Josef Schroth is a Research Advisor in the Financial Stability Department at the Bank of Canada. He works in the areas of macroeconomics and accounting. Specific topics include financial market regulation and disclosure choice. Josef Schroth received his PhD in economics from UCLA.
Countercyclical capital buffers are regulatory measures developed in response to the global financial crisis of 2008–09. This note focuses on how time-varying capital buffers can improve financial stability in Canada
A regulator would want to restrict dividends to force banks to rebuild capital during a crisis. But such a policy is not time-consistent. A time-consistent policy would let banks gradually rebuild capital and pay dividends even when their equity remains below pre-crisis levels.
Optimal coordination of monetary and macroprudential policies implies higher risk weights on (safe) bonds any time that banks are required to hold additional capital buffers. Coordination also implies a somewhat tighter monetary-policy stance whenever such capital buffers are released.
Should managers be paid in stock options if they provide stock-market participants with information about the firm? This paper studies how firm owners trade off the benefit of stock-price incentives and better-informed market participants against the cost of potential stock-price manipulation.
The countercyclical capital buffer is part of Basel III, the set of regulatory measures developed in response to the financial crisis of 2007–09. This study focuses on how time-varying capital buffers can address inefficiencies in economies with endogenous financial crises.
We study constrained-efficient bank capital regulation in a model with market-imposed equity requirements. Banks hold equity buffers to insure against sudden loss of access to funding. However, in the model, banks choose to only partially self-insure because equity is privately costly.
Foreign direct investment inflows are positively related to growth across developing countries—but so are savings in excess of investment. I develop an explanation for this well-established puzzle by focusing on the limited availability of consumer credit in developing countries together with general equilibrium effects.
How much discretion should local financial regulators in a banking union have in accommodating local credit demand? I analyze this question in an economy where local regulators privately observe expected output from high lending. They do not fully internalize default costs from high lending since deposit insurance cannot be priced fairly.
This paper develops a model of an economy where bank credit supports both productive investment and individual consumption smoothing in the face of idiosyncratic income risk. Bank credit is constrained by bank equity capital.
This paper studies an economy where agents can spend resources on consuming a private good and on funding a public good. There is asymmetric information regarding agents’ relative preference for private versus public good consumption.
