Working Papers
2016
March 23, 2016
Reassessing the Productivity Gains from Trade Liberalization
Description: This paper reassesses the impact of trade liberalization on productivity. We build a new, unique database of effective tariff rates at the country-industry level for a broad range of countries over the past two decades. We then explore both the direct effect of liberalization in the sector considered, as well as its indirect impact in downstream industries via input linkages. Our findings point to a dominant role of the indirect input market channel in fostering productivity gains. A 1 percentage point decline in input tariffs is estimated to increase total factor productivity by about 2 percent in the sector considered. For advanced economies, the implied potential productivity gains from fully eliminating remaining tariffs are estimated at around 1 percent, on average, which do not factor in the presumably larger gains from removing existing non-tariff barriers. Finally, we find strong evidence of complementarities between trade and FDI liberalization in boosting productivity. This calls for a broad liberalization agenda that cuts across different areas.
March 23, 2016
Credit, Securitization and Monetary Policy: Watch Out for Unintended Consequences
Description: We show evidence that interest rate hikes slowdown loan growth but lead intermediation to migrate from banks’ balance sheets to non-banks via increased securitization activity. As such, higher interest rates have the potential for unintended consequences; raising systemic risk rather than lowering it by pushing more intermediation activity to more weakly regulated sectors. In the past, this increased securitization activity was driven primarily byb private-label securitization. On the other hand, the government sponsored entities like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae appear to react to higher policy rates by cutting back on their securitization activity but expanding loans to the Federal Home Loan Bank system.
March 23, 2016
Macroprudential and Monetary Policy Interactions in a DSGE Model for Sweden
Description: We analyse the effects of macroprudential and monetary policies and their interactions using an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model tailored to Sweden. Households face a ceiling on their loan-to-value ratio and must amortize their mortgages. The government grants mortgage interest payment deductions. Lending rates are affected by mortgage risk weights. We find that demand-side macroprudential measures are more effective in curbing household debt ratios than monetary policy, and they are less costly in terms of foregone consumption. A tighter macroprudential stance is also found to be welfare improving, by promoting lower consumption volatility in response to shocks, especially when using a combination of macroprudential instruments.
March 21, 2016
Financial Stability and Interest-Rate Policy: A Quantitative Assessment of Costs and Benefits
Description: Should monetary policy use its short-term policy rate to stabilize the growth in household credit and housing prices with the aim of promoting financial stability? We ask this question for the case of Canada. We find that to a first approximation, the answer is no— especially when the economy is slowing down.
March 18, 2016
Monetary Policy in the Presence of Islamic Banking
Description: This paper discusses key issues related to the conduct of monetary policy in countries that have Islamic banks. It describes the macrofinancial background and monetary policy frameworks where Islamic banks typically operate, and discusses the monetary transmission mechanism in economies where Islamic and conventional banking coexist. Most economies with Islamic banks also have conventional banks and this calls for a comprehensive approach to monetary policy. At the same time, a dual approach to monetary policy should be considered whenever the Islamic segment of the financial system is not as developed as the conventional one. The paper tries to shed light on potential spillovers between conventional and Islamic financial systems, and proposes specific recommendations on the design of Islamic monetary policy operations and for facilitating monetary transmission through the Islamic financial system.
March 18, 2016
Nowcasting Annual National Accounts with Quarterly Indicators: An Assessment of Widely Used Benchmarking Methods
Description: Benchmarking methods can be used to extrapolate (or “nowcast”) low-frequency benchmarks on the basis of available high-frequency indicators. Quarterly national accounts are a typical example, where a number of monthly and quarterly indicators of economic activity are used to calculate preliminary annual estimates of GDP. Using both simulated and real-life national accounts data, this paper aims at assessing the prediction accuracy of three benchmarking methods widely used in the national accounts compilation: the proportional Denton method, the proportional Cholette-Dagum method with first-order autoregressive error, and the regression-based Chow-Lin method. The results show that the Cholette-Dagum method provides the most accurate extrapolations when the indicator and the annual benchmarks move along the same trend. However, the Denton and Chow-Lin methods could prevail in real-life cases when the quarterly indicator temporarily deviates from the target series.
March 17, 2016
Implications of Food Subsistence for Monetary Policy and Inflation
Description: We introduce subsistence requirements in food consumption into a simple new-Keynesian model with flexible food and sticky non-food prices. We study how the endogenous structural transformation that results from subsistence affects the dynamics of the economy, the design of monetary policy, and the properties of inflation at different levels of development. A calibrated version of the model encompasses both rich and poor countries and broadly replicates the properties of inflation across the development spectrum, including the dominant role played by changes in the relative price of food in poor countries. We derive a welfare-based loss function for the monetary authority and show that optimal policy calls for complete (in some cases nearcomplete) stabilization of sticky-price non-food inflation, despite the presence of a foodsubsistence threshold. Subsistence amplifies the welfare losses of policy mistakes, however, raising the stakes for monetary policy at earlier stages of development.
March 17, 2016
Optimal Fiscal Adjustment under Uncertainty
Description: The paper offers a non-probabilistic framework for representation of uncertainty in the context of a simple linear-quadratic model of fiscal adjustment. Instead of treating model disturbances as random variables with known probability distributions, it is only assumed that they belong to some pre-specified compact set. Such an approach is appropriate when the decision maker does not have enough information to form probabilistic beliefs or when considerations for robustness are important. Solution of the model in the minimax sense when disturbance sets are ellipsoids is obtained and the application of the method is illustrated using the example of Portugal.
March 17, 2016
Tax Administration Reform in China: Achievements, Challenges, and Reform Priorities
Description: Tax administration improvements have contributed significantly to a doubling of China’s tax-to-GDP ratio and the substantial reduction in taxpayers’ compliance costs since the mid-1990s. This paper describes the key features of China’s tax administration and their evolution over the last 20 years. It also identifes emerging challenges to the tax system and areas where further tax administration improvements are needed to sustain tax revenue and reduce taxpayers’ compliance costs in the future.
March 17, 2016
Foreign Exchange Intervention under Policy Uncertainty
Description: We study the use of foreign exchange (FX) intervention as an additional policy instrument in an environment with learning, where agents infer the central bank policy rules from its policy actions. Under full information, a central bank focused on stabilizing output and inflation can achieve better outcomes by using FX intervention as an additional policy tool. Under policy uncertainty, where agents perceive that monetary policy may also have exchange rate stabilization goals, the use of FX intervention entails a trade-off, reducing output volatility while increasing inflation volatility. While having an additional policy tool is always beneficial, we find that the optimal magnitude of intervention is higher in monetary policy regimes with lower uncertainty. These results indicate that the benefits of using FX intervention as an additional stabilization tool are greater in regimes where monetary policy is credibly focused on output and inflation stabilization.