Working Papers
2018
September 28, 2018
Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Rate and Base Changes: Evidence from Fiscal Consolidations
Description: This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of tax changes during fiscal consolidations. We build a new narrative dataset of tax changes during fiscal consolidation years, containing detailed information on the expected revenue impact, motivation, and announcement and implementation dates of nearly 2,500 tax measures across 10 OECD countries. We analyze the macroeconomic impact of tax changes, distinguishing between tax rate and tax base changes, and further separating between changes in personal income, corporate income, and value added tax. Our results suggest that base broadening during fiscal consolidations leads to smaller output and employment declines compared to rate hikes, even when distinguishing between tax types.
September 28, 2018
China's Local Government Bond Market
Description: Local governments play a significant role in China’s public finance and fiscal operations. The size of local government debt has grown rapidly over the past years, exceeding the stock of sovereign debt in China. How does this development compare to other countries and what policies can foster the sound development of the bond markets? This paper finds that despite its rapid growth, the local government bond market is still underdeveloped. Severe impediments—low liquidity, weak credit discipline, structural fiscal deficit in local governments—have become more visible. Reforms to develop a sound local government bond market should harmonize tax and regulations, build liquidity, and advance fiscal reforms to tighten off-budget borrowing and address intergovernmental imbalances.
September 28, 2018
What Do Monetary Contractions Do? Evidence From Large, Unanticipated Tightenings
Description: As the “Volcker shock” is believed to have generated useful information on the effects of monetary policy, this paper develops a simple procedure to identify other unanticipated monetary contractions. The approach is applied to a panel data set spanning 162 countries (over the period 1970-2017), in which it identifies 147 large monetary contractions. The procedure selects episodes where a protracted period of loose monetary policy was suddenly followed by sizeable nominal interest rate increases. Focusing on contractions of significant size increases the signal-to-noise ratio, while they are unlikely to be accompanied by confounding “information effects” (markets interpreting a rate hike as the Central Bank being optimistic about the real side of the economy). A subsequent panel VAR analysis suggests that a 100-basis point rate hike reduces real GDP by 0.5 percent. This reduction in output seems to be persistent, pointing to a certain degree of hysteresis. The price level falls by 1.5 percent, indicating that the medium-/long-run impact of contractionary monetary shocks is not characterized by a neo-Fisherian response. Advanced economies appear to display more price stickiness than emerging/developing countries, as the former combine a more muted price response with a larger effect on output.
September 14, 2018
Systemic Banking Crises Revisited
Description: This paper updates the database on systemic banking crises presented in Laeven and Valencia (2008, 2013). Drawing on 151 systemic banking crises episodes around the globe during 1970-2017, the database includes information on crisis dates, policy responses to resolve banking crises, and the fiscal and output costs of crises. We provide new evidence that crises in high-income countries tend to last longer and be associated with higher output losses, lower fiscal costs, and more extensive use of bank guarantees and expansionary macro policies than crises in low- and middle-income countries. We complement the banking crises dates with sovereign debt and currency crises dates to find that sovereign debt and currency crises tend to coincide or follow banking crises.
September 11, 2018
An Imperfect Financial Union With Heterogeneous Regions
Description: We analyze a union of financially-integrated yet politically-sovereign countries, where households in the Northern core of the union lend to those in the Southern periphery in a unified debt market subject to a borrowing constraint. This constraint generates sudden stops throughout the South, depresses the intra-union interest rate, and reduces Northern welfare below its unconstrained level, while having ambiguous effects on Southern welfare. During sudden stops, Pareto improvements can be achieved using North-to-South governmental loans if Southern governments have the capacity to commit to repay, or using a combination of Southern debt relief and budget-neutral taxes and subsidies if they do not. From the pre-crisis perspective, it is Pareto-improving to allow loans and debt relief to be negotiated in later sudden-stop periods as long as the regions in the union are sufficiently heterogeneous to begin with. We show that our results are robust to production and to limited financial openness of the union.
