Working Papers
2018
June 13, 2018
The Macroeconomic and Distributional Implications of Fiscal Consolidations in Low-income Countries
Description: We quantitatively investigate the macroeconomic and distributional impacts of fiscal consolidations in low-income countries (LICs) through value added tax (VAT), personal income tax (PIT), and corporate income tax (CIT). We extend the standard heterogeneous agents incomplete markets model by including multiple sectors and rural-urban distinction to capture salient features of LICs. We find that overall, VAT has the least efficiency costs but is highly regressive, while PIT impacts the economy in the opposite way with CIT staying in between. Cash transfers targeting rural households mitigate the negative distributional impacts of VAT most effectively, while public investment leads to little redistribution.
June 13, 2018
The Effects of Weather Shocks on Economic Activity: What are the Channels of Impact?
Description: Global temperatures have increased at an unprecedented pace in the past 40 years. This paper finds that increases in temperature have uneven macroeconomic effects, with adverse consequences concentrated in countries with hot climates, such as most low-income countries. In these countries, a rise in temperature lowers per capita output, in both the short and medium term, through a wide array of channels: reduced agricultural output, suppressed productivity of workers exposed to heat, slower investment, and poorer health. In an unmitigated climate change scenario, and under very conservative assumptions, model simulations suggest the projected rise in temperature would imply a loss of around 9 percent of output for a representative low-income country by 2100.
June 13, 2018
The Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Consolidation in Emerging Economies: Evidence from Latin America
Description: We estimate the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in 14 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. We examine contemporaneous policy documents to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by responding to prospective economic conditions. Based on this narrative dataset, our estimates suggest that fiscal consolidation has contractionary effects on GDP, consistent with a multiplier of 0.9. We find these effects to be close to those in OECD countries based on a similarly constructed dataset (Devries and others, 2011). We also find similar estimation results for the two groups of economies for the effect of fiscal consolidation on the external current account balance, providing support for the twin deficits hypothesis.
June 13, 2018
Bailing Out the People? When Private Debt Becomes Public
Description: This paper documents a form of private sector bailout that is much more common (and yet unnoticed) than the typical bank bailout. Building on the newly-created Global Debt Database, we show that excess private debt systematically turns into higher public debt, regardless of whether the credit boom resulted in a crisis or a more orderly deleveraging process. This debt migration operates mainly through growth rather than explicit bailouts: private deleveraging weighs on activity, prompting a countercyclical government response to support economic activity. Ultimately, whether this debt substitution results in a net increase or a net decline of overall indebtedness in the economy depends on the extent of the growth slowdown during the deleveraging spell. These findings suggest that markets and policymakers should move away from looking at private and sovereign debt in silos and pay closer attention to the total stock of debt in the economy, as the line between the two tends to become blurry.
June 13, 2018
The Exposure to Routinization: Labor Market Implications for Developed and Developing Economies
Description: Evidence that the automation of routine tasks has contributed to the polarization of labor markets has been documented for many developed economies, but little is known about its incidence in developing economies. We propose a measure of the exposure to routinization—that is, the risk of the displacement of labor by information technology—and assemble several facts that link the exposure to routinization with the prospects of polarization. Drawing on exposures for about 85 countries since 1990, we establish that: (1) developing economies are significantly less exposed to routinization than their developed counterparts; (2) the initial exposure to routinization is a strong predictor of the long-run exposure; and (3) among countries with high initial exposures to routinization, polarization dynamics have been strong and subsequent exposures have fallen; while among those with low initial exposure, the globalization of trade and structural transformation have prevailed and routine exposures have risen. Although we find little evidence of polarization in developing countries thus far, with rapidly rising exposures to routinization, the risks of future labor market polarization have escalated with potentially significant consequences for productivity, growth and distribution.
June 13, 2018
Short Term Inflation Determinants in Barbados
Description: Inflation in Barbados is mainly imported. But how are external shocks transmitted to the domestic economy? Shouldn’t there be also a domestic component, albeit very small, given the presence of capital controls? We focus on short term dynamics and contribute to the existing literature in three ways: (i) we identify the process with which inflation expectations are likely to be formed in Barbados; (ii) we add forward looking inflation expectations as one of the main channels through which external monetary shocks are transmitted to the economy; and (iii) we measure the importance of domestic shocks. We find that due to the peg, forward-looking inflation expectations in the reserve currency country are an important component of the inflation expectation process in Barbados and that they are a key channel in the international monetary transmission mechanism. Domestic factors, mainly monetary shocks, also matter given the limited degree of monetary autonomy provided by capital controls.
June 13, 2018
Fiscal Adjustment in the Gulf Countries: Less Costly than Previously Thought
Description: This paper estimates fiscal multipliers for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Using OLS panel fixed effects on a sample of six countries from 1990-2016, results indicate that GCC fiscal multipliers have declined in recent years which would make the on-going fiscal consolidation less costly than previously thought. Though both capital and current multipliers have declined in recent years, capital multipliers are larger than current multipliers, which implies that reducing (less productive) current spending will help limit the adverse impact of such measures on growth.
June 13, 2018
Are Elasticities of Taxable Income Rising?
Description: This paper assesses a possible explanation for the global downward trend in top personal income tax rates over the last decades: globalization and the related tax evasion and avoidance opportunities could have raised elasticities of taxable income, which would imply lower optimal tax rates. The paper estimates elasticities of taxable income for top income earners using a large sample of economies and years with a common method, allowing an analysis of trends in such elasticities. The paper finds that elasticities do not appear to exhibit any clear pattern over the years. The downward trend in tax rates must have other possible explanations, which are briefly discussed.
June 13, 2018
Pushed Past the Limit? How Japanese Banks Reacted to Negative Interest Rates
Description: In this paper, we investigate how negative interest rate policy (NIRP) introduced in January 2016 by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) affected Japanese banks' lending and risk taking behavior. The BoJ's announcement was an unexpected surprise to the market and was followed by a sharp drop in equity prices of Japanese financial firms. We exploit the cross-sectional variation in the change of share prices on the day of the announcement to measure banks' differential exposure to NIRP. We show that more exposed banks increased their credit and took on more risk compared to banks that were less exposed to negative rates.
June 13, 2018
Progressive Taxation of Extractive Resources as Second-Best Optimal Policy
Description: The paper provides a critical review of the literature on the concept of progressivity in the taxation of petroleum and mineral resources and offers a fresh perspective on its purpose and measurement. Regressive taxes, such as royalties, exist to satisfy policy objectives other than revenue maximization, such as achieving early revenues, while rent-based or profit-sensitive fiscal instruments must be designed with progressive marginal rates to maximize government revenues. Hence, the emphasis should be placed on tax rate progression of the direct taxation of profit or rent, rather than progressivity in the overall government take. However, as regressive taxes, by their very nature, tend to be distortionary, the optimal degree of progression in the rent- or profit-tax rates must take these distortions into account. The central ideas are illustrated with a simple analytical model in which a second-best optimal tax rate schedule on profit is characterized in the presence of the tax distortions caused by the regressive taxes. Some practical implications of the analysis are discussed.