Working Papers
2017
July 24, 2017
Sovereign Debt Restructurings in Grenada: Causes, Processes, Outcomes, and Lessons Learned
Description: This paper documents the two debt restructurings that Grenada undertook in 2004–06 and 2013–15.Both restructurings emerged as a consequence of weak fiscal and debt situations, whichbecame unsustainable soon after external shocks hit the island economy. The two restructurings provided liquidity relief, with the second one involving a principal haircut. However, the first restructuring was not able to secure long-term debt sustainability. Grenada’s restructuring experience shows the importance of (1) establishing appropriate debt restructuring objectives; (2) committing to policy reforms and maintaining ownership of the restructuring goals; and (3) engaging closely and having clear communications with creditors.
July 24, 2017
Macroprudential Policy Spillovers: A Quantitative Analysis
Description: This paper analyzes cross-border macrofinancial spillovers from a variety of macroprudential policy measures, using a range of quantitative methods. Event study and panel regression analyses find that liquidity and sectoral macroprudential policy measures often affect cross-border bank credit, whereas capital measures do not. This empirical evidence is stronger for tightening than for loosening measures, is distributed across credit leakage and reallocation effects, and is generally regionally concentrated. Consistently, structural model based simulation analysis indicates that output and bank credit spillovers from sectoral macroprudential policy shocks are generally small worldwide, but are regionally concentrated and economically significant for countries connected by strong trade or financial linkages. This simulation analysis also indicates that countercyclical capital buffer adjustments have the potential to generate sizeable regional spillovers.
July 24, 2017
Why Is Labor Receiving a Smaller Share of Global Income? Theory and Empirical Evidence
Description: This paper documents the downward trend in the labor share of global income since the early 1990s, as well as its heterogeneous evolution across countries, industries and worker skill groups, using a newly assembled dataset, and analyzes the drivers behind it. Technological progress, along with varying exposure to routine occupations, explains about half the overall decline in advanced economies, with a larger negative impact on middle-skilled workers. In emerging markets, the labor share evolution is explained predominantly by global integration, particularly the expansion of global value chains that contributed to raising the overall capital intensity in production.
July 24, 2017
What Explains the Decline of the U.S. Labor Share of Income? An Analysis of State and Industry Level Data
Description: The U.S. labor share of income has been on a secular downward trajectory since the beginning of the new millennium. Using data that are disaggregated across both state and industry, we show the decline in the labor share is broad-based but the extent of the fall varies greatly. Exploiting a new data set on the task characteristics of occupations, the U.S. input-output tables, and the Current Population Survey, we find that in addition to changes in labor institutions, technological change and different forms of trade integration lowered the labor share. In particular, the fall was largest, on average, in industries that saw: a high initial intensity of “routinizable” occupations; steep declines in unionization; a high level of competition from imports; and a high intensity of foreign input usage. Quantitatively, we find that the bulk of the effect comes from changes in technology that are linked to the automation of routine tasks, followed by trade globalization.
July 19, 2017
Women Are Key for Future Growth: Evidence from Canada
Description: How important are female workers for economic growth? This paper presents empirical evidence that an increase in female labor force participation is positively associated with labor productivity growth. Using panel data for 10 Canadian provinces over 1990–2015, we found that a 1 percentage point increase in the labor force participation among women with high educational attainment would raise Canada’s overall labor productivity growth by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage point a year. This suggests that if the current gap of 7 percentage points between male and female labor force participation with high educational attainment were eliminated, the level of real GDP could be about 4 percent higher today. The government has appropriately stepped up its efforts to improve gender equality, as part of its growth strategy. In particular, the government’s plan to expand access to affordable child care is a positive step. However, we argue that to maximize the policy outcome given a budget constraint, provision of subsidized child care—including publicly funded child care spaces—should be better targeted to working parents.
July 19, 2017
Smooth Operator: Remittances and Fiscal Shocks
Description: With 250 million migrants globally, remittances are one of the major sources of income in many developing countries. While there is abundant evidence that remittances facilitate consumption smoothing in receving countries, the literature has not considered whether this effect varies with the fiscal stance and during fiscal shocks. Therefore, we investigate the impact of remittances on the stability of household consumption, using both cross-country and household-level datasets. Our focus is on whether the consumption-smoothing effect changes with fiscal policy phases and whether remittances and government support are substitutes or complements in stabilizing household consumption. We find that remittances help smooth consumption, and hence improve welfare, more during fiscal consolidation episodes, while this impact is insignificant during fiscal expansions. The results also indicate that the effect is more pronounced in countries with greater reliance on remittances.
July 19, 2017
Designing a Simple Loss Function for Central Banks: Does a Dual Mandate Make Sense?
Description: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. This paper studies how to design simple loss functions for central banks, as parsimonious approximations to social welfare. We show, both analytically and quantitatively, that simple loss functions should feature a high weight on measures of economic activity, sometimes even larger than the weight on inflation. Two main factors drive our result. First, stabilizing economic activity also stabilizes other welfare relevant variables. Second, the estimated model features mitigated inflation distortions due to a low elasticity of substitution between monopolistic goods and a low interest rate sensitivity of demand. The result holds up in the presence of measurement errors, with large shocks that generate a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and resource utilization, and also when ensuring a low probability of hitting the zero lower bound on interest rates.
July 19, 2017
Financial Resource Curse in Resource-Rich Countries
Description: Why do commodity-dependent developing countries have typically lower levels of financial development than their peers? The literature has proposed many possible explanations, but it typically does not dwell on the deep mechanisms that drive such an outcome. In this paper, we argue that the main cause is the shocks in commodity prices. We test the hypothesis on 68 commodity-rich developing countries between 1980 and 2014, and we find strong evidence of the financial development resource curse through the channel of commodity price shocks, after controlling for other explanations found in the literature. The findings are robust to the different types of commodities, the nature of the shocks, and various indicators of financial development. We also show how the impact of these shocks can be mitigated through good quality of governance.
July 18, 2017
A Crude Shock: Explaining the Impact of the 2014-16 Oil Price Decline Across Exporters
Description: The decline in oil prices in 2014-16 was one of the sharpest in history, and put to test the resilience of oil exporters. We examine the degree to which economic fundamentals entering the oil price decline explain the impact on economic growth across oil exporting economies, and derive policy implications as to what factors help to mitigate the negative effects. We fi nd that pre-existing fundamentals account for about half of the cross-country variation in the impact of the shock. Oil exporters that weathered the shock better tended to have a stronger fi scal position, higher foreign currency liquidity buffers, a more diversifi ed export base, a history of price stability, and a more flexible exchange rate regime. Within this group of countries, the impact of the shock is not found to be related to the size of oil exports, or the share of oil in fi scal revenue or economic activity.
July 18, 2017
On Swing Pricing and Systemic Risk Mitigation
Description: Swing pricing allows a fund manager to transfer to redeeming or subscribing investors the costs associated with their trading activity, thus potentially discouraging large flows. This liquidity management tool, which is already used in major jurisdictions, may also help mitigate systemic risk. Here we develop and apply a methodology to investigate whether swing pricing does in fact help dampen flows out of funds, especially during periods of market stress. Drawing on evidence of first-mover advantage within a group of ‘swinging’ corporate bond funds, we provide policy considerations for enhancing the tool’s effectiveness as a systemic risk mitigant.