Working Papers
2023
June 9, 2023
Some Lessons from Asian E-Money Schemes for the Adoption of Central Bank Digital Currency
Description: This paper synthesizes four lessons from the experiences of six Asian e-money schemes for central banks as they consider adopting central bank digital currency (CBDC): (i) CBDC should embody four attributes: trust, convenience, efficiency, and security; (ii) CBDC service providers can facilitate CBDC adoption through four channels: leveraging digital technology, targeting use cases, developing business models, and complying with legal and regulatory requirements; (iii) central banks could incentivize CBDC service providers to develop these four channels when considering CBDC adoption; and (iv) central banks may be able to establish data-sharing arrangements that preserve privacy while leaving room for CBDC service providers to explore the economic value of data.
June 9, 2023
Bank Competition and Household Privacy in a Digital Payment Monopoly
Description: Lenders can exploit households' payment data to infer their creditworthiness. When households value privacy, they then face a tradeoff between protecting such privacy and credit conditions. We study how the introduction of an informationally more intrusive digital payment vehicle affects households' cash use, credit access, and welfare. A tech monopolist controls the intrusiveness of the new payment method and manipulates information asymmetries among households and oligopolistic banks to extract data contracts that are more lucrative than lending on its own. The laissez-faire equilibrium entails a digital payment vehicle that is more intrusive than socially optimal, providing a rationale for regulation.
June 2, 2023
Macroprudential Policy and Bank Systemic Risk: Does Inflation Targeting Matter?
Description: This paper investigates macroprudential policy effects on bank systemic risk and the role of inflation targeting in such effects. Using bank-level data for 45 countries comprising various monetary and exchange rate regimes, our regime-dependent dynamic panel regression results point to complementarities between monetary and macroprudential policies. We find that the tightening of most macroprudential tools—including DSTI and LTV limits, and capital requirements—reduces bank systemic risk further under inflation targeting. Our findings lend credence to the view that inflation targeting strengthens macroprudential policy roles in mitigating financial stability risks.
June 2, 2023
The Distributional and Fiscal Implications of Public Utility Pricing
Description: The setting of public utility prices involves balancing various competing government policy objectives, from equity concerns to ensuring the financial sustainability of providers and balancing public finances. In practice, public utility pricing often departs significantly from government objectives and tends to be characterized by unnecessarily complex price schedules, below cost-recovery tariff rates, and sectoral inefficiencies that contribute to large fiscal costs. Countries commonly embark on utility pricing reform in response to these heavy fiscal pressures. The paper discusses various reform options available to governments, with a focus on residential pricing schedules, highlighting their fiscal, financial, redistributive, and efficiency implications.
June 2, 2023
Fiscal Anatomy of Two Crises and an Interlude
Description: The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic are associated with the largest increases in public debt ratios since World War II. We decompose unexpected changes in debt ratios into the role of surprises in economic growth, interest costs, policy measures, and other factors. During both crises, lower-than-expected output contributed the most to higher-than-expected debt ratios. Fiscal policy measures recorded in the public deficit were similar in the two episodes. We also analyze the decade-long interlude (2010-19). Rather than declining as foreseen in a normative scenario, debt ratios remained stable on average, as interest rates, policy adjustment and, in some countries, economic growth turned out lower than expected.
June 2, 2023
Cars and the Green Transition: Challenges and Opportunities for European Workers
Description: Reducing transport sector emissions is an important pillar of the green transition. However, the transition to electric vehicles (EV) portends major changes in vehicle manufacturing activity, on which many livelihoods in Europe depend. Using the heterogeneity across European countries in the speed of transition to EV production and variation in sectoral and regional exposure to the automotive sector, this paper offers early evidence of the labor market implications of the EV transition. Our results suggest that the transformation of the auto sector is already having an adverse impact on employment in the affected sectors and regions, which can be expected to grow at least in the near term. Many of the affected workers will be able to retire and our analysis suggests that those who will have to transition to new “greener” jobs have a fair chance to do so when compared to other workers in the manufacturing sector. Furthermore, we find evidence that active labor market policies, specifically training, can help to reduce the adjustment costs for the affected workers.
June 2, 2023
Quasi-Fiscal Implications of Central Bank Crisis Interventions: Case Studies
Description: This paper presents case studies of central bank crisis interventions during the Covid-19 and the Global Financial Crises in four jurisdictions (Canada, Chile, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The paper serves as an Annex to the main IMF Working Paper WP/23/114 ‘Quasi-Fiscal Implications of Central Bank Crisis Interventions.’
June 2, 2023
Quasi-Fiscal Implications of Central Bank Crisis Interventions
Description: We develop a stylized balance sheet framework to help identify ‘quasi-fiscal’ components of central bank crisis interventions and show how sources of fiscal risk are created from both the new claims and how they are funded. Combining central bank balance sheet data with survey evidence from intervention announcements, we document the risks to the public sector balance sheet from central banks’ interventions in response to the Covid-19 crisis, including non-conventional lending to the financial and non-financial sectors and large-scale purchases of government securities. Case study analysis indicates that management of fiscal risks from central bank crisis interventions varies greatly across countries, although several good practices can be identified.
June 2, 2023
Measuring Multinational Production with Foreign Direct Investment Statistics: Recent Trends, Challenges, and Developments
Description: In a complex global production landscape, the quest for measures of economic activity by multinational enterprises (MNEs) has become more pressing. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) statistics, which capture financing aspects of MNEs, have often been used as a proxy for multinational production given their wide availability and cross-country comparability, but concerns that multinational production occurs in different countries than where financial positions are recorded call this practice into question. This paper revisits the main objections to the use of FDI as a proxy for multinational production, explores counterarguments, and provides guidance on the use of FDI statistics to measure multinational production.
May 26, 2023
Financial Heterogeneity, Investment, and Firm Interactions
Description: Recent literature has shown that corporate indebtedness affects firm-level investment behavior but not necessarily aggregate business cycles. I argue that interactions among heterogeneous firms play an important role in equilibrium. After a downturn, financially unconstrained firms in financially constrained industries significantly increase capital ex-penditure to substitute depressed investment by their financially constrained competitors. The increase in investment, primarily driven by small and medium firms, leads to substantial gains in future sales. Using a new empirical approach, I further show that equilibrium effects are unambiguously countercyclical because the increase in investment by unconstrained firms does not crowd out investment by financially constrained competitors. The “competitive interaction channel” underscored in this paper may play an important role in mitigating the impact of negative shocks in macroeconomic models with financial heterogeneity.