Leverage causes fat tails and clustered volatility

Thurner, S., Farmer, J.D., & Geanakoplos, J. (2012). Leverage causes fat tails and clustered volatility. Quantitative Finance 12 (5) 695-707. 10.1080/14697688.2012.674301.

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Abstract

We build a simple model of leveraged asset purchases with margin calls. Investment funds use what is perhaps the most basic financial strategy, called "value investing", i.e. systematically attempting to buy underpriced assets. When funds do not borrow, the price fluctuations of the asset are approximately normally distributed and uncorrelated across time. This changes when the funds are allowed to leverage, i.e. borrow from a bank, which allows them to purchase more assets than their wealth would otherwise permit. During good times, funds that use more leverage have higher profits, increasing their wealth and making them dominant in the market. However, if a downward price fluctuation occurs while one or more funds is fully leveraged, the resulting margin call causes them to sell into an already falling market, amplifying the downward price movement. If the funds hold large positions in the asset, this can cause substantial losses. This in turn leads to clustered volatility: before a crash, when the value funds are dominant, they dump volatility, and after the crash, when they suffer severe losses, volatility is high. This leads to power-law tails, which are both due to the leverage-induced crashes and due to the clustered volatility induced by the wealth dynamics. This is in contrast to previous explanations of fat tails and clustered volatility, which depended on "irrational behavior", such as trend following. A standard (supposedly more sophisticated) risk control policy in which individual banks base leverage limits on volatility causes leverage to rise during periods of low volatility, and to contract more quickly when volatility becomes high, making these extreme fluctuations even worse.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Clustered vulnerability; Crash; Fat tails; Leverage; Margin calls; Systemic risk
Research Programs:	Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA)
Bibliographic Reference:	Quantitative Finance; 12(5):695-707 (May 2012)
Depositing User:	IIASA Import
Date Deposited:	15 Jan 2016 08:46
Last Modified:	27 Aug 2021 17:39
URI:	https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/9943

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