Working Papers
2013
December 20, 2013
Resilience in Latin America: Lessons from Macroeconomic Management and Financial Policies
Description: This paper analyzes the unprecedented resilience of Latin American countries to the global financial crisis. It argues that sound macroeconomic conditions, which allowed an unusual monetary and fiscal expansion, exchange rate flexibility, a strong and well--regulated financial system, high level of reserves, and a bit of luck coming from very high terms of trade, were central to good economic performance. Persevering along the road of strong macroeconomic and financial policies is necessary, but not sufficient, to go from recovery to sustained growth.
December 20, 2013
Procyclicality and the Search for Early Warning Indicators
Description: This paper compares three types of early warning indicators of financial instability – those based on financial market prices, those based on normalized measures of total credit and those based on liabilities of financial intermediaries. Prices perform well as concurrent indicators of market conditions but are not suitable as early warning indicators. Total credit and liabilities convey similar information and perform better as early warning indicators, but liabilities are more transparent and the decomposition between core and non-core liabilities convey additional useful information.
December 19, 2013
System Priors: Formulating Priors about DSGE Models' Properties
Description: This paper proposes a novel way of formulating priors for estimating economic models. System priors are priors about the model's features and behavior as a system, such as the sacrifice ratio or the maximum duration of response of inflation to a particular shock, for instance. System priors represent a very transparent and economically meaningful way of formulating priors about parameters, without the unintended consequences of independent priors about individual parameters. System priors may complement or also substitute for independent marginal priors. The new philosophy of formulating priors is motivated, explained and illustrated using a structural model for monetary policy.
December 19, 2013
Adding China to the Global Projection Model
Description: We extend the Global Projection Model (GPM) to include a separate block for China. China plays an important role in shaping global economic outcomes, given its sheer size and trade integration with other key economies, its demand for commodities, and its policies. Also, the Chinese economy has several unique features which differentiate it from the rest of emerging Asia. These features (the use of multiple monetary-policy instruments and a managed-floating exchange-rate policy) mean that a separate treatment of China allows for a better consideration of China, as well as how the rest of emerging Asia behaves.
December 19, 2013
Securitization: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead
Description: This paper examines the financial stability implications arising from securitization markets, with one eye on the past and another on the future. The paper begins by deriving a number of “lessons learned” based on an examination of key industry developments in the years before the crisis. Emphasis is placed on the various ways in which securitization markets dramatically changed shape in the years preceding the crisis, vis-à-vis their earlier (simpler) incarnation. Current impediments to securitization markets are then discussed, including a treatment of various regulatory initiatives, the operational infrastructure of securitization markets, and related official sector intervention. Finally, a broad suite of policy recommendations is presented to address the factors that either contributed to the crisis or may currently be posing obstacles to growth-supportive, sustainable securitization markets. These proposals are guided by the objective of preserving the beneficial features of securitization, while mitigating those that pose a potential risk to financial stability.
December 19, 2013
Real Money Investors and Sovereign Bond Yields
Description: Experience from the global financial crisis suggests that countries’ borrowing costs are not solely determined by macro and fiscal fundamentals. Factors such as ownership structures of government securities, among others, also play a significant role. This paper investigates the effect of “real money investors”—domestic nonbanks and national and foreign central banks—on bond yields for a sample of 45 advanced and emerging market economies. The results show that, while bond yields rise with the debt to GDP ratio, this increase is partly offset if this debt falls in the hands of real money investors. Nonetheless, for some countries there is the risk that such ownership structure could change over the long run, which would impose upward pressure on borrowing costs, especially where fiscal positions are weak.
December 19, 2013
Policy Analysis and Forecasting in the World Economy: A Panel Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Approach
Description: This paper develops a structural macroeconometric model of the world economy, disaggregated into thirty five national economies. This panel unobserved components model encompasses an approximate linear panel dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring a monetary transmission mechanism, a fiscal transmission mechanism, and extensive macrofinancial linkages, both within and across economies. A variety of monetary policy analysis, fiscal policy analysis, spillover analysis, and forecasting applications of the estimated model are demonstrated, based on a Bayesian framework for conditioning on judgment.
December 19, 2013
A Financial Conditions Index for Poland
Description: This paper constructs a financial conditions index for Poland to explore the link between financial conditions and real economic activity. The index in constructed by applying two complementary approaches—factor analysis and vector auto-regression approach. We evaluate the index’s forecasting performance against a composite leading indicator developed by the OECD. We found that the FCI is highly correlated with GDP growth, attesting to the importance of financial sector in Poland’s economy. In-sample and out-of-sample forecasting exercises indicate that the FCI can outperform the CLI in predicting near-term GDP growth.
December 17, 2013
Monetary Transmission in Brazil: Has the Credit Channel Changed?
Description: This paper investigates the transmission of monetary policy by private banks in Brazil during the recent easing cycle. The analysis presented uses a panel dataset with information on lending by private banks in Brazil and concludes that monetary transmission through lending volumes was not impaired. Instead, the observed diminished lending appears to be related to supply and demand factors, as well as to the rapid expansion of public banks’ lending.
December 17, 2013
This Time They Are Different: Heterogeneity and Nonlinearity in the Relationship Between Debt and Growth
Description: We study the long-run relationship between public debt and growth in a large panel of countries. Our analysis takes particular note of theoretical arguments and data considerations in modeling the debt-growth relationship as heterogeneous across countries. We investigate the issue of nonlinearities (debt thresholds) in both the cross-country and within-country dimensions, employing novel methods and diagnostics from the time-series literature adapted for use in the panel. We find some support for a nonlinear relationship between debt and long-run growth across countries, but no evidence for common debt thresholds within countries over time.