Working Papers
2023
February 10, 2023
Production Technology, Market Power, and the Decline of the Labor Share
Description: The labor share has been declining in the United States, and especially so in manufacturing. This paper investigates the role of capital accumulation and market power in explaining this decline. I first estimate the production function of 21 manufacturing sectors along time series and including time-varying markups. The elasticities of substitution for most sectors are estimated below one, implying that capital deepening cannot explain the labor share decline. I then track the long-run evolution of the labor share using the estimated production technology parameters. I decompose aggregate labor share changes into sector re-weights, capital-labor substitution, and market power effects. I find that the increase in market power, as reported in recent studies, can account for, at least, 76 percent of the labor share decline in manufacturing. Absent the rise in market power, the labor share would have remained constant in the second half of the 20th century.
February 10, 2023
The 2020-2022 Inflation Surge Across Europe: A Phillips-Curve-Based Dissection
Description: In 2021-22, inflation in Europe soared to multidecade highs, consistently exceeding policymakers’ forecasts and surprising with its wide cross-country dispersion. This paper analyzes the key drivers of the inflation surge in Europe and its variation across countries. The analysis highlights significant differences in Phillips curve parameters across Europe’s economies. Inflation is more sensitive to domestic slack and external price pressures in emerging European economies compared to their advanced counterparts, which contributed to a greater passthrough of global commodity price shocks into domestic prices, and, consequently, to larger increases in inflation rates. Across Europe, inflation also appears to have become increasingly backward looking and more sensitive to commodity price shocks since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding helps explain why conventional (Phillips curve) inflation models consistently underpredicted the 2021-2022 inflation surge, although it remains too early to conclude there has been a structural break in the inflation process.
February 10, 2023
Getting into the Nitty-Gritty of Fiscal Multipliers: Small Details, Big Impacts
Description: The lack of a standardized framework to report fiscal multipliers limits comparisons across studies, budgetary items, or countries. Within a unified analytical framework (using a panel of 177 countries), we study how key methodological details affect the size and persistence of fiscal multipliers‘ estimates. Our baseline results are in line with the existing literature with average cumulative medium-term multipliers of -2.1 (-2.5) for taxes on personal income, 0.3 (1.7) for investment and, -0.5 (1.9) for consumption for advanced (emerging market) economies. However, we show that slight changes in the identification of shocks, based on forecast errors or in the definition of the fiscal multiplier, can artificially increase both the size and decrease the precision of estimates. We also emphasize the importance of accounting for the endogenous dynamic responses of fiscal variables to fiscal innovations by showing that multipliers calculated simply as the output response to fiscal shocks, as it is common in the literature, can potentially bias the results.
February 10, 2023
Uncovering CIP Deviations in Emerging Markets: Distinctions, Determinants and Disconnect
Description: We provide a systematic empirical treatment of short-term Covered Interest Parity (CIP) deviations for a large set of emerging market (EM) currencies. EM CIP deviations have much larger volatilities than most G10 currencies and move in an opposite direction during global risk-off episodes. While off-shore EM CIP deviations are sensitive to changes in FX dealers’ risk-bearing capacities and global risk aversion, on-shore EM CIP deviations are largely unresponsive in segmented FX markets. Moreover, the sensitivity of offshore EM CIP deviations to global risk factors for currencies with segmented FX markets is stronger compared to their counterparts with integrated FX markets. We find weak evidence of country default risk affecting EM CIP deviations after accounting for global factors.
February 10, 2023
Estimating Digital Infrastructure Investment Needs to Achieve Universal Broadband
Description: We develop a detailed model to evaluate the necessary investment requirements to achieve affordable universal broadband. The results indicate that approximately $418 billion needs to be mobilized to connect all unconnected citizens globally (targeting 40-50 GB/Month per user with 95 percent reliability). The bulk of additional investment is for emerging market economies (73 percent) and low-income developing countries (24 percent). We also find that if the data consumption level is lowered to 10-20 GB/Month per user, the total cost decreases by up to about half, whereas raising data consumption to 80-100 GB/Month per user leads to a cost increase of roughly 90 percent relative to the baseline. Moreover, a 40 percent cost decrease occurs when varying the peak hour quality of service level from the baseline 95 percent reliability, to only 50 percent reliability. To conclude, broadband policy assessments should be explicit about the quantity of data and the reliability of service provided to users. Failure to do so will lead to inaccurate estimates and, ultimately, to poor broadband policy decisions.
