratio. At the same time, the higher consumption by older adults is the most important force behind the decline in the aggregate saving rate since the mid-1980s.

The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can be caused by changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase in debt leverage of low- and middle-income households, and an eventual financial and real crisis. The paper presents a theoretical model where higher leverage and crises are the endogenous result of a growing income share of high-income households. The model matches the profiles of the income distribution, the debt-to-income ratio and crisis risk for the three decades preceding the Great Recession.

Relying on an original household survey (PATER survey), we document how the 2008–9 crisis affected households’ wealth, expectations, and consumption plans in France. We then show that households experiencing losses relating to their housing or their financial wealth were more likely to change their plans by reducing consumption expenditure. Moreover, our results suggest a certain degree of heterogeneity in consumption reaction across individuals depending on their level of wealth, on the composition of their consumption basket, and on the type of shocks experienced (gains/losses). Besides the direct wealth effect, our results also provide evidence of the role played by changes in expectations on consumption plans (confidence channel).

We document that the deregulation of bank branching restrictions in the United States triggered a reallocation across sectors, with end effects on state-level volatility. The change cannot be explained simply by shifts in sector-level returns and volatility. A reallocation effect is at play, which we study in the context of mean-variance portfolio theory applied to sectoral returns. We find the reallocation is particularly strong in sectors characterized by young, small and external finance dependent firms, and for states that have a larger share of such sectors. The findings suggest that improving bank access to branching affects the sectoral specialization of output, in a manner that depends on the variance-covariance properties of sectoral returns, rather than on their average only.

Nous construisons un modèle à générations imbriquées qui permet d'étudier la fragilité financière d'une petite économie ouverte à deux secteurs. Les entreprises subissent une contrainte de crédit et les firmes produisant des biens non échangeables sont endettées en biens échangeables. De ce fait, il peut y avoir des équilibres multiples à un instant donné du temps, ce qui rend possibles des crises auto-réalisatrices de balance des paiements. Cet état de fragilité financière nécessite un niveau d'endettement suffisant dans le bilan des firmes du secteur abrité et une taille relative de ce secteur suffisamment grande par rapport au secteur exposé. Nous déterminons les conditions auxquelles l'évolution endogène, le long d'une trajectoire d'équilibre, de ces deux facteurs, la structure de bilan des firmes abritées et la structure productive, mène à terme à un état de fragilité financière.

Un modèle est développé dans le but de reproduire quelques faits stylisés du marché du carry trade. Parmi eux, le fait que le ratio de Sharpe peut être affecté par le nombre d'arbitrageurs et qu'il a une forme concave. Par conséquent, il n'est pas une fonction croissante du différentiel des taux d'intérêt. Cependant, les monnaies à taux d'intérêt élevés sont plus exposées à d'important risque de krach. Les skewness et kurtosis de neufs monnaies sont calculés comme mesure de krach et le ratio de Sharpe est calculé comme mesure de profitabilité. Dans la partie empirique, le ratio de Sharpe est calculé et il présente une forme concave que le modèle arrive à reproduire. Dans la dernière section, la prime de risque sur le marché du carry trade est calculée.

We analyze the dual role of currency mismatch: as a vehicle that exposes the economy to systemic risk, but also as an engine of growth. We do so at the macro and the micro levels for emerging European economies in recent years. At the aggregate level, we construct a new index of currency mismatch in the banking sector that controls for lending made by banks to unhedged borrowers–i.e., those with no foreign currency income. Using our index, we find that across emerging European economies, increases in currency mismatch are associated with higher growth in tranquil times, but with a greater severity of crisis. These results are also confirmed for a broader sample of emerging economies. On net, after taking into account the crisis period, we find a positive link between currency mismatch and growth. In our firm-level analysis, we find that currency mismatch helps relax borrowing constraints and enhances firms' growth in emerging Europe. These effects are stronger across sets of financially constrained firms–those that are small and are in nontradables sectors.

Depuis le déchaînement de la crise, l'organisation des transactions boursières n'a pas vraiment fait l'objet de velléités réformatrices. Pourtant, les opportunités spéculatives comme les risques encourus dépendent aussi de l'organisation des marchés sur lesquels on opère. La directive européenne Marché d'instruments financiers, en vigueur depuis 2007, témoigne d'une foi déraisonnable dans les vertus auto-organisatrices du marché. Elle a conduit à une concurrence telle sur le marché des marchés financiers qu'elle a fragmenté la liquidité et accentué la privatisation des dispositifs d'échange et des transactions. Mobilisant l'histoire financière, nous démontrons pourquoi et comment il faudrait, à l'échelle européenne, confier aux marchés réglementés une mission de service d'intérêt général comparable à celle qu'ils ont assumée par le passé sans cela ait nuit au développement économique : centraliser, traiter et diffuser l'information pré et post négociation qui constitue un bien public.

We would like to thank Enrique Alberola, Joshua Aizenman, Erik Berglöf, Guillermo Calvo, Jin Han, Andrea Ichino, Jean Imbs, Maurizio Mazzocco, Joe Ostroy, Amine Ouazad and Romain Wacziarg as well as participants at the Economic Policy panel meeting for helpful comments, and the following people for sharing their data sets with us: Reza Baqir (IMF Vulnerability Exercise for Emerging Economies); Herman Kamil (foreign currency borrowing by sector in Latin America); Stephanie Prat (foreign currency foreign assets and liabilities for various emerging economies); and Christoph Rosenberg and Marcel Tirpak (direct borrowing in East Europe from abroad). The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy.The Managing Editor in charge of this paper was Tullio Jappelli.

Recent estimates of the output Euler equation for the United States indicate that the elasticity of aggregate demand to interest rates is not significantly different from zero. We first argue that this result may hide a structural break: the estimated elasticity is a convolution of two coefficients with opposite signs across the samples 1965-1979 and 1982-2003. The sign of the coefficient in the earlier sample is inconsistent with standard economic theory and intuition. We outline a model with limited asset markets participation that can generate this change in sign when asset market participation changes from low to high, and provide institutional evidence for such a change in the United States in the late 70s and early 80s.