Working Papers
2020
February 10, 2020
Cyber Risk Surveillance: A Case Study of Singapore
Description: Cyber risk is an emerging source of systemic risk in the financial sector, and possibly a macro-critical risk too. It is therefore important to integrate it into financial sector surveillance. This paper offers a range of analytical approaches to assess and monitor cyber risk to the financial sector, including various approaches to stress testing. The paper illustrates these techniques by applying them to Singapore. As an advanced economy with a complex financial system and rapid adoption of fintech, Singapore serves as a good case study. We place our results in the context of recent cybersecurity developments in the public and private sectors, which can be a reference for surveillance work.
February 7, 2020
Does Child Marriage Matter for Growth?
Description: Global attention to ending child marriage and its socio-economic consequences is gaining momentum. Ending child marriage is not only critical from a development perspective but it also has important economic implications. This paper is the first to quantify the relationship between child marriage and economic growth. Applying a simultaneous equations model, the analysis shows that eliminating child marriage would significantly improve economic growth—if child marriage were ended today, long-term annual per capita real GDP growth in emerging and developing countries would increase by 1.05 percentage points. The results also provide insights on policy prioritization in developing comprehensive strategies to end child marriage. For example, the strong interdependent relationship between education and child marriage suggests that education policies and the budgets that support them should place greater emphasis on reducing child marriage.
February 7, 2020
Monetary Policy Implementation: Operational Issues for Countries with Evolving Monetary Policy Frameworks
Description: This paper discusses operational issues for countries that want to reform their monetary policy frameworks. It argues that stabilizing short-term interest rates on a day-to-day basis has significant advantages, and thus that short-term interest rates, not reserve money, in most cases should be the daily operating target, including for countries relying on a money targeting policy strategy. The paper discusses how a policy formulation framework based on monetary aggregates can be combined with an operational framework that ensures more stable and predictable short-term rates to enhance policy transmission. It also discusses how to best configure an interest-rate-based operational framework when markets are underdeveloped and liqudity management capacity is weak.
February 7, 2020
Macroeconomic Policy, Product Market Competition, and Growth: The Intangible Investment Channel
Description: While there is growing evidence of persistent or even permanent output losses from financial crises, the causes remain unclear. One candidate is intangible capital – a rising driver of economic growth that, being non-pledgeable as collateral, is vulnerable to financial frictions. By sheltering intangible investment from financial shocks, counter-cyclical macroeconomic policy could strengthen longer-term growth, particularly so where strong product market competition prevents firms from self-financing their investments through rents. Using a rich cross-country firm-level dataset and exploiting heterogeneity in firm-level exposure to the sharp and unforeseen tightening of credit conditions around September 2008, we find strong support for these theoretical predictions. The quantitative implications are large, highlighting a powerful stabilizing role for macroeconomic policy through the intangible investment channel, and its complementarity with pro-competition product market deregulation.
February 7, 2020
Measuring Output Gap: Is It Worth Your Time?
Description: We apply a range of models to the U.K. data to obtain estimates of the output gap. A structural VAR with an appropriate identification strategy provides improved estimates of output gap with better real time properties and lower sensitivity to temporary shocks than the usual filtering techniques. It also produces smaller out-of-sample forecast errors for inflation. At the same time, however, our results suggest caution in basing policy decisions on output gap estimates.
January 31, 2020
The Minimum Wage Puzzle in Less Developed Countries: Reconciling Theory and Evidence
Description: We show that a dynamic general equilibrium model with efficiency wages and endogenous capital accumulation in both the formal and (non-agricultural) informal sectors can explain the full range of confounding stylized facts associated with minimum wage laws in less developed countries.
January 31, 2020
Where Should We Go? Internet Searches and Tourist Arrivals
Description: The widespread availability of internet search data is a new source of high-frequency information that can potentially improve the precision of macroeconomic forecasting, especially in areas with data constraints. This paper investigates whether travel-related online search queries enhance accuracy in the forecasting of tourist arrivals to The Bahamas from the U.S. The results indicate that the forecast model incorporating internet search data provides additional information about tourist flows over a univariate approach using the traditional autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and multivariate models with macroeconomic indicators. The Google Trends-augmented model improves predictability of tourist arrivals by about 30 percent compared to the benchmark ARIMA model and more than 20 percent compared to the model extended only with income and relative prices.
January 31, 2020
Labor Market Dynamics, Informality and Regulations in Latin America
Description: Labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are characterized by high levels of informality and relatively rigid regulation. This paper shows that these two features are related and together make the speed of adjustment of employment to shocks slower, especially when regulations are tightly enforced. Evidence suggests that strict labor market regulations also have an adverse effect on medium-term growth. While both regulations on prices (minimum wages) and quantities (employment protection) decrease the speed of adjustment to shocks, they appear to be binding in different phases of the cycle—the former affects mostly the (net) job creation margin and the latter the (net) job destruction margin. The results also highlight possible interactions between labor market regulations and the effectiveness of macro-stabilization tools—including exchange rate depreciation.
January 31, 2020
Productivity Growth and Value Chains in Four European Countries
Description: Advanced economies have been witnessing a pronounced slowdown of productivity growth since the global financial crisis that is accompanied in recent years by a withdrawal from trade integration processes. We study the determinants of productivity slowdown over the past two decades in four closely integrated European countries, Austria, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, based on firm-level data. Participation in global value chains appears to have affected productivity positively, including through its effect on TFP when facilitated by higher investment in intangible assets, a proxy for firm innovation. Other contributors to productivity growth in firms are workforce aging, access to finance, and skills mismatches.
January 31, 2020
How Big are Fiscal Multipliers in Latin America?
Description: This paper uses the strategy and data of Blanchard and Perotti (BP) to identify fiscal shocks and estimate fiscal multipliers for the United States. With these results, it computes the cumulative multiplier of Ramey and Zubairy (2018), now common in the literature. It finds that, contrary to the peak and through multipliers reported by BP, the cumulative tax multiplier is much larger than the cumulative spending one. Hence, the conclusions depend on the definition of multiplier. This methodology is also used to estimate the effects of fiscal shocks on economic activity in eight Latin American countries. The results suggest that the fiscal multipliers vary significantly across countries, and in some cases multipliers are larger than previously estimated.