Working Papers
2020
June 19, 2020
Does Going Tough on Banks Make the Going Get Tough? Bank Liquidity Regulations, Capital Requirements, and Sectoral Activity
Description: Whether and to what extent tougher bank regulation weighs on economic growth is an open empirical question. Using data from 28 manufacturing industries in 50 countries, we explore the extent to which cross-country differences in bank liquidity and capital levels were related to differences in sectoral activity around the period of the global financial crisis. We find that industries which are more dependent on external finance, in countries where banks had higher liquidity and capital ratios, performed relatively better during the crisis, with regard to investment rates and the creation of new enterprises. This relationship, however, exists only for bank-based systems and emerging market economies. In the pre-crisis period, we find only a marginal link to bank capital. These findings survive a battery of robustness checks and provide some solid support for the tighter prudential measures introduced under Basel III.
June 19, 2020
Debt, Investment, and Growth in Developing Countries with Segmented Labor Markets
Description: We introduce a new suite of macroeconomic models that extend and complement the Debt, Investment, and Growth (DIG) model widely used at the IMF since 2012. The new DIG-Labor models feature segmented labor markets, efficiency wages and open unemployment, and an informal non-agricultural sector. These features allow for a deeper examination of macroeconomic and fiscal policy programs and their impact on labor market outcomes, inequality, and poverty. The paper illustrates the model's properties by analyzing the growth, debt, and distributional consequences of big-push public investment programs with different mixes of investment in human capital and infrastructure. We show that investment in human capital is much more effective than investment in infrastructure in promoting long-run economic development when investments earn their average estimated returns. The decision about how much to invest in human capital versus infrastructure involves, however, an acute intertemporal trade-off. Because investment in education affects labor productivity with a long lag, it takes 15+ years before net national income, the private capital stock, real wages for the poor, and formal sector employment surpass their counterparts in a program that invests mainly in infrastructure. The ranking of alternative investment programs depends on the policymakers' social discount rate and on the weight of distributional objectives in the social welfare function.
June 12, 2020
Improving Crop Yields in Sub-Saharan Africa - What Does the East African Data Say
Description: Recent micro level data from East Africa is used to benchmark aggregate data and assess the role of agricultural inputs in explaining variation in crop yields on smallholding plots. Fertilizer, improved seeds, protection against erosion and pesticides improve crop yields in Rwanda and Ethiopia, but not Uganda, possibly associated with lack of use there. With all positive yield determinants in place, wheat and maize yields could increase fourfold. The data hints at the negative effect of climate change on yields and the benefits of accompanying measures to mitigate its adverse impact (access to finance and protection against erosion). The adverse effect of crop damage on yields varies between 12/13 percent (Rwanda, Uganda) to 36 percent (Ethiopia). Protection against erosion and investment financing mitigate these effects considerably.
June 12, 2020
Fiscal Resilience Building: Insights from a New Tax Revenue Diversification Index
Description: Does the reliance on diversified tax structure enhance resilience to fiscal risks? This paper gives an answer to this question by proposing a new cross-country tax revenue diversification index (RDI). The RDI builds on the Theil index, and unlike the few existing tax diversification indices, which are constructed only at the state level for the US, is computed at the national level, covering a broad panel of 127 countries over the period 2000-15. We find suggestive evidence that tax revenue diversification reduces tax revenue volatility, thus bringing to the data long-held views about the prominence of tax revenue diversification for fiscal resilience strengthening. While exploring the drivers of the RDI, we find that tax revenue diversification is not just a reflection of economic diversification, but also an outcome of macroeconomic, political and institutional factors. Interestingly, a non-monotone relationship is also at play between the RDI and economic development, with countries’ portfolio of tax sources getting more diversified as their economy develops, until a tipping point, where richer countries start finding it harder to diversify further their tax revenue sources.
June 12, 2020
How Large and Persistent is the Response of Inflation to Changes in Retail Energy Prices?
