Abstract
During the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve issued billions of dollars in liquidity swap agreements with foreign central banks, serving as a global lender of last resorts. Most studies of this event have analyzed the distribution of these swap lines using materially rational frameworks, which is logical under normal lending conditions. However, this approach does not account for the extensive evidence on social influences over decisions made under uncertainty. Meeting minutes from the Federal Reserve exhibit significant flexibility in recipient selection, and the content of these discussions suggest that social dynamics were important in members’ decision-making. This paper tests the effect of social similarity between foreign central banks and the Federal Reserve on the likelihood of receiving a swap line during the crisis. I introduce new measures of social similarity among central banks with data on employees’ professional ties and public speeches in the years preceding the global financial crisis. Statistical results show a positive, significant effect for social similarity on swap line receipt, even when tested alongside material predictors, and this social rationality appears to have been a deciding feature in some cases of swap distribution. I conclude with implications for future crises, and potential regulatory consequences.
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Notes
This dataset has cases of differently recorded firm names for what is actually the same organization. I use the approach developed by (Marple et al. 2017) to disambiguate the redundant names; see the original paper for description of the impact of these techniques on correcting network metrics such as distance scores.
Edge weights were log-normalized, as in (Young et al. 2017) for appropriate distance estimation.
A representative for the BIS highlighted these parameters in an e-mail from August 8, 2016 (Canelli 2016)
These speeches were downloaded from the main website in bulk, as permitted by the organization. Each speech was coded using the front-matter of the speech, wherein the individual and their organizational and national affiliations are listed. These codes were checked to ensure consistency, and no errors were found. See appendix I for more detailed information on the population of this speech similarity indicator.
Summary statistics for these variables are reported in Appendix II. Some variables have been logged for the regression models. White tests for heteroskedasticity show R2 on uncorrected models ranging from 0.06 to 0.18, indicating a need for robust (HC1) standard errors. Results are consistent and significant in probit model specifications.
See Appendix III for comparable models without these first two groups of recipients in the data
The second measure of crisis depth, liquid liabilities to non-gold reserves, performs identically well in these model specifications. It is omitted from table 1 due to greater missing data on this indicator than on GDP growth, and because the global financial center covariate significantly predicts it (β = 1.92; p < 0.001; R2 = 0.14). Appendix IV demonstrates that the GDP growth and liability to non-gold reserves predictors have identical effects on the likelihood of swap receipt when tested independently of the financial center covariate.
Please see Appendix VII for an asymptotic equivalent of the Hausman test showing no evidence of endogeneity in the speech similarity covariate within the second model presented in Table 1. Please see Appendix VIII for a test of multicollinearity in the CBI predictor, which shows no evidence for coefficient estimate issues in the main models.
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I am deeply grateful to Kevin Young, Meredith Rolfe, Bruce Desmarais, Justin Gross, William Winecoff, Iain Hardie, Sylvia Maxfield, Vinod Aggarwal, and the anonymous reviewers at Review of International Organizations, for extensive and helpful feedback on this article.
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Marple, T. The social management of complex uncertainty: Central Bank similarity and crisis liquidity swaps at the Federal Reserve. Rev Int Organ 16, 377–401 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-020-09378-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-020-09378-x