Working Papers
2017
July 7, 2017
Panama’s Growth Prospects: Determinants and Sectoral Perspectives
Description: This paper estimates medium-term potential growth for a country undergoing significant structural and secular changes. Our forward-looking framework, incorporating three analytical approaches for examining economic prospects, constitutes an important complement to typical backward-looking methods that filter or extrapolate historical data. In particular, the opening of the expanded Panama Canal in 2016 highlights significant structural changes underway in the Panamanian economy. We first analyze growth determinants and find that Panama is well-placed to maintain its business model, with improvements in education and governance important to support growth. Second, the current pipeline of investment projects can help sustain investment-led growth, although at a more moderate pace. Third, further development of the logistics and tourism sectors holds promise to further build on Panama’s comparative advantage.
June 30, 2017
Towards Macroprudential Stress Testing: Incorporating Macro-Feedback Effects
Description: Macro-feedback effects have been identified as a key missing element for more effective macro-prudential stress testing. To fill this gap, this paper develops a framework that facilitates the analysis of both the direct effects of macroeconomic shocks on the solvency of individual banks and feedback effects that allow for the amplification and propagation of shocks that can result from bank deleveraging and credit crunches. The framework ensures consistency in the key relationships between macroeconomic and financial variables, and banks’ balance sheets. This is accomplished by embedding a standard stress-testing framework based on individual banks’ data in a semi-structural macroeconomic model. The framework has numerous applications that can strengthen stress testing and macro financial analysis. Moreover, it provides an avenue for many extensions that address the challenges of incorporating other second-round effects important for comprehensive systemic risk analysis, such as interactions between solvency, liquidity and contagion risks. To this end, the paper presents some preliminary simulations of feedback effects arising from the link between the liquidity and solvency risk.
June 30, 2017
Trade Integration in Latin America: A Network Perspective
Description: The paper applies a network analysis framework to analyze the regional and global integration of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. We compare network-based measures of trade integration to conventional measures, decomposing integration along several dimensions to better understand the sources of trade connectivity and their impact on growth. The paper finds that LAC countries are relatively well integrated in terms of links to diversified markets, but the strength of those links is weak. Comparing trade integration to predictions from gravity models, we find many LAC countries have significant scope to improve connectivity and increase their roles in regional and world trade networks.
June 30, 2017
Does the Stock Market Boost Firm Innovation?: Evidence from Chinese Firms
Description: The paper analyses the effect of the stock market on firm innovation through the lens of initial public offering (IPO) using uniquely matched Chinese firm-level data. We find that IPOs lead to an increase in both the quantity and quality of firm innovation activity. In addition, IPOs expand a firm’s scope of innovation beyond its core business. The impact of IPOs on firm innovation varies across financial constraints, corporate governance, and ownership structures. Our results further illustrate that IPOs induce a firm to increase the number of inventors and enable better retention of existing inventors after the IPO. Finally, we show that the enhanced innovation activity resulting from IPOs increases a firm’s Tobin’s Q in the long run.
June 30, 2017
Extensive Margin Adjustment of Multi-Product Firm and Risk Diversification
Description: Product scope adjustment is a key mechanism through which multi-product firms achieve efficient resource allocations. In this paper, we take a novel perspective to study firms’ product scope adjustment behavior through the lens of asset pricing. Using a unique panel scanner data set containing detailed information on products, matched with the financial information of their manufacturers, we find that multi-product firms with higher product turnover have lower financial risks and lower risk premia. To understand this channel, we propose a stylized model with a time-dependent (Calvo-type) product turnover rate to highlight the ’risk absorption channel’ of product scope adjustment. In response to an economy-wide shock, a firm that can adjust its product scope more flexibly shows lower excess equity returns and lower asset volatility.
June 29, 2017
Fiscal Reforms, Long-term Growth and Income Inequality
Description: We estimate the effects on growth of nine fiscal reform episodes in seven high-income countries using the Synthetic Control Method. These episodes are selected using an indicator-based approach applied to the evaluation of growth-friendly fiscal reforms during 1975-2010. We find that in reform countries the annual growth rate of real GDP was on average about 1 percentage point above their synthetic units 10 years after each respective reform. Moreover, countries which were initially less developed seemed to experience a larger growth impact after their reforms. Results are broadly robust to controlling for structural reforms on business regulation, financial market, labor market, and legal and product markets, which may also affect growth. Our findings also suggest that inequality is not affected by the growth-friendly fiscal reforms analyzed in this paper.
June 29, 2017
Migration and Remittances in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engines of Growth and Macroeconomic Stabilizers?
Description: Outward migration has been an important phenomenon for countries in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), particularly those in Central America and the Caribbean. This paper examines recent trends in outward migration from and remittances to LAC, as well as their costs and benefits. For the home country, the negative impact from emigration on labor resources and productivity seems to outweigh growth gains from remittances, notably for the Caribbean. However, given emigration, remittance flows play key financing and stabilizing roles in Central America and the Caribbean. They facilitate private consumption smoothing, support financial sector stability and fiscal revenues, and help reduce poverty and inequality, without strong evidence for harmful competitiveness effects through shifts in the real exchange rate.
June 28, 2017
Financial Development and Source of Growth: New Evidence
Description: This paper examines how financial development affects the sources of growth—productivity and investment—using a sample of 145 countries for the period 1960-2011. We employ a range of econometric approaches, focusing on the CCA and MENA countries. The analysis looks beyond financial depth to capture the access, efficiency, stability, and openness dimensions of financial development. Yet even in this broad interpretation, financial development does not appear to be a magic bullet for economic growth. We cannot confirm earlier findings of an unambiguously positive relationship between financial development, investment, and productivity. The relationship is more complex. The influence of the different dimensions of financial development on the sources of growth varies across income levels and regions.
June 28, 2017
Who Dares, Wins: Labor Market Reforms and Sovereign Yields
Description: The paper shows that investors value the adoption of structural reforms by lending at lower cost. The reform-induced reduction of long-term yields is bigger when reforms are initiated in good times and in countries facing high borrowing costs. Importantly, there is no statistical evidence that markets systematically punish countries that launch reforms concomitantly with fiscal stimulus. The paper also finds that the social context matters: structural reforms lead to a short-lived overshooting of yields when followed by strikes or lockouts. Controlling for endogeneity issues does not reject the central finding of the paper. These results are economically plausible and confirmed even after using sovereign credit ratings as an alternative dependent variable. These results have two main implications: (i) on average, labor market reforms lower borrowing costs; and (ii) country-specific circumstances also play a role.
June 28, 2017
Cross-Country Spillovers of Fiscal Consolidations in the Euro Area
Description: This paper revisits the issue of cross-country spillovers from fiscal consolidations using an innovative empirical methodology. We find evidence in support of fiscal spillovers in 10 euro area countries. Fiscal consolidation in one country not only reduces domestic output (direct effect), but also the output of other member countries (indirect/spillover effect). Fiscal spillovers are larger for: (i) more closely located and economically integrated countries, and (ii) fiscal shocks originating from relatively larger countries. On average, 1 percent of GDP fiscal consolidation in 10 euro area countries reduces the combined output by 0.6 percent on impact, out of which half is driven by indirect effects from fiscal spillovers. The impact peters out and becomes insignificant over the medium-term. It is largely driven by tax measures, which have a relatively stronger effect on output compared to expenditure measures. The results are robust to alternative measures of bilateral links across countries.