Working Papers
2012
September 1, 2012
Brazil’s Capital Market: Current Status and Issues for Further Development
Description: Capital market development in Brazil is a key policy issue going forward to foster savings, investment and absorptive capacity in a context of prospects for sizable capital flows in the medium term. During the last decade, Brazil has achieved substantial progress in capital market development. The menu of available financial instruments has been expanded, market infrastructure has been reformed and strengthened, and a diversified investor base has been built. Nonetheless, Brazil’s capital markets are still facing a number of challenges including prevalent short-term indexation, investors’ risk aversion to long-term fixed rate bonds, still low liquidity in the secondary market, and managing the role of BNDES. A shift to a lower yield curve environment should continue to gradually take place. But further progress will require continued policy effort to assure macro stability and financial sector reforms to promote the development of longer-term private finance.
September 1, 2012
The Trade Impact of China on EMU: Is It Even Across Members?
Description: This paper investigates the asymmetries in trade spillovers from sector-specific technology shocks in China to selected euro area countries. We use a Ricardian-gravity trade model to estimate sectoral competitiveness in individual euro area countries. Simulations on the impact of productivity shocks in Chinese textiles and machinery suggest that the required adjustment in wages, prices, and factor re-allocation is widely heterogenous across euro area countries on accounts of their different specialization patterns. This raises the question of the distribution of gains and losses from external trade shocks.
September 1, 2012
Dissecting Saving Dynamics: Measuring Wealth, Precautionary, and Credit Effects
Description: We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate’s long stability (from the 1960s through the early 1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s - 2007), and recent substantial increase (2008 - 2011) can all be interpreted using a parsimonious ‘buffer stock’ model of optimal consumption in the presence of labor income uncertainty and credit constraints. Saving in the model is affected by the gap between ‘target’ and actual wealth, with the target wealth determined by credit conditions and uncertainty. An estimated structural version of the model suggests that increased credit availability accounts for most of the saving rate’s long-term decline, while fluctuations in net wealth and uncertainty capture the bulk of the business-cycle variation.
August 1, 2012
What Drives the POLONIA Spread in Poland?
Description: Since the start of the 2008 - 09 financial crisis, the Polish Overnight Index Average (POLONIA) has persistently been below the policy rate, suggesting a limited influence of the NBP’s open market operations on the short-term interbank rate. In this regard, this paper analyzes the behavior of the POLONIA spread and explore several potential factors that could influence the spread. An empirical analysis confirms that the negative POLONIA spread is related to a few factors, which include the existence of the structural liquidity in the banking system; bank’s unwillingness to lock up liquidity in the NBP bills; the frontloading of banks’ fulfillment of the reserve requirements; and external market sentiment. The analysis also shows the effectiveness of the NBP’s responses to the financial crisis and structural liquidity surplus.
August 1, 2012
Exchange Rate Fluctuations and International Portfolio Rebalancing in Thailand
Description: We present empirical evidence that the Thai baht’s value is driven in part by investors’ cross-border equity portfolio rebalancing decisions. Our results are based on comprehensive datasets of FX and stock market transactions undertaken by nonresident investors in Thailand in 2005 and 2006. Higher returns in the stock market relative to a reference stock market are associated with net sales of equities by these investors and a depreciation of the Thai baht. Net purchases of Thai equities lead to an appreciation of the Thai baht. Foreign investors do not appear to hedge the foreign exchange risk related to their stock market positions.
August 1, 2012
Private Information, Capital Flows, and Exchange Rates
Description: We demonstrate empirically that not all capital flows influence exchange rates equally: Capital flows induced by foreign investors’ stock market transactions have both an economically significant and a permanent impact on exchange rates, whereas capital flows induced by foreign investors’ transactions in government bond markets do not. We relate these differences in the price impact of capital flows to differences in the amounts of private information conveyed by these flows. Our empirical findings are based on novel, daily-frequency datasets on prices and quantities of all transactions of foreign investors in the stock, bond, and onshore FX markets of Thailand.
August 1, 2012
Effects of Culture on Firm Risk-Taking: A Cross-Country and Cross-Industry Analysis
Description: This paper investigates the effects of national culture on firm risk-taking, using a comprehensive dataset covering 50,000 firms in 400 industries in 51 countries. Risk-taking is found to be higher for domestic firms in countries with low uncertainty aversion, low tolerance for hierarchical relationships, and high individualism. Domestic firms in such countries tend to take substantially more risk in industries which are more informationally opaque (e.g. finance, mining, IT). Risk-taking by foreign firms is best explained by the cultural norms of their country of origin. These cultural norms do not proxy for legal constraints, insurance safety nets, or economic development.
August 1, 2012
Exchange Rate and Foreign Interest Rate Linkages for Sub-Saharan Africa Floaters
Description: The paper considers the determinants of exchange rate movements among sub-Saharan countries that have flexible exchange rate regimes. The determinants are based on the law of one price and interest parity conditions. Results indicate that the exchange rates have responded significantly to changes in the US Treasury bill rate and to the EMBI spread in recent years. The effects are more important for countries with open capital accounts. On the other hand the paper does not provide any support for the interest rate parity theory because domestic interest rates have no bearing on exchange rate movements.
August 1, 2012
Household Production, Services and Monetary Policy
Description: A distinctive feature of market-provided services is that some of them have close substitutes at home. Households may therefore switch between consuming home and market services in response to changes in the real wage - the opportunity cost of working at home - and changes in the price of market services. In order to analyze and quantify the implications of this trade-off for monetary policy, I embed a household sector into an otherwise standard sticky price DSGE model, which I calibrate to the U.S. economy. The results of the model are twofold. At the sectoral level, household production augments the service sector's New Keynesian Phillips curve with a sizable extra component that co-moves negatively with the output gap term, lowering the incentive of service sector firms to change their prices. This mechanism endogenously amplifies the real effects of a monetary shock in that sector, unlike in the nondurable goods sector for which households cannot manufacture substitutes at home. At the aggregate level, household production also implies more sluggish prices and a stronger response of real macroeconomic variables to a monetary shock. Some empirical support for this theory is provided.
August 1, 2012
The Chicago Plan Revisited
Description: At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan: (1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money. (2) Complete elimination of bank runs. (3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt. (4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation. We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.