Working Papers
2020
June 26, 2020
The Macroeconomic Costs of Conflict
Description: Macroeconomic costs of conflict are generally very large, with GDP per capita about 28 percent lower ten years after conflict onset. This is overwhelmingly driven by private consumption, which falls by 25 percent ten years after conflict onset. Conflict is also associated with dramatic declines in official trade, with exports (imports) estimated to be 58 (34) percent lower ten years after conflict onset. The onset of conflict often also induces significant refugee outflows to neighboring non-advanced countries in the short run, and relatively small but very persistent refugee outflows to advanced countries over the long run. Finally, we stress that conflict should be defined in terms of the number of people killed relative to the total population. The traditional definition of conflict—based on the absolute number of deaths—skews the sample toward low-intensity conflicts in large countries, thereby understating the negative effects of conflict from a macroeconomic perspective.
June 26, 2020
The Impact of Monetary Policy Communication in an Emerging Economy: The Case of Indonesia
Description: Since the adoption of the inflation targeting framework by Bank Indonesia (BI), monetary policy communication has played an increasingly important role in BI’s policy toolkit. This paper assesses BI’s monetary policy communication from three perspectives: i) its transparency and clarity, ii) its ability to align market expectation and BI’s policy decisions (predictability), and iii) its impact on financial markets. In particular, we assess the impact of BI’s monetary policy practices by focusing on its monetary policy press releases and monetary policy reports. The results show that Bank Indonesia has made significant progress in the transparency of its communication as well as in the institutional framework to support this. Nonetheless, the results also suggest ways in which the impact of communication can be further improved, including by strengthening the clarity of policy messages, its consistency with the policy framework and the depth of the money market.
June 26, 2020
One Money, Many Markets: Monetary Transmission and Housing Financing in the Euro Area
Description: We study the transmission of monetary shocks across euro-area countries using a dynamic factor model and high-frequency identification. We develop a methodology to assess the degree of heterogeneity, which we find to be low in financial variables and output, but significant in consumption, consumer prices, and variables related to local housing and labor markets. Building a small open economy model featuring a housing sector and calibrating it to Spain, we show that varying the share of adjustable-rate mortgages and loan-to-value ratios explains up to one-third of the cross-country heterogeneity in the responses of output and private consumption.
June 26, 2020
Designing Fiscal Redistribution: The Role of Universal and Targeted Transfers
Description: There is a growing debate on the relative merits of universal and targeted social assistance transfers in achieving income redistribution objectives. While the benefits of targeting are clear, i.e., a larger poverty impact for a given transfer budget or lower fiscal cost for a given poverty impact, in practice targeting also comes with various costs, including incentive, administrative, social and political costs. The appropriate balance between targeted and universal transfers will therefore depend on how countries decide to trade-off these costs and benefits as well as on the potential for redistribution through taxes. This paper discusses the trade-offs that arise in different country contexts and the potential for strengthening fiscal redistribution in advanced and developing countries, including through expanding transfer coverage and progressive tax financing.
June 26, 2020
A Survey of Research on Retail Central Bank Digital Currency
Description: This paper examines key considerations around central bank digital currency (CBDC) for use by the general public, based on a comprehensive review of recent research, central bank experiments, and ongoing discussions among stakeholders. It looks at the reasons why central banks are exploring retail CBDC issuance, policy and design considerations; legal, governance and regulatory perspectives; plus cybersecurity and other risk considerations. This paper makes a contribution to the CBDC literature by suggesting a structured framework to organize discussions on whether or not to issue CBDC, with an operational focus and a project management perspective.
June 19, 2020
Comfort in Floating: Taking Stock of Twenty Years of Freely-Floating Exchange Rate in Chile
Description: Chile offers an example of a country that has overcome the fear of floating by reducing balance sheet mismatches, enhancing financial market development, as well as improving monetary, fiscal, and political institutions, and strengthening policy credibility. Under the floating regime, Chile’s economic adjustment to external shocks appears significantly improved, and its exchange rate pass-through has substantially declined. Our results reinforce the case that moving to a clear and credible floating regime can be associated with a reduction in the fear of floating via economic transformation (like smaller balance sheet mismatches, a larger hedging market, and a lower exchange rate pass-through).
June 19, 2020
Social Programs and Formal Employment: Evidence from the Brazilian Bolsa Família Program
Description: Employment is key to combating poverty. Thus, detractors of social assistance programs argue that they create disincentives to work. While there is substantial evidence showing limited effects of these programs on overall labor supply, the jury is still out with respect to their impact on formal employment. This paper exploits an unannounced change in the eligibility rule of the Bolsa Familia program in Brazil, one of the oldest and largest conditional cash transfers in the world, to identify the causal impact of the program on formal employment, combining three large administrative datasets. This paper finds that the program has a positive effect on entry in formal labor market, especially for younger cohorts.
June 19, 2020
The Lack of Convergence of Latin-America Compared with CESEE: Is Low Investment to Blame?
Description: In the last few decades there has been little convergence of income levels in Latin America with those in the United States, in sharp contrast with both emerging Asia and emerging Europe. This paper argues that lack of convergence was not the result of low investment. Latin America is poorer because of lower human capital levels and lower TFP—not because of a lower capital-output ratio. Cross-country differences of TFP in turn are associated with differences in human capital, governance and business climate indicators. We demonstrate that once levels of human capital and governance are taken into account, there is strong conditional cross-country convergence. Poor countries with high levels of human capital, governance or business climate indicators converge rapidly. Poor countries without those attributes do not. We show that low investment is the result of low TFP and thus GDP growth—not the cause.
June 19, 2020
Shocks Matter: Managing Capital Flows with Multiple Instruments in Emerging Economies
Description: We study the optimal management of capital flows in a small open economy model with financial frictions and multiple policy instruments. The paper reports two main findings. First, both foreign exchange intervention (FXI) and macroprudential polices are tools complementary to the monetary policy rate that can largely reduce inflation and output volatility in a scenario of capital outflows. Second, the optimal policy mix depends on the underlying shock driving capital flows. FXI takes the leading role in response to foreign interest rate shocks, while macroprudential policy becomes the prominent tool for domestic risk shocks. These results highlight the importance of calibrating the use of multiple instruments according to the underlying shocks that induce shifts in capital flows.
June 19, 2020
The Distributional Impact of Recessions: the Global Financial Crisis and the Pandemic Recession
Description: Using the U.S. Current Population Survey data, this paper compares the distributional impacts of the Pandemic Crisis and those of the Global Financial Crisis in terms of (i) worker characteristics, (ii) job characteristics–“social” (where individuals interact to consume goods), “teleworkable” (where individuals have the option of working at home), and “essential” jobs (which were not subject to government mandated shut-downs during the recent recession), and (iii) wage distributions. We find that young and less educated workers have always been affected more in recessions, while women and Hispanics were more severely affected during the Pandemic Recession. Surprisingly, teleworkable, social and essential jobs have been historically less cyclical. This historical acyclicality of teleworkable occupations is attributable to its higher share of skilled workers. Unlike during the Global Financial Crisis, however, employment in social industries fell more whereas employment in teleworkable and essential jobs fell less during the Pandemic Crisis. Lastly, during both recessions, workers at low-income earnings have suffered more than top-income earners, suggesting a significant distributional impact of the two recessions.