Working Papers
2016
December 15, 2016
Emerging Market Corporate Leverage and Global Financial Conditions
Description: Corporate debt in emerging markets has risen significantly in recent years amid accommodative global financial conditions. This paper studies the relationship of leverage growth in emerging market (EM) firms to U.S. monetary conditions, and more broadly, to global financial conditions. We find that accommodative U.S. monetary conditions are reliably associated with faster EM leverage growth during the past decade. Specifically, a 1 percentage point decline in the U.S. policy rate corresponds to an appreciable increase in EM leverage growth of 9 basis points, on average (relative to the sample average leverage growth of 35 basis points per year). This impact is more pronounced for sectors dependent on external financing, for SMEs, and for firms in more financially open EMs with less flexible exchange rates. The findings suggest that global financial conditions affect EM firms’ leverage growth in part by influencing domestic interest rates and by relaxing corporate borrowing constraints.
December 13, 2016
Automatic Adjustment Mechanisms in Asian Pension Systems?
Description: Automatic adjustment mechanisms (AAMs)—rules ensuring that certain characteristics of a pension system respond to demographic, macroeconomic and financial developments, in a predetermined fashion and without the need for additional intervention—have been introduced in many OECD countries to tackle public pension schemes’ deteriorating financial sustainability. Incorporating AAMs—in particular linking retirement age to life expectancy—can be an important part of pension reforms in Asia. If implemented early, AAMs could help prevent the need for sharp adjustments in the future, increase the predictability and inter-generational equity of pension systems and enhance confidence.
December 13, 2016
Output and Inflation Co-movement: An Update on Business-Cycle Stylized Facts
Description: What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? By documenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cycle in a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations are driven by one major factor. The positive co-movement of real output and inflation convincingly argues for a demand story. We propose a simple statistic that can compare data and models. Based on this statistic, we show that the recent vintage of structural economic models has difficulties replicating the stylized facts we document.
December 13, 2016
Monetary Policy Credibility and Exchange Rate Pass-Through
Description: A long-standing conjecture in macroeconomics is that recent declines in exchange rate pass-through are in part due to improved monetary policy performance. In a large sample of emerging and advanced economies, we find evidence of a strong link between exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices and the monetary policy regime’s performance in delivering price stability. Using input-output tables, we decompose exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices into a component that reflects the adjustment of imported goods at the border, and another that captures the response of all other prices. We find that price stability and central bank credibility have reduced the second component.
December 12, 2016
A Tale of Transition: An Empirical Analysis of Economic Inequality in Urban China, 1986–2009
Description: This paper is the first comprehensive empirical study of earnings, income, and consumption inequality in urban China from 1986 to 2009, using unique micro-level data from the Urban Household Survey (UHS). The paper documents a drastic increase in economic inequality for the sample period. The paper finds that consumption inequality closely tracks income inequality, both over time and over the life cycle. The paper believes that the main driver of this co-movement could be a dramatic increase in noninsurable idiosyncratic permanent income shocks after the early 1990s, associated with the economic transition in urban China.
December 8, 2016
The Impact of Workforce Aging on European Productivity
Description: The age-distribution of Europe’s workforce has shifted towards older workers over the past few decades, a process expected to accelerate in the years ahead.. This paper studies the effect of the aging of the workforce on labor productivity, identifies the main transmission channels, and examines what policies might mitigate the effects of aging. We find that workforce aging reduces growth in labor productivity, mainly through its negative effect on TFP growth. Projected workforce aging could reduce TFP growth by an average of 0.2 percentage points every year over the next two decades. A variety of policies could ameliorate this effect.
December 8, 2016
The Impact of Demographics on Productivity and Inflation in Japan
Description: Is Japan’s aging and, more recently, declining population hampering growth and reflation efforts? Exploiting demographic and economic variation in prefectural data between 1990 and 2007, we find that aging of the working age population has had a significant negative impact on total factor productivity. Moreover, prefectures that aged at a faster pace experienced lower overall inflation, while prefectures with higher population growth experienced higher inflation. The results give strong support to the notion that demographic headwinds can have a non-trivial impact on total factor productivity and deflationary pressures.
December 7, 2016
Macro-Financial Linkages and Heterogeneous Non-Performing Loans Projections: An Application to Ecuador
Description: We propose a stress testing framework of credit risk, which analyzes macro-financial linkages, generates consistent forecasts of macro-financial variables, and projects non-performing loans (NPL) on the basis of such forecasts. Economic contractions are generally associated with increases in NPL. However, despite the common assumption used in the empirical literature of homogeneous impact across banks, the strength of this relationship is often bank-specific, and imposing homogeneity may lead to over or underestimating the resilience of the financial system to macroeconomic woes. Our approach accounts for banks’ heterogeneous reaction to macro-financial shocks in a dynamic context and potential cross-sectional dependence across banks caused by common shocks. An application to Ecuador suggests that substantial heterogeneity is present and that this should be taken into account when trying to anticipate inflections in the quality of portfolio.
December 6, 2016
Real Effects of Capital Inflows in Emerging Markets
Description: We examine the association between capital inflows and industry growth in a sample of 22 emerging market economies from 1998 to 2010. We expect more external finance dependent industries in countries that host more capital inflows to grow disproportionately faster. This is indeed the case in the pre-crisis period of 1998–2007, and is driven by debt, rather than equity, inflows. We also observe a reduction in output volatility but this association is more pronounced for equity, rather than debt, inflows. These relationships, however, break down during the crisis, hinting at the importance of an undisrupted global financial system for emerging markets to harness the growth benefits of capital inflows. In line with this observation, we also document that the inflows-growth nexus is stronger in countries with well-functioning banks.
December 2, 2016
Political Institutions, State Building, and Tax Capacity: Crossing the Tipping Point
Description: An empirical finding by Gaspar, Jaramillo and Wingender (2016) shows that once countries cross a tax-to-GDP threshold of around 12¾ percent, real GDP per capita increases sharply and in a sustained manner over the following decade. In this paper, we attempt via four case studies—Spain, China, Colombia, and Nigeria—to illustrate that the improvements in tax capacity have been part of a deeper process of state capacity building. We discuss the political conditions that supported tax capacity building, highlighting three important political ingredients: constitutive institutions, inclusive politics and credible leadership.