Michael Kühl Books

This paper investigates how government bond purchases affect leverage-constrained banks and non-financial firms by utilising a stochastic general equilibrium model. My results indicate that government bond purchases not only reduce non-financial firms' borrowing costs, amplified through a reduction in expected defaults, but also lower banks' profit margins. In an economy in which loans priced at par dominate in banks' balance sheets - as a reflection of the euro area's structure - the leverage constraint of non-financial firms is relaxed while that of banks tightens. I show that the leverage constraint in the non-financial sector plays an essential role in transmitting the impulses of government bond purchases to the real economy.

This paper compares the consequences of equity injections into banks with purchases of corporate and government bonds in a financial crisis situation using a New Keynesian model in which non-financial firms predominantly take non-market-based debt from banks instead of issuing securities. Our results show that equity injections into banks are more welfare enhancing than asset purchases following a financial shock located in the banking sector. Equity injections remove the frictions that have initiated the stress and, at the same time, relax borrowing conditions. Outright purchases also increase welfare but lower returns with negative effects on banks profits, while the effect on asset prices to stabilize banks balance sheets is of minor importance due to the dominance of non-market-based debt. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the origin of the financial shock matters crucially for the efficacy of measures.

The role of bank capital as a propagation channel of shocks is strongly pronounced in recent macroeconomic models. In this paper, we show how the evolution of bank capital depends on the share of non-state-contingent assets in banks balance sheets and present the consequences for macroeconomic dynamics. State-contingent securities impact on banks balance sheets through changes in their returns (and their prices), both of which depend on the current state of the economy. Nonstate-contingent assets are signed before shocks are realized and their repayment is guaranteed. For this reason they insulate banks balance sheets from recent economic activity in the absence of defaults. Our results show that non-state-contingent assets in banks balance sheets attenuate the amplification of shocks resulting from financial frictions in the banking sector.