Description: We estimate the dynamic effects of changes in retail energy prices on inflation using a novel monthly database, covering 110 countries over 2000:M1 to 2016:M6. We find that (i) inflation responds positively to retail energy price shocks, with effects being, on average, modest and transitory. However, our results suggest significant heterogeneity in the response of inflation to these shocks owing to differences in factors related to labor market flexibility, energy intensity, and monetary policy credibility. We also find compelling evidence of asymmetric effects—under sufficiently large shocks—in the case of high-income and low-income countries, with increases in retail fuel prices inducing larger effects on inflation than decreases in fuel prices.
June 12, 2020
Would Population Aging Change the Output Effects of Fiscal Policy?
Description: Would population aging affect the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus? Despite the renewed focus on population aging, there are few empirical studies on the output effects of fiscal policy in aging economies. Our study fills this gap by analyzing this issue in OECD countries. We find that, as population ages, the output effects of fiscal spending shocks are weakened. We also find that, while high-debt countries generally face weaker fiscal multipliers, high-debt aging economies face even weaker multipliers. These results point to important policy implications: population aging would call for a larger fiscal stimulus to support aggregate demand during recession and thus require larger fiscal space to allow a wider swing of the fiscal position without creating concerns for fiscal sustainability. Our analysis also suggests that policy measures to promote labor supply could help increase the output effect of fiscal stimulus in aging economies.
June 12, 2020
Government Spending Effects in a Policy Constrained Environment
Description: The theoretical literature generally finds that government spending multipliers are bigger than unity in a low interest rate environment. Using a fully nonlinear New Keynesian model, we show that such big multipliers can decrease when 1) an initial debt-to-GDP ratio is higher, 2) tax burden is higher, 3) debt maturity is longer, and 4) monetary policy is more responsive to inflation. When monetary and fiscal policy regimes can switch, policy uncertainty also reduces spending multipliers. In particular, when higher inflation induces a rising probability to switch to a regime in which monetary policy actively controls inflation and fiscal policy raises future taxes to stabilize government debt, the multipliers can fall much below unity, especially with an initial high debt ratio. Our findings help reconcile the mixed empirical evidence on government spending effects with low interest rates.
June 12, 2020
FX Intervention to Stabilize or Manipulate the Exchange Rate? Inference from Profitability
Description: We analyze the profitability of FX swaps used by the central bank of Brazil to shed light on the rationale for FX intervention. We find that swaps are profitable in expectation, suggesting that FX intervention is used to stabilize the exchange rate in the face of temporary excessive movements rather than to manipulate it away from fundamental values. In line with this interpretation, we find that the scale of FX intervention responds to the degree of exchange rate misalignment relative to UIP conditions. We also document that intervention is more aggressive when there is less uncertainty about the medium-term level of the exchange rate and when the exchange rate is overvalued rather than undervalued.
June 12, 2020
The Costs of Macroprudential Deleveraging in a Liquidity Trap
Description: We examine the effects of various borrower-based macroprudential tools in a New Keynesian environment where both real and nominal interest rates are low. Our model features long-term debt, housing transaction costs and a zero-lower bound constraint on policy rates. We find that the long-term costs, in terms of forgone consumption, of all the macroprudential tools we consider are moderate. Even so, the short-term costs differ dramatically between alternative tools. Specifically, a loan-to-value tightening is more than twice as contractionary compared to loan-to-income tightening when debt is high and monetary policy cannot accommodate.
June 12, 2020
Who will Bear the Brunt of Lockdown Policies? Evidence from Tele-workability Measures Across Countries
Description: Lockdowns imposed around the world to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic are having a differential impact on economic activity and jobs. This paper presents a new index of the feasibility to work from home to investigate what types of jobs are most at risk. We estimate that over 97.3 million workers, equivalent to about 15 percent of the workforce, are at high risk of layoffs and furlough across the 35 advanced and emerging countries in our sample. Workers least likely to work remotely tend to be young, without a college education, working for non-standard contracts, employed in smaller firms, and those at the bottom of the earnings distribution, suggesting that the pandemic could exacerbate inequality. Crosscountry heterogeneity in the ability to work remotely reflects differential access to and use of technology, sectoral mix, and labor market selection. Policies should account for demographic and distributional considerations both during the crisis and in its aftermath.