September 11, 2018
The Fiscal Cost of Conflict: Evidence from Afghanistan 2005-2016
Description: I use a monthly panel of provincially-collected central government revenues and conflict fatalities to estimate government revenues lost due to conflict in Afghanistan since 2005. I identify causal effects by instrumenting for conflict using pre-sample ethno-linguistic share. Headline estimates are very large, implying total revenue losses since 2005 of $3bn, and future revenue gains from peace of about 6 percent of GDP per year. Reduced collection efficiency, rather than lower economic activity, appears to be the key channel. OLS estimates understate the causal effect by a factor of four. Comparing to estimates from Powell’s (2017) generalized synthetic control method suggests that this bias results from omitted variables and measurement error in equal share. The findings underscore the considerable economic loss due to conflict, and the importance of careful identification in measuring this loss.
September 11, 2018
Carbon Taxation for International Maritime Fuels: Assessing the Options
Description: The International Maritime Organization (IMO) announced in April 2018 a target of cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the sector by 50 percent below 2008 levels by 2050 and subsequent meetings of the IMO will develop a strategy for making headway on this commitment. This paper seeks to inform dialogue about the possibility of a carbon tax as a key element of GHG mitigation policy for international maritime transport. The paper discusses the case for the tax over alternative mitigation instruments, options for the practical design issues, and then presents estimates of the impacts of carbon taxation and other instruments from an analytical model of the maritime sector.
September 11, 2018
External Audit Arrangements at Central Banks
Description: This paper takes stock of external audit arrangements at central banks. Its focus is on the annual audit of central bank financial statements, as well as legal and institutional measures that support audit quality and independence. The paper outlines good practices in these areas and provides a summary of actual practices observed based on a review of audited financial statements and central bank legislation. While the audit frameworks for central banks differ depending on their legal and institutional circumstances, central banks’ external audits increasingly follow international standards. Most of them are audited by auditors with international affiliations and embrace modern governance structures that provide for audit oversight. However, the paper also notes that a sizeable number of central banks do not publish the audit results in a timely manner, which leaves room for improvement in transparency practices.
September 11, 2018
Managing Reductions in Aid Inflows: Assessing Policy Choices in Haiti
Description: A low-income country such as Haiti that confronts an environment of diminishing aid inflows must assess tradeoffs among the available policy options: spending cuts, monetization, sales of debt, or use of foreign reserves. To provide the analytical tools for this task, the paper draws from a set of DSGE models recently developed to evaluate policy choices in low-income countries for which external aid flows represent an important revenue source. Two simplified stylized variations of the main model are used to gain intuition and initially assess the trdeaoffs. Subsequenctly a full-scale small open economy DSGE model, calibrated to match conditions in Haiti and in similar low-income countries, is employed. Several key results are common to all model versions. While sales of foreign exchange reserves can compensate for the loss of aid inflows, this strategy is not sustainable. The remaining policy choices entail larger welfare costs, involving lower consumption levels and real depreciation. The results suggest that a mixture of spending cuts and depreciation is the best strategy, when use of foreign reserves is constrained.
September 11, 2018
Macroprudential Stress Tests and Policies: Searching for Robust and Implementable Frameworks
Description: Macroprudential stress testing (MaPST) is becoming firmly embedded in the post-crisis policy-frameworks of financial-sectors around the world. MaPSTs can offer quantitative, forward-looking assessments of the resilience of financial systems as a whole, to particularly adverse shocks. Therefore, they are well suited to support the surveillance of macrofinancial vulnerabilities and to inform the use of macroprudential policy-instruments. This report summarizes the findings of a joint-research effort by MCM and the Systemic-Risk-Centre, which aimed at (i) presenting state-of-the-art approaches on MaPST, including modeling and implementation-challenges; (ii) providing a roadmap for future-research, and; (iii) discussing the potential uses of MaPST to support policy.