Working Papers
2013
January 11, 2013
Banks’ Foreign Credit Exposures and Borrowers’ Rollover Risks Measurement, Evolution and Determinants
Description: The recent crises highlighted the role of cross-border banking linkages. This paper proposes two new measures for better capturing creditor banking systems’ foreign credit exposures and borrower countries’ reliance on foreign bank credit, by combining BIS data with bank-level data. The results indicate that the proposed refinements matter, especially when foreign bank affiliates’ funding relies heavily on local deposits. In addition, after developing novel and necessary break-in-series and exchange rate variation adjustments, estimations looking at the driving factors of both measures during 2006-2012 highlight: (i) the role of systemic banking crises and global financial conditions in the evolution of banks’ foreign credit exposures; (ii) the role of a larger set of factors in the case of the evolution of borrower countries’ reliance on foreign bank credit—how countries borrowed, from whom they borrowed, and global financial and domestic demand conditions.
January 11, 2013
The Behavior of Currencies during Risk-off Episodes
Description: Episodes of increased global risk aversion, also known as risk-off episodes, have become more frequent and severe since 2007. During these episodes, currency markets exhibit recurrent patterns, as the Japanese yen, Swiss franc, and U.S. dollar appreciate against other G-10 and emerging market currencies. The pattern of these moves can be explained by a combination of fundamental factors, such as the nominal interest rate, the international investment position and measures of exchange rate misalignment, and market-liquidity factors, such as bid-offer spreads and restrictions on international capital flows. We also find that currency performance in a risk-off episode has become more related to a currency?s yield and relationship to broader risks in recent years.
January 11, 2013
New Zealand Banks’ Vulnerabilities and Capital Adequacy
Description: The paper finds that, given New Zealand’s conservative approach in implementing the Basel II framework, New Zealand banks’ headline capital ratios underestimate their capital strength. A comparison with Canadian, UK and Australian banks highlights the impact of New Zealand’s more conservative approach. Stress tests in the paper show that four large New Zealand banks could withstand sizable stand-alone shocks to their exposure to either residential mortgages (calibrated on the Irish crisis experience) or corporate lending. However, combined shocks to both residential mortgages and corporate lending would put more pressure on the banks’ capital. Given high bank concentration and large offshore wholesale funding needs, the merits of higher minimum capital requirements for systemically important domestic banks could be considered, together with other measures to be implemented.
January 9, 2013
A Modern History of Fiscal Prudence and Profligacy
Description: We draw on a newly collected historical dataset of fiscal variables for a large panel of countries—to our knowledge, the most comprehensive database currently available—to gauge the degree of fiscal prudence or profligacy for each country over the past several decades. Specifically, our dataset consists of fiscal revenues, primary expenditures, the interest bill (and thus both the primary and the overall fiscal deficit), the government debt, and gross domestic product, for 55 countries for up to two hundred years. For the first time, a large cross country historical data set covers both fiscal stocks and flows. Using Bohn’s (1998) approach and other tests for fiscal sustainability, we document how the degree of prudence or profligacy varies significantly over time within individual countries. We find that such variation is driven in part by unexpected changes in potential economic growth and sovereign borrowing costs.
Notes: View Electronic Chartbook for this titlePublic Finances in Modern History Database
January 8, 2013
Macroeconomic Model Spillovers and Their Discontents
Description: The Great Recession underlined that policies in some countries can have profound spillovers elsewhere. Sadly, the solution of simulating large macroeconomic models to measure these spillovers has been found wanting. Typical models generate lower international correlations of output and financial asset prices than are seen in even pre-crisis data. Imposing higher financial market correlations creates more reasonable cross-country spillovers, and is likely to become the norm in policy modeling despite weak theoretical underpinnings, as is already true of sticky wages. We propose using event studies to calibrate market reactions to particular policy announcements, and report results for U.S. monetary and fiscal policy announcements in 2009 and 2010 that are plausible and event-specific.
January 8, 2013
Capital Requirements for Over-the-Counter Derivatives Central Counterparties
Description: The central counterparties dominating the market for the clearing of over-the-counter interest rate and credit derivatives are globally systemic. Employing methodologies similar to the calculation of banks’ capital requirements against trading book exposures, this paper assesses the sensitivity of central counterparties’ required risk buffers, or capital requirements, to a range of model inputs. We find them to be highly sensitive to whether key model parameters are calibrated on a point-in-time versus stress-period basis, whether the risk tolerance metric adequately captures tail events, and the ability—or lack thereof—to define exposures on the basis of netting sets spanning multiple risk factors. Our results suggest that there are considerable benefits from having prudential authorities adopt a more prescriptive approach to for central counterparties’ risk buffers, in line with recent enhancements to the capital regime for banks.
January 4, 2013
Breaking the Curse of Sisyphus: An Empirical Analysis of Post-Conflict Economic Transitions
Description: This paper provides a broad empirical analysis of the determinants of post-conflict economic transitions across the world during the period 1960–2010, using a dynamic panel estimation approach based on the system-generalized method of moments. In addition to an array of demographic, economic, geographic, and institutional variables, we introduce an estimated risk of conflict recurrence as an explanatory variable in the growth regression, because post-conflict countries have a tendency to relapse into subsequent conflicts even years after the cessation of violence. The empirical results show that domestic factors, including the estimated probability of conflict recurrence, as well as a range of external variables, contribute to post-conflict economic performance.
January 3, 2013
Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers
Description: This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has been associated with lower growth than expected, with the relation being particularly strong, both statistically and economically, early in the crisis. A natural interpretation is that fiscal multipliers were substantially higher than implicitly assumed by forecasters. The weaker relation in more recent years may reflect in part learning by forecasters and in part smaller multipliers than in the early years of the crisis.
2012
December 27, 2012
Macroprudential Policies and Housing Price: A New Database and Empirical Evidence for Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe
Description: Several countries in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe used a rich set of prudential instruments in response to last decade’s credit and housing boom and bust cycles. We collect detailed information on these policy measures in a comprehensive database covering 16 countries at a quarterly frequency. We use this database to investigate whether the policy measures had an impact on housing price inflation. Our evidence suggests that some—but not all—measures did have an impact. These measures were changes in the minimum CAR and non-standard liquidity measures (marginal reserve requirements on foreign funding, marginal reserve requirements linked to credit growth).
December 21, 2012
The Determinants of Banks' Liquidity Buffers in Central America
Description: Banks’ liquidity holdings are comfortably above legal or prudential requirements in most Central American countries. While good for financial stability, high systemic liquidity may nonetheless hinder monetary policy transmission and financial markets development. Using a panel of about 100 commercial banks from the region, we find that the demand for precautionary liquidity buffers is associated with measures of bank size, profitability, capitalization, and financial development. Deposit dollarization is also associated with higher liquidity, reinforcing the monetary policy and market development challenges in highly dollarized economies. Improvements in supervision and measures to promote dedollarization, including developing local currency capital markets, would help enhance financial systems’ efficiency and promote intermediation in the region.