Working Papers
2017
February 10, 2017
Exploring the Role of Foreign Investors in Russia's Local Currency Government Bond (OFZ) Market
Description: Local currency government bonds (OFZ bonds) are an important fixed-income instrument in Russia’s financial markets. In this paper, based on granular data, we explore the development of the OFZ bond market with a focus on foreign investors. As this fixed-income market has experienced a liberalization of the domestic trading and settlement infrastructure, and weathered several episodes of market stresses since the 2008–09 global financial crisis, the role of foreign investors can be observed along with these events. What we have found is that foreign investors had influenced the market before they became an important player and since then they have contributed to the development of the market while not necessarily destabilizing it in episodes of shocks.
February 10, 2017
The Impact of Natural Resource Discoveries in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Closer Look at the Case of Bolivia
Description: This paper studies the impact of natural resource extraction in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) from a number of angles. First, we exploit a novel dataset on the universe of giant oil and gas discoveries in the region to trace out the cyclical response of macroeconomic variables to discoveries over the short- and medium-run. Second, we use non-stationary panel data techniques to look at the long-run (trend) relationship between GDP per capita and the value of oil and gas production—our results imply that the recent fall in prices could depress GDP per capita by several percentage points. Last, we use Bolivia, which discovered huge gas reserves in the late 1990s, as a case study to apply the cross-country results and to study the impact of discoveries at the subnational level.
February 10, 2017
What’s Different about Bank Holding Companies?
Description: The recent fnancial crisis highlighted the role of Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) in exacerbating the crisis and in transmitting monetary policy beyond the local economy to global markets. Yet, little is known about their behavior, as most models of banking typically focus on banks with a loan desk. We develop a dynamic model of a BHC that encompasses both a trading desk and a loan desk, and explore the role of risk attitude and overleveraging by the trading desk. We trace the impact of monetary policy and market innovations on bank behavior in the presence of Basel III type regulations. To our knowledge, this is a first such exercise. We show that the value of the BHC is enhanced by operating both desks, even if they both are subject to common market shocks. We explore alternative regulatory remedies to ongoing efforts to ring-fence the proprietary trading business, and show that regulations that target bank governance can mitigate possible rogue trading and the overleveraging problem.
February 10, 2017
Currency Wars or Efficient Spillovers? A General Theory of International Policy Cooperation
Description: In an interconnected world, national economic policies regularly lead to large international spillover effects, which frequently trigger calls for international policy cooperation. However, the premise of successful cooperation is that there is a Pareto inefficiency, i.e. if there is scope to make some nations better off without hurting others. This paper presents a first welfare theorem for open economies that defines an efficient benchmark and spells out the conditions that need to be violated to generate inefficiency and scope for cooperation. These are: (i) policymakers act competitively in the international market, (ii) policymakers have sufficient external policy instruments and (iii) international markets are free of imperfections. Our theorem holds even if each economy suffers from a wide range of domestic market imperfections and targeting problems. We provide examples of current account intervention, monetary policy, fiscal policy, macroprudential policy/capital controls, and exchange rate management and show that the resulting spillovers are Pareto efficient, as long as the three conditions are satisfied. Furthermore, we develop general guidelines for how policy cooperation can improve welfare when the conditions are violated.
February 10, 2017
Banks’ Adjustment to Basel III Reform: A Bank-Level Perspective for Emerging Europe
Description: The paper seeks to identify strategies of commercial banks in response to higher capital requirements of Basel III reform and its phase-in. It focuses on a sample of nine EU emerging market countries and picks up 5 largest banks in each country assessing their response. The paper finds that all banking sectors raised CAR ratios mainly through retained earnings. In countries where the banking sector struggled with profitability, banks have resorted to issuance of new equity or shrunk the size of their balance sheets to meet the higher capital-adequacy requirements. Worries echoed at the early stage of Basel III compilation, namely that commercial banks would shrink their balance sheet by reducing their lending to meet stricter capital requirements, did materialize only in banks struggling with profitability.
January 31, 2017
Household Consumption in Japan – Role of Income and Asset Developments
Description: We study Japanese household consumption at a disaggregated level focusing on the role of income and asset dynamics. Stagnation of real per capita consumption is widespread acrosslabor market groups, age groups and regions. Consumption-to-income ratios have been mildly increasing due to the rising share of pensioners with significant assets. Evidence therefore suggests that assets have become more important in financing consumption. However, the short-term consumption dynamics remain quite sensitive to income growth but not to asset market movements.
January 30, 2017
Curbing Corporate Debt Bias
Description: Tax provisions favoring corporate debt over equity finance (“debt bias”) are widely recognized as a risk to financial stability. This paper explores whether and how thin-capitalization rules, which restrict interest deductibility beyond a certain amount, affect corporate debt ratios and mitigate financial stability risk. We find that rules targeted at related party borrowing (the majority of today’s rules) have no significant impact on debt bias—which relates to third-party borrowing. Also, these rules have no effect on broader indicators of firm financial distress. Rules applying to all debt, in contrast, turn out to be effective: the presence of such a rule reduces the debt-asset ratio in an average company by 5 percentage points; and they reduce the probability for a firm to be in financial distress by 5 percent. Debt ratios are found to be more responsive to thin capitalization rules in industries characterized by a high share of tangible assets.
January 30, 2017
Czech Magic: Implementing Inflation-Forecast Targeting at the CNB
Description: This paper describes the CNB’s experience implementing an inflation-forecast targeting (IFT) regime, and the building of a system for providing the economic information that policymakers need to implement IFT. The CNB’s experience has been very successful in establishing confidence in monetary policy in the Czech Republic and should provide useful guidance for other central banks that are considering adopting an IFT regime.
January 30, 2017
International Remittances, Migration, and Primary Commodities in FSGM
Description: This paper adds international migration and remittances into the IMF’s Flexible System of Global Models (FSGM). FSGM is a global general equilibrium model with endogenous primary commodity markets. A method to estimate the structural dynamics of major remitter regions is proposed. The dynamics of remittances and migration in FSGM are calibrated to be consistent with the main stylized facts of the empirical estimates. Structural disturbances pertinent to current global remittance flows are examined. These disturbances include disruptions to oil supply, output variation in Europe and the United States, labor nationalization policies in Saudi Arabia, and a global reduction in the cost to remit. The multilateral framework illustrates how remittance inflows need not originate from the region with the underlying economic disturbance but can arise from third party remitter regions affected by global commodity markets. The results also illustrate that the correlation of remittance inflows and the real GDP of labor-exporting economies can be either positively or negatively correlated. The evidence suggests that the behavioral incentive to migrate and remit cannot be deduced from correlations of real GDP and remittance inflows.
January 30, 2017
Fiscal Politics in the Euro Area
Description: This paper provides evidence of fiscal procyclicality, excessive deficits, distorted budget composition and poor compliance with fiscal rules in the euro area. Our analysis relies on real-time data for 19 countries participating in the euro area over 1999–2015. We look for, but do not find, conclusive evidence of bias in procedures in relation to country size. The paper also briefly reviews the literature on political economy factors and policy biases, and offers some reflections on the euro area architecture.