Working Papers
2023
August 11, 2023
Coping with Climate Shocks: Food Security in a Spatial Framework
Description: We develop a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model with heterogeneous house-holds and multiple locations to study households’ vulnerability to food insecurity from cli-mate shocks. In the model, households endogenously respond to negative climate shocks by drawing-down assets, importing food and temporarily migrating to earn additional income to ensure sufficient calories. Because these coping strategies are most effective when trade and migration costs are low, remote households are more vulnerable to climate shocks. Food insecure households are also more vulnerable, as their proximity to a subsistence requirement causes them to hold a smaller capital buffer and more aggressively dissave in response to shocks, at the expense of future consumption. We calibrate the model to 51 districts in Nepal and estimate the impact of historical climate shocks on food consumption and welfare. We estimate that, on an annual basis, floods, landslides, droughts and storms combined generated GDP losses of 2.3 percent, welfare losses of 3.3 percent for the average household and increased the rate of undernourishment by 2.8 percent. Undernourished households experience roughly 50 percent larger welfare losses and those in remote locations suffer welfare losses that are roughly two times larger than in less remote locations (5.9 vs 2.9 percent). In counterfactual simulations, we show the role of better access to migration and trade in building resilience to climate shocks.
August 4, 2023
The Crypto Cycle and US Monetary Policy
Description: We examine fluctuations in crypto markets and their relationships to global equity markets and US monetary policy. We identify a single price component—which we label the “crypto factor”—that explains 80% of variation in crypto prices, and show that its increasing correlation with equity markets coincided with the entry of institutional investors into crypto markets. We also document that, as for equities, US Fed tightening reduces the crypto factor through the risk-taking channel—in contrast to claims that crypto assets provide a hedge against market risk. Finally, we show that a stylized heterogeneous-agent model with time-varying aggregate risk aversion can explain our empirical findings, and highlights possible spillovers from crypto to equity markets if the participation of institutional investors ever became large.
August 4, 2023
Revisiting Covid Scarring in Emerging Markets
Description: The Covid-19 pandemic is expected to result in large and persistent losses in economic output, known as scarring. These losses were expected to be more severe in Emerging Markets than in Advanced Economies. This paper examines the impact of Covid on output in Emerging Markets so far and its implications for projections of economic scarring. While Covid has had a material impact on activity, the recovery has been stronger than initially expected. We find that these positive data surprises have over time been treated increasingly as transitory rather than a signal for the state of scarring. Second, we show that the composition of output losses has been qualitatively different from past last shocks. History suggests that the main driver of scarring is weak productivity. Covid losses, however, have so far been more skewed to employment with a smaller than usual impact on productivity. We argue that these findings suggest that scarring, while substantial, may be ultimately less severe than initially feared, at least over the medium term. We provide alternative sets of medium-term projections to indicate potential magnitudes.
August 4, 2023
Integrated Monetary and Financial Policies for Small Open Economies
Description: We develop a tractable small-open-economy framework to characterize the constrained efficient use of the policy rate, foreign exchange (FX) intervention, capital controls, and domestic macroprudential measures. The model features dominant currency pricing, shallow FX markets, and occasionally-binding external and domestic borrowing constraints. We characterize the conditions for the “traditional prescription”—relying on the policy rate and exchange rate flexibility—to be sufficient, even if externalities persist. The conditions are satisfied for world interest rate shocks if FX markets are deep. By contrast, we show that to manage non-fundamental inflow surges and taper tantrums related to local currency debt, capital inflow taxes and FX intervention should be used instead of the policy rate and exchange rate flexibility. In the realistic case where countries face both shallow FX markets and external borrowing constraints, we establish that some kinds of FX mismatch regulations may reduce the external debt limit friction but worsen FX market depth. Finally, we show that capital controls and domestic macroprudential measures cease to be perfect substitutes if there is a risk that the domestic borrowing constraint binds as a result of the transmission of the global financial cycle.