February 10, 2023
The Internationalization of China’s Equity Markets
Description: China’s equity markets internationalization process started in the early 2000s but accelerated after 2012, when Chinese firms’ shares listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen gradually became available to international investors. This paper studies the effects of the post-2012 internationalization events by comparing the evolution of equity financing and investment activities for: (i) domestic listed firms relative to firms that already had access to international investors and (ii) domestic listed firms that were directly connected to international markets relative to those that were not. The paper finds large increases in financial and investment activities for domestic listed and for connected firms, with significant aggregate effects. The evidence also suggests the rise in firms’ equity issuances was primarily and initially financed by domestic investors. International investors’ portfolio holdings in Chinese equity markets and ownership in firms increased markedly only once Chinese firms’ locally issued shares became part of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index.
February 3, 2023
How to Mitigate the Impact of Economic Downturns on Labor Markets: Evidence from Nicaragua
Description: This paper studies the drivers of the labor market performance in Nicaragua with a particular focus on informality, to identify vulnerable groups during economic downturns; and estimates the speed of adjustment of employment to shocks. The paper compares this experience with the ones in other CAPDR countries (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama). Our findings are that while the high countercyclical informality in Nicaragua has been the active margin of adjustment during economic downturns mitigating unemployment, the trade-off has been a lower speed of adjustment to shocks hampering the country’s ability to revert to its potential. Policy recommendations relate to mitigating the impact of downturns on employment in Nicaragua, easing adjustments and inequalities in the labor market to hasten the employment recovery and thus, support growth.
February 3, 2023
Good Will Hunting: Do Disasters Make Us More Charitable?
Description: Humans are usually compassionate, caring and empathetic toward others, but are we really hardwired for altruism when a disaster hits? There is evidence that people exposed to natural disasters tend to behave more philanthropically, but most studies rely on small-scale surveys and experimental data. For that reason, this paper contributes to the literature by investigating whether the COVID-19 pandemic has altered prosocial tendencies and charitable donations, using a novel daily dataset of debit and credit card transactions. I conduct a real-time analysis of actual charitable donations in three European countries and find that the COVID-19 pandemic and government interventions have no significant effect on how much people contribute to charities as a share of total spending. A higher preference for precautionary savings in the midst of the pandemic appears to outweigh altruistic behavior, while government welfare programs crowds out private charitable donations.
February 3, 2023
How Costly Will Reining in Inflation Be? It Depends on How Rational We Are
Description: We document that past highly inflationary episodes are often characterized by a steeper inflationslack relationship. We show that model-generated data from a standard small Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model can replicate this empirical finding when estimated with different expectation formation processes. When inflation becomes de-anchored and expectations drift, we can observe high inflation even with a mildly positive output gap in response to cost-push shocks. The results imply that we should not use an unconditioned (not controlling for expectations change) Phillips curve estimated in normal times to predict the cost of reining in inflation. Our optimal policy exercises prescribe early monetary policy tightening and then easing in the context of positive output gaps and inflation far above the central bank target.
February 3, 2023
Fintech Payments in Public Financial Management: Benefits and Risks
Description: Fintech payments leverage large digital platforms to fill gaps in the traditional payment system. They have made great strides in increasing access to payment services in several countries around the globe. At the same time, like any innovation, the new payment models are exposed to risks in their operating environment. We review the main fintech payment models (mobile money, internet-based fintech payment, and digital money) and discuss operational and financial risks as well as challenges they face. We then explore how public financial management (PFM), especially treasury payments and non-tax revenue collections, could benefit from fintech payments by providing examples of early fintech applications in different countries and discuss the challenges of integrating them into the public sector. The use of fintech in public finance could bring various benefits—including strengthening fiscal transparency, improving budget planning and execution, and upgrading cash management—if public sector institutional and technological capacities are strengthened and risks are adequately mitigated.