Working Papers
2019
April 29, 2019
Enabling Deep Negative Rates to Fight Recessions: A Guide
Description: The experience of the Great Recession and its aftermath revealed that a lower bound on interest rates can be a serious obstacle for fighting recessions. However, the zero lower bound is not a law of nature; it is a policy choice. The central message of this paper is that with readily available tools a central bank can enable deep negative rates whenever needed—thus maintaining the power of monetary policy in the future to end recessions within a short time. This paper demonstrates that a subset of these tools can have a big effect in enabling deep negative rates with administratively small actions on the part of the central bank. To that end, we (i) survey approaches to enable deep negative rates discussed in the literature and present new approaches; (ii) establish how a subset of these approaches allows enabling negative rates while remaining at a minimum distance from the current paper currency policy and minimizing the political costs; (iii) discuss why standard transmission mechanisms from interest rates to aggregate demand are likely to remain unchanged in deep negative rate territory; and (iv) present communication tools that central banks can use both now and in the event to facilitate broader political acceptance of negative interest rate policy at the onset of the next serious recession.
April 26, 2019
The Global Economic Recovery 10 Years After the 2008 Financial Crisis
Description: This paper takes stock of the global economic recovery a decade after the 2008 financial crisis. Output losses after the crisis appear to be persistent, irrespective of whether a country suffered a banking crisis in 2007–08. Sluggish investment was a key channel through which these losses registered, accompanied by long-lasting capital and total factor productivity shortfalls relative to precrisis trends. Policy choices preceding the crisis and in its immediate aftermath influenced postcrisis variation in output. Underscoring the importance of macroprudential policies and effective supervision, countries with greater financial vulnerabilities in the precrisis years suffered larger output losses after the crisis. Countries with stronger precrisis fiscal positions and those with more flexible exchange rate regimes experienced smaller losses. Unprecedented and exceptional policy actions taken after the crisis helped mitigate countries’ postcrisis output losses.
April 26, 2019
Global Declining Competition
Description: Using a new firm-level dataset on private and listed firms from 20 countries, we document five stylized facts on market power in global markets. First, competition has declined around the world, measured as a moderate increase in average firm markups during 2000- 2015. Second, the markup increase is driven by already high-markup firms (top decile of the markup distribution) that charge increasing markups. Third, markups increased mostly among advanced economies but not in emerging markets. Fourth, there is a non-monotonic relation between firm size and markups that is first decreasing and then increasing. Finally, the increase is mostly driven by increases within incumbents and also by market share reallocation towards high-markup entrants.
April 24, 2019
Indonesia's Public Wealth: A Balance Sheet Approach to Fiscal Policy Analysis
Description: Public sector balance sheets (PSBS) provide a framework for comprehensive and deep analysis of fiscal risks and policies. To illustrate these benefits, this paper shows how PSBS analysis can be applied to assess risks to Indonesia’s public sector stemming from its public corporations. The paper also shows that the government’s plans to finance a ramp-up in public investment with additional tax revenue increases both economic growth and public wealth.
April 24, 2019
You Are Suffocating Me! Firm-Level Evidence on Crowding Out
Description: Literature on whether government spending crowds out or crowds in the private sector is large, but still without an unambiguous conclusion. Using firm-level data from Ukraine, this paper provides a granular empirical investigation to disentangle the impact of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on private firm investment in Ukraine—a large transition economy. Controlling for firm characteristics and systematic differences across sectors, the results indicate that the SOE concentration in a given sector has a statistically significant negative effect on private fixed capital formation, and that the impact of SOEs is stronger in those industries in which SOEs have a more dominant presence. These findings imply that private firms operating in sectors with a high level of SOE concentration invest systematically less than businesses that are not competing directly with SOEs.
April 19, 2019
The Financial Inclusion Landscape in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Dozen Key Findings
Description: Financial inclusion is a multidimensional concept and countries have chosen diverse methods of enhancing financial inclusion with varying degrees of results. The heterogeneity of financial inclusion is particularly striking in the Asia-Pacific region as member countries range from those that are at the cutting edge of financial technology to others that are aiming to provide access to basic financial services. The wide disparity is not only inter-country but also intra-country. The focus of this paper is to take stock of the current state of financial inclusion in the Asia-Pacific region by highlighting twelve stylized facts about the state of financial inclusion in these countries. The paper finds that the state of financial inclusion depends on several factors, but a holistic approach calibrated to specific country conditions may lead to greater financial inclusion.
April 19, 2019
Death and Taxes: Does Taxation Matter for Firm Survival?
Description: This paper investigates the impact of taxation on firm survival, using hazard models and a large-scale panel dataset on over 4 million nonfinancial firms from 21 countries over the period 1995–2015. We find ample evidence that a lower level of effective marginal tax rate improves firms’ survival chances. This result is not only statistically but also economically important and remains robust when we partition the sample into country subgroups. The effect of taxation on firms’ survival probability is found to exhibit a non-linear pattern and be stronger in developing countries than advanced economies. These findings have important policy implications for the design of corporate tax systems. The challenge is not simply reducing the statutory tax rate, but to level the playing field for all firms by rationalizing differentiated tax treatments across sectors, asset types and sources of financing.
April 9, 2019
Illuminating Economic Growth
Description: This paper seeks to illuminate the uncertainty in official GDP per capita measures using auxiliary data. Using satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an additional measurement of true GDP per capita, we provide a statistical framework, in which the error in official GDP per capita may depend on the country’s statistical capacity and the relationship between nighttime lights and true GDP per capita can be nonlinear and vary with geographic location. This paper uses recently developed results for measurement error models to identify and estimate the nonlinear relationship between nighttime lights and true GDP per capita and the nonparametric distribution of errors in official GDP per capita data. We then construct more precise and robust measures of GDP per capita using nighttime lights, official national accounts data, statistical capacity, and geographic locations. We find that GDP per capita measures are less precise for middle and low income countries and nighttime lights can play a bigger role in improving such measures.
April 5, 2019
Household Debt, Consumption, and Monetary Policy in Australia
Description: This paper discusses the evolution of the household debt in Australia and finds that while higher-income and higher-wealth households tend to have higher debt, lower-income households may become more vulnerable to rising debt service over time. Then, the paper analyzes the impact of a monetary policy shock on households’ current consumption and durable expenditures depending on the level of household debt. The results corroborate other work that households’ response to monetary policy shocks depends on their debt and income levels. In particular, households with higher debt tend to reduce their current consumption and durable expenditures more than other households in response to a contractionary monetary policy shocks. However, households with low debt may not respond to monetary policy shocks, as they hold more interest-earning assets.
March 28, 2019
Gains from Anchoring Inflation Expectations: Evidence from the Taper Tantrum Shock
Description: Many argue that improvements in monetary policy frameworks in emerging market economies over the past few decades, have made them more resilient to external shocks. This paper exploits the May 2013 taper tantrum in the United States to study the reaction of 18 large emerging markets to an external shock, conditioning on their degree of inflation expectations' anchoring. We fi nd that while the tapering announcement negatively affected growth prospects regardless of the level of anchoring, countries with weakly anchored inflation expectations experienced larger exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices, hence comparatively higher inflation. We conclude that efforts to improve the extent of anchoring of inflation expectations in emerging markets pay off, as they ease the trade-off that central banks face when external shocks weaken growth prospects and trigger currency depreciations.