August 4, 2023
Not All Energy Transitions Are Alike: Disentangling the Effects of Demand and Supply-Side Policies on Future Oil Prices
Description: We use structural scenario analysis to show that the climate policy mix—supply-side versus demand-side policies—can lead to different oil price paths with diverging distributional consequences in a netzero emissions scenario. When emission reduction is driven by demand-side policies, prices would decline to around 25 USD per barrel in 2030, benefiting consuming countries. Vice versa, supply-side climate policies aimed at curbing oil production would push up prices to above 130 USD per barrel, benefiting those producing countries that take the political decision to keep on producing. Consequently, it is wrong to assume that oil prices will necessarily decline due to the clean energy transition. As policies are mostly formulated at the country level and hard to predict at the global level, the transition will raise uncertainty about the price outlook.
August 4, 2023
International Tax Spillovers and Tangible Investment, with Implications for the Global Minimum Tax
Description: This paper articulates and, using newly-assembled data, explores how international taxation affects aggregate tangible cross-border investment. Spillovers from statutory tax rates abroad seem: As sizable as effects from the host’s rate; larger than previous consensus values (attributed to a systematic bias from FDI data); and consistent with ‘implicit’ profit shifting through real investment (rather than ‘paper’ profit shifting). Contrary to much policy discussion, the results also imply that: Host countries’ marginal effective tax rates have at best a weak effect on real investment; those elsewhere have none; and, applied to the prospective global minimum tax, inward tangible investment in most sample countries will increase.
August 4, 2023
Panel Nowcasting for Countries Whose Quarterly GDPs are Unavailable
Description: Quarterly GDP statistics facilitate timely economic assessment, but the availability of such data are limited for more than 60 developing economies, including about 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa as well as more than two-thirds of fragile and conflict-affected states. To address this limited data availablity, this paper proposes a panel approach that utilizes a statistical relationship estimated from countries where data are available, to estimate quarterly GDP statistics for countries that do not publish such statistics by leveraging the indicators readily available for many countries. This framework demonstrates potential, especially when applied for similar country groups, and could provide valuable real-time insights into economic conditions supported by empirical evidence.
August 4, 2023
Predicting Financial Crises: The Role of Asset Prices
Description: We explore the early warning properties of a composite indicator which summarizes signals from a range of asset price growth and asset price volatility indicators to capture mispricing of risk in asset markets. Using a quarterly panel of 108 advanced and emerging economies over 1995-2017, we show that the combination of rapid asset price growth and low asset price volatility is a good predictor of future financial crises. Elevated levels of our indicator significantly increase the probability of entering a crisis within the next three years relative to normal times when the indicator is not elevated. The indicator outperforms credit-based early warning metrics, a result robust to prediction horizons, methodological choices, and income groups. Our results are consistent with the idea that measures based on asset prices can offer critical information about systemic risk levels to policymakers.
August 4, 2023
Do Corporate Bond Shocks Affect Commercial Bank Lending?
Description: Understanding how corporate bond market disruptions are transmitted to the rest of the financial system is essential to gauge systemic financial risk and design policy responses. In this study, we extend the vector autoregression model of Gilchrist and Zakrajšek (2012) to explicitly account for the role of commercial banks in the transmission of corporate bond credit spread shocks. We find that corporate bond market shocks can reduce commercial bank lending activity by tightening loan supply. Policies designed to contain stress in the corporate bond market can thus mitigate systemic risk by limiting contagion to the commercial banking sector.
August 4, 2023
Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Capital-Skill Complementarity
Description: I examine the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on labor market outcomes for skilled and unskilled workers and propose a new channel to improve our understanding of the underlying propagation mechanisms. I find that uncertainty shocks are recessionary with the unskilled experiencing a steeper fall in employment. To rationalize these findings, I build a New Keynesian DSGE model with skill heterogeneity and wage rigidities, which, coupled with precautionary labor supply, significantly amplify contractionary effects of uncertainty on the real economy.