Working Papers
2018
July 24, 2018
Is Unemployment on Steroids in Advanced Economies?
Description: Despite conventional macroeconomic theory is based on the idea that demand shocks can only have temporary effects on unemployment, several European economies display highly persistent unemployment dynamics. The theory of hysteresis challenges this view and points out that, under certain conditions, demand disturbances can have permanent effects. In this paper, we find strong empirical evidence of unemployment hysteresis in advanced economies since the 1990s. Relying on an identification scheme instigated by an insider/outsider model, we study the effects of demand shocks allowing for cross-country heterogeneous dynamics, and exploit such heterogeneity to investigate what institutional settings have the potential to soften or amplify the effects of demand shocks. Our results indicate that strengthening labor market institutions that promote a faster adjustment of real wages, removing disincentives for firms to hire and for workers to be employed, and improving the matching between labor supply and labor demand can lessen the effects of adverse demand shocks and lead to a faster reversion of unemployment rates to pre-shock levels.
July 23, 2018
International Corporate Tax Avoidance: A Review of the Channels, Magnitudes, and Blind Spots
Description: This paper reviews the rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations. It surveys evidence on main channels of corporate tax avoidance including transfer mispricing, international debt shifting, treaty shopping, tax deferral and corporate inversions. Moreover, it performs a meta analysis of the extensive literature that estimates the overall size of profit shifting. We find that the literature suggests that, on average, a 1 percentage-point lower corporate tax rate will expand before-tax income by 1 percent—an effect that is larger than reported as the consensus estimate in previous surveys and tends to be increasing over time. The literature on tax avoidance still has several unresolved puzzles and blind spots that require further research.
July 19, 2018
Inflation News and Euro Area Inflation Expectations
Description: Do euro area inflation expectations remain well-anchored? This paper finds that the protracted period of low (and below-target) inflation in the euro area since 2013 has weakened their anchoring. Testing their sensitivity to inflation and macroeconomic news, this paper expands existing results in two key dimensions. First, by analyzing all available (advanced) inflation releases. Second, the reactions of expectations are investigated at daily, time-varying and intraday frequency regressions to add robustness to our conclusions. Results point to a significant impact of inflation news over recent years that had not been observed before in the euro area.
July 13, 2018
Tax Spillovers from US Corporate Income Tax Reform
Description: This paper describes, and where possible tentatively quantifies, likely tax spillovers from the U.S. corporate income tax reform that was part of the broader 2017 tax reform. It calculates effective tax rates under various assumptions, showing among other findings, how the interest limitation and the Foreign Derived Intangible Income provision can raise or reduce rates. It tentatively estimates that under constant policies elsewhere, the rate cut will reduce tax revenue from multinationals in other countries by on average 1.6 to 5.2 percent. If other countries react in line with historical reaction functions, the revenue loss from multinationals rises to an average of 4.5 to 13.5 percent. The paper also discusses profit-shifting, real location, and policy reactions from the more complex features of the reform.
July 13, 2018
Still Attached? Are Social Safety Nets Working? Labor Force Participation in European Regions
Description: The paper examines the evolution and drivers of labor force participation in European regions, focusing on the effects of trade and technology. As in the United States, rural regions within European countries saw more pronounced declines (or smaller increases) in participation than urban regions. Unlike in the United States, however, trade and technology, captured here using novel measures of initial exposures to routinization and offshoring, did not result in detachment from the workforce in European regions. Instead, regions with high initial exposures to routinization and offshoring experienced so-far larger increases in participation, likely driven by an added second worker effect.
July 13, 2018
Fundamental Drivers of House Prices in Advanced Economies
Description: House prices in many advanced economies have risen substantially in recent decades. But experience indicates that housing prices can diverge from their long-run equilibrium or sustainable levels, potentially followed by adjustments that impact macroeconomic and financial stability. Therefore there is a need to monitor house prices and assess whether they are sustainable. This paper focuses on fundamentals expected to drive long run trends in house prices, including institutional and structural factors. The scale of potential valuation gaps is gauged on the basis of a cross-country panel analysis of house prices in 20 OECD countries.
July 13, 2018
Is the Cycle the Trend? Evidence From the Views of International Forecasters
Description: We revisit the conventional view that output fluctuates around a stable trend by analyzing professional long-term forecasts for 38 advanced and emerging market economies. If transitory deviations around a trend dominate output fluctuations, then forecasters should not change their long-term output level forecasts following an unexpected change in current period output. By contrast, an analysis of Consensus Economics forecasts since 1989 suggest that output forecasts are super-persistent—an unexpected 1 percent upward revision in current period output typically translates into a revision of ten year-ahead forecasted output by about 2 percent in both advanced and emerging markets. Drawing upon evidence from the behavior of forecast errors, the persistence of actual output is typically weaker than forecasters expect, but still consistent with output shocks normally having large and permanent level effects.
July 12, 2018
Bank Network Analysis in the ECCU
Description: This paper applies network analysis to assess the extent of systemic vulnerabilities in the ECCU banking system. It includes two sets of illustrative stress tests. First, solvency and liquidity shocks to each individual bank and the impact on other banks in the network through their biltareal net asset exposures. Second, country and region-wide tail shocks to GDP affecting capital and liquidity of all banks in the shocked jurisdictions, followed by the rippling effects through the regional network. The results identify systemic institutions that merit hightened attention by the regulator, as determined by the degree of connectivity with the rest of the system, and the extent to which they are vulnerable to the failure of other banks.
July 12, 2018
Investment Slowdown in Denmark: Diagnosis and Policy Options
Description: Total investment in Denmark has experienced a sharp slowdown following the global financial crisis. This slowdown has coincided with a decline in labor productivity and expansion of the current account surplus. This paper presents stylized facts summarizing the investment slowdown followed by an empirical analysis identifying its drivers. The results suggest that the decline in output has contributed to investment slowdown, consistent with predictions of the accelerator model. However, other factors, including high leverage and structural rigidities in product markets, also played a role.
July 12, 2018
Housing Price, Credit, and Output Cycles: How Domestic and External Shocks Impact Lithuania's Credit
Description: Lithuania’s current credit cycle highlights the strong link between housing prices and credit. We explore this relationship in more detail by analyzing the main features of credit, housing price, and output cycles in Baltic and Nordic countries during1995-2017. We find a high degree of synchronization between Lithuania’s credit and housing price cycles. Panel regressions show a strong correlation between a credit upturn and housing price upturn. Moreover, panel VAR suggests that shocks in housing prices, credit, and output within and outside Lithuania strongly impact Lithuania’s credit.