Working Papers
2019
June 28, 2019
The Price of Capital Goods: A Driver of Investment Under Threat
Description: Over the past three decades, the price of machinery and equipment fell dramatically relative to other prices in advanced and emerging market and developing economies. Using cross-country and sectoral data, we show that the decline in the relative price of tangible tradable capital goods provided a significant impetus to the capital deepening that took place during the same time period. The broad-based decline in the relative price of machinery and equipment, in turn, was driven by the faster productivity growth in the capital goods producing sectors relative to the rest of the economy, and deeper trade integration, which induced domestic producers to lower prices and increase their efficiency. Our findings suggest an additional channel through which rising trade tensions and sluggish productivity could threaten real investment growth going forward.
June 28, 2019
The Euro-Area Government Spending Multiplier at the Effective Lower Bound
Description: We build a factor-augmented interacted panel vector-autoregressive model of the Euro Area (EA) and estimate it with Bayesian methods to compute government spending multipliers. The multipliers are contingent on the overall monetary policy stance, captured by a shadow monetary policy rate. In the short run (one year), whether the fiscal shock occurs when the economy is at the effective lower bound (ELB) or in normal times does not seem to matter for the size of the multiplier. However, as the time horizon increases, multipliers diverge across the two regimes. In the medium run (three years), the average multiplier is about 1 in normal times and between 1.6 and 2.8 at the ELB, depending on the specification. The difference between the two multipliers is distributed largely away from zero. More generally, the multiplier is inversely correlated with the level of the shadow monetary policy rate. In addition, we verify that EA data lend support to the view that the multiplier is larger in periods of economic slack, and we show that the shadow rate and the state of the business cycle are autonomously correlated with its size. The econometric approach deals with several technical problems highlighted in the empirical macroeconomic literature, including the issues of fiscal foresight and limited information.
June 28, 2019
The Measurement of External Accounts
Description: Growing international integration in trade and finance can challenge the measurement of external accounts. This paper presents a unified conceptual framework for identifying sources of mismeasurement of foreign investment income in current account balances. The framework allows to derive a precise definition of measurement distortions and an empirical strategy for estimating their importance. As an application, we empirically estimate two specific distortions related to inflation and retained earnings on portfolio equity for a broad set of countries. We find these may explain a non-trivial share of current account imbalances and that they are particularly relevant in countries with large external investment positions. We also discuss how merchanting and profit-shifting activities could lead to measurement distortions. We suggest areas for future research and underline the need to strengthen data collection efforts.
June 28, 2019
Real Effective Exchange Rate and Trade Balance Adjustment: The Case of Turkey
Description: There is an ongoing debate in the literature on whether global trade flows have become disconnected from the large real effective exchange rate movements in the wake of the global financial crisis. The question has important policy implications for the role of exchange rates in supporting growth and restoring external balance. In this paper, we use Turkey---a large and open emerging market economy that has experienced sizable swings of the real effective exchange rate---as a case study to test competing hypotheses. Our results lend support to the finding in existing cross-country studies that the real effective exchange rate remains an important determinant of trade flows. But, its effect is not symmetric in secular periods of appreciation and depreciation and is, oftentimes, dwarfed by the impact on trade flows of the income growth differential between trade partners.
June 17, 2019
How Does Taxation Affect Hours Worked in EU New Member States?
Description: Hours worked vary widely across countries and over time. In this paper, we investigate the role played by taxation in explaining these differences for EU New Member States. By extending a standard growth model with novel data on consumption and labor taxes, we assess the evolution of trends in hours worked over the 1995-2017 period. We find that the inclusion of tax rates in the model significantly improves the tracking of hours. We also estimate the elasticity of hours (and its different margins) to quantify the deadweight loss introduced by consumption and labor taxes. We find that these taxes explain a large share of labor supply differences across EU New Member States and that the potential gains from policy actions are noteworthy.
June 17, 2019
Coping with Falling Oil Prices: The Different Fortunes of African Banks
Description: This paper studies the impact of declining oil prices on banks in sub-Saharan African oil-exporting countries. Results indicate that banks respond differently to an oil shock depending on their ownership: (i) domestic banks are the most adversely impacted and experience a deterioration in asset quality and liquidity; (ii) foreign-owned banks are the most resilient as they are able to improve asset quality and attract deposits but at the same time, they decelerate credit growth; in contrast, (iii) Pan-African Banks help stabilize overall credit but large banks in that segment experience reduced asset quality. These differentiated results suggest a tradeoff between maintaining credit growth and safeguarding financial stability in an oil slump which could be addressed by both micro- and macroprudential policies.
June 17, 2019
Domestic Amplifiers of External Shocks: Growth Accelerations and Reversals in Emerging Market and Developing Economies
Description: External conditions have been found to influence the tendency of emerging market and developing economies to experience episodes of growth accelerations and reversals. In this paper we study the role of domestic policies and other structural attributes in amplifying or mitigating the effect that shifts in external conditions have on growth patterns in emerging market and developing economies over the past five decades. We find that these economies can enhance the growth impulse from external conditions by strengthening their institutional frameworks and adopting a policy mix that protects trade integration; permits exchange rate flexibility; and ensures that vulnerabilities stemming from high current account deficits and external debt, as well as high public debt, are contained.
June 14, 2019
From Basel I to Basel III: Sequencing Implementation in Developing Economies
Description: Developing economies can strengthen their financial systems by implementing the main elements of global regulatory reform. But to build an effective prudential framework, they may need to adapt international standards taking into account the sophistication and size of their financial institutions, the relevance of different financial operations in their market, the granularity of information available and the capacity of their supervisors. Under a proportionate application of the Basel standards, smaller institutions with less complex business models would be subject to a simpler regulatory framework that enhances the resilience of the financial sector without generating disproportionate compliance costs. This paper provides guidance on how non-Basel Committee member countries could incorporate banks’ capital and liquidity standards into their framework. It builds on the experience gained by the authors in the course of their work in providing technical assistance on—and assessing compliance with—international standards in banking supervision.
June 11, 2019
Optimal Fiscal Spending and Reserve Accumulation Policies under Volatile Aid
Description: This paper assesses the optimal setting of fiscal spending and foreign exchange rate intervention policies in response to volatile foreign aid, in a small open economy model that incorporates typical features of low-income countries. Within a class of policy rules, it jointly considers the optimal aid spending and international reserve accumulation policies. The results show that it is optimal to adjust government spending gradually in response to unpredictable fluctuations in aid, while partially accumulating foreign exchange reserves to offset Dutch disease effects. Also, allocating relatively more of the government spending to productive public investment, and less to government consumption, is welfare improving.
June 10, 2019
Fiscal Consolidation and Public Wages
Description: A New Keynesian model with government production, public compensation, and unemployment is fit to U.S. data to study the macroeconomic and fiscal effects of public wage reductions. We find that accounting for the type of government spending is crucial for its macroeconomic implications. Although reductions in public wages and government purchases of goods have similar effects on total output and the fiscal balance, the former can raise private output slightly, in contrast to the substantial contractionary effects of the latter. In addition, the baseline estimation finds that exogenous public wage reductions decrease private wages. Model counterfactuals show that sufficiently rigid nominal private wages can reverse the response of private wages, as the rigidity dampens the labor reallocation effect from the public to private sector that exerts downward pressure on private wages.