Working Papers
2016
April 8, 2016
Post-crisis International Banking: An Analysis with New Regulatory Survey Data
Description: Foreign bank lending has stopped growing since the global financial crisis. Changes in banks’ business models, balance-sheet adjustments, as well as the tightening of banking regulations are potential drivers of this prolonged slowdown. The existing literature however suggests an opposite effect related to regulation, with tighter regulations encouraging foreign lending through regulatory arbitrage. We investigate this question using new survey data on regulations specific to banks’ international operations. Our results show that regulatory tightening can explain about half of the decline in the foreign lending-to-GDP ratio between 2007 and 2013. Regulatory changes in home countries have had a larger effect than those in host countries.
April 8, 2016
Mitigating the Deadly Embrace in Financial Cycles: Countercyclical Buffers and Loan-to-Value Limits
Description: This paper presents a new version of MAPMOD (Mark II) to study the effectiveness of macroprudential regulations. We extend the original model by explicitly modeling the housing market. We show how household demand for housing, house prices, and bank mortgages are intertwined in what we call a deadly embrace. Without macroprudential policies, this deadly embrace naturally leads to housing boom and bust cycles, which can be very costly for the economy, as shown by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09.
April 7, 2016
Do Subnational Fiscal Rules Foster Fiscal Discipline? New Empirical Evidence from Europe
Description: This paper studies how fiscal rules interact with the intergovernmental fiscal framework to foster fiscal discipline among European subnational governments. We use political variables describing the fiscal attitudes of the central government as instruments to obtain consistent estimates of the impact of subnational fiscal rules on fiscal balances. The results suggest that the discipline-enhancing effect of fiscal rules is weaker when there are large “vertical fiscal imbalances” that is, large differences in revenue and spending assignments across the different levels of government. These findings imply that separate reforms to reduce excessive vertical fiscal imbalances complement a rules-based fiscal framework that is aimed at fostering fiscal discipline.
April 7, 2016
Amortization Requirements May Increase Household Debt: A Simple Example
Description: Debt amortization requirements have been suggested as a way to reduce household indebtedness. However, a closer look reveals that amortization requirements may create incentives for both borrowers and lenders to borrow and lend more rather than less. Suppose that a household plans to finance a given housing purchase through a preferred future mortgage path. If that mortgage path violates a new amortization requirement, the household can still achieve its preferred mortgage path, net after savings, by initially borrowing more, investing the excess borrowing in a savings account, and fulfilling the amortization requirement by withdrawals from the savings account over time. This is obvious, if the savings interest rate equals the mortgage rate, because then the excess borrowing is costless. But even if the savings interest rate is less than the debt interest rate, so that the excess borrowing is costly, there remains a strong incentive to initially borrow more than without an amortization requirement. Furthermore, under these circumstances, it is profitable and quite riskless for banks to let borrowers borrow more and invest the excess borrowing in a savings account in the bank, giving lenders an incentive to lend more, not less, than without amortization requirements. Thus, amortization requirements as a way of reducing household indebtedness may be counterproductive.
April 7, 2016
Structural Reform and Growth: What Really Matters? Evidence from the Caribbean
Description: Since the 1980’s with the introduction of IMF/WB adjustment programs structural reforms have been a core part of the reform agenda in the Caribbean. The paper reviewed the package of structural reforms in trade liberalization, financial liberalization and tax policy, and gauges their impact on growth. The paper used a set of reform indices to gauge both short-run and long-run effects of structural reforms on growth, controlling for other possible growth determinants using panel dynamic OLS estimation. In addition, recognizing the importance of institutions to growth the empirical analysis also analyzed the impact of institutional quality on growth for a sample of small states including the Caribbean. We concluded that the benefits of structural reforms are only seen over the long-term and in reinvigorating growth the reform effort needs to be revived and include greater attention to strengthening institutional quality.
April 7, 2016
Advancing Financial Development in Latin America and the Caribbean
Description: This paper examines the state of financial development in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region as well as potential growth and stability implications from further development. The analysis suggests that access to financial institutions has expanded notably in the past decade, and the region compares favorably with other emerging market regions on this dimension. The region, however, continues to lag behind peers on broader financial development, especially with respect to markets, though there is substantial heterogeneity across countries. Financial systems in many LAC countries are also underdeveloped relative to their macroeconomic fundamentals. Further financial development could convey net benefits to the region, provided there is adequate regulatory oversight to prevent excesses.
April 7, 2016
Understanding Corporate Vulnerabilities in Latin America
Description: This paper analyzes the potential risks and vulnerabilities of non-financial corporates in Latin America and Canada. We quantify the impact of company-specific, countryspecific, and global factors in driving corporate spreads. Overall, we found that all these factors play a role in explaining corporate risk. In particular, country specific factors such as exchange rate and sovereign CDS spreads are significantly associated with changes in corporate spreads, underscoring the importance of solid policy frameworks. We also find that global conditions, such as the VIX, are dominant drivers of corporate spreads. In recent years, the adverse effects from deteriorating domestic conditions have been broadly offset by relatively bening global financial conditions. However, a sustained reversal in these conditions would put significant pressure on corporate risk.
March 25, 2016
Fiscal Multipliers for Brazil
Description: We find historical fiscal multipliers for Brazil around 0.5, larger than what existing literature typically identifies for the average emerging market. However, spending and public credit multipliers seem to have dropped to near zero since the global financial crisis, as the estimate for the whole sample period (1999-2014) is about ½ of that for precrisis years. By contrast, revenue multipliers have remained broadly stable. We conclude that fiscal consolidations based on expenditure and public credit retrenchment are likely to entail a modest drag on growth in the near term.
March 24, 2016
Macroeconomic Dimensions of Public-Private Partnerships
Description: The voluminous literature comparing public-private partnerships (P3s) and own-investment (OI) by the public sector is dominated by contributions from microeconomic theory. This paper gives macroeconomics a voice in the debate by investigating the repercussions of P3 vs. OI in a dynamic general equilibrium model featuring private capital accumulation and involuntary unemployment with efficiency wages. Typically P3s cost more but produce higher-quality infrastructure and boast a better on-time completion record than OI; consequently, they are comparatively more effective in reducing underinvestment in private capital, underinvestment in infrastructure, unemployment and poverty. The asymmetric impact on macro externalities raises the social return in the P3 2 - 9 percentage points relative to the social return to OI, depending on whether the externalities operate singly or in combination and on whether P3 enjoys an advantage in speed of construction.
March 23, 2016
Trilemma or Dilemma: Inspecting the Heterogeneous Response of Local Currency Interest Rates to Foreign Rates
Description: This paper studies the heterogeneous response across countries of local currency interest rates to foreign and domestic factors, thus contributing to the discussion on the policy trilemma in international economics. On average, floaters appear to be less affected by the U.S. in the short run (up to about one year). However, there is large cross-country heterogeneity in the response: floaters that care less about domestic objectives, exhibit stronger fear of floating, or show higher co-cyclicality with the U.S., respond more to foreign rates. This suggests that floating does not necessarily imply a lack of response of local policy rates to foreign ones, but seems to allow independence when needed. Moreover, the effect of foreign rates on the short end of the local interest rate curve seems to operate mainly via the foreign influence on local policy rates, thus suggesting that central banks may be themselves the source of conduit of the “global credit cycle” discussed by Rey (2014). At the same time, most countries face the equivalent of a “Greenspan conundrum” as their long term rates are mainly influenced by foreign factors.