Working Papers
2012
February 1, 2012
Structural Transformation and the sophistication of Production
Description: A new dataset on export sophistication reveals that in many countries the importance of modern services, and the sophistication of manufactured and service exports, has increased over time. However, this trend was less pronounced in LICs. Sophisticated sectors are more likely to act as a catalyst for broad-based economic growth, rather than turning into isolated enclaves, when the economy is liberalized, the exchange rate is not overvalued, and there are good information flows. An educated workforce, external liberalization, and good information flows are important prerequisites for developing sophisticated goods and services. An appropriate macroeconomic policy is particularly important for goods, skilled labor and good information flows for services.
February 1, 2012
An Integrated Framework for Financial Positions and Flowson a From-Whom-To-Whom Basis: Concepts, Status, and Prospects
Description: The global crisis of 2008 highlighted the need to understand financial interconnectedness among the various sectors of an economy and between them and their counterparties in the rest of the world. However, application of this kind of analysis has been hampered by the lack of adequate data. This paper sets the background for promoting internationally coordinated efforts for compiling and disseminating data on sectoral financial positions and flows on a from-whom-to-whom basis within the framework of the System of National Accounts. It draws on actual experiences in compiling these kinds of data and provides guidelines for their development in the future.
February 1, 2012
From Stress to Costress: Stress Testing Interconnected Banking Systems
Description: This paper presents an integrated framework for assessing systemic risk. The framework models banks’ capital asset ratios as a function of future losses and credit growth using a generalized method of moments to calibrate shocks to credit quality and credit growth. The analysis is complemented by a simple measure of systemic risk, which captures tail risk comovement among banks in the system. The main contribution of this paper is to advance a simple framework to integrate systemic risk scenarios that assess the impact of aggregate and idiosyncratic factors. The analysis is based on CreditRisk+, which uses analytical techniques—similar to those applied in the insurance industry - to estimate banks’ credit portfolio loss distributions, making no assumptions about the cause of default.
February 1, 2012
Fiscal Policy and the Real Exchange Rate
Description: Government spending on infrastructure has recently increased sharply in many emerging-market economies. This paper examines the mechanism through which public infrastructure spending affects the dynamics of the real exchange rate. Using a two-sector dependent open economy model with intersectoral adjustment costs, we show that government spending generates a non-monotonic U-shaped adjustment path for the real exchange rate with sharp intertemporal trade-offs. The effect of government spending on the real exchange rate depends critically on (i) the composition of public spending, (ii) the underlying financing policy, (iii) the intensity of private capital in production, and (iv) the relative productivity of public infrastructure. In deriving these results, the model also identifies conditions under which the predictions of the neoclassical open economy model can be reconciled with empirical regularities, namely the intertemporal relationship between government spending, private consumption, and the real exchange rate.
February 1, 2012
Fiscal Policy and the Current Account: Are Microstates Different?
Description: This paper examines the empirical link between fiscal policy and the current account focusing on microstates defined as countries with a population of less than 2 million between 1970 and 2009. The paper employs panel regression and panel vector autoregression (VAR) on 155 countries of which 42 are microstates. Panel regression results show that a percentage point improvement in the fiscal balance improves the current account balance by 0.4 percentage points of GDP. The real effective exchange rate has no significant impact on the current account in microstates but the coefficient is significant in the global sample. Panel VAR results show that an increase in government consumption results in real exchange appreciation but the effect on the current account after an initial deterioration dies out quicker in microstates than in the global sample. The result implies that fiscal policy has little effect on the current account in microstates beyond its direct impact on imports. Overall, the results suggest that the weak relative price effects make the effect of fiscal adjustment on the current account much more difficult in microstates.
February 1, 2012
The Valuation Effects of Geographic Diversification: Evidence From U.S. Banks
Description: This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two novel identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in geographic diversity reduce BHC valuations. These findings are consistent with the view that geographic diversity makes it more difficult for shareholders and creditors to monitor firm executives, allowing corporate insiders to extract larger private benefits from firms.
February 1, 2012
Debt, Taxes, and Banks
Description: Understanding the impact of the asymmetric tax treatment of debt and equity on the capital structures of financial institutions is critical to shaping and assessing responses to the problem of excessive leverage that underlay the 2009 financial crisis - but there is no empirical evidence to draw on. Guided by a simple model of banks? financing decisions in the presence of both regulatory constraints and tax asymmetries, this paper explores the impact of corporate tax bias on bank leverage, the use of hybrid instruments and regulatory capital ratios for a panel of over 14,000 commercial banks in 82 countries over nine years. On average, the sensitivity of banks? debt choices proves very similar to that of non-financial firms, consistent with rough offsetting of two opposing effects suggested by the theory. As the model predicts, somewhat counter-intuitively, the impact of tax on hybrids is generally weak or insignificant. Responsiveness to taxation varies significantly across banks, however: those holding smaller equity buffers, and larger banks, are noticeably less sensitive to tax.
February 1, 2012
The Global Macroeconomic Costs of Raising Bank Capital Adequacy Requirements
Description: This paper examines the transitional macroeconomic costs of a synchronized global increase in bank capital adequacy requirements under Basel III, as well as a capital increase covering globally systemically important banks. The analysis, using an estimated multi-country model, contributed to the work of the Macroeconomic Assessment Group analysis, especially in estimating the potential international spillovers associated with a global increase in capital requirements. The magnitude of the effects found in this analysis is relatively modest, especially if monetary policies have scope to ease in response to a widening of interest rate spreads by banks.
February 1, 2012
What Drives Credit Growth in Emerging Asia?
Description: This paper seeks to uncover the main drivers of credit growth in emerging Asia using a multi-country structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model. Taking a novel approach, we developed a two-block SVAR whereby shocks within blocks are identified using sign restrictions, whereas shocks across the blocks are identified using a recursive (block-) Cholesky structure. We find that domestic factors are more dominant than external factors in driving rapid credit growth in emerging Asia. This is particularly true for domestic monetary policy, which can play a pivotal role in terms of managing rapid credit growth in emerging Asia.
February 1, 2012
Capital Inflows, Exchange Rate Flexibility, and Credit Booms
Description: The prospects of expansionary monetary policies in the advanced countries for the foreseeable future have renewed the debate over policy options to cope with large capital inflows that are, at least partly, driven by low interest rates in the financial centers. Historically, capital flow bonanzas have often fueled sharp credit expansions in advanced and emerging market economies alike. Focusing primarily on emerging markets, we analyze the impact of exchange rate flexibility on credit markets during periods of large capital inflows. We show that bank credit grows more rapidly and its composition tilts to foreign currency in economies with less flexible exchange rate regimes, and that these results are not explained entirely by the fact that the latter attract more capital inflows than economies with more flexible regimes. Our findings thus suggest countries with less flexible exchange rate regimes may stand to benefit the most from regulatory policies that reduce banks' incentives to tap external markets and to lend/borrow in foreign currency; these policies include marginal reserve requirements on foreign lending, currency-dependent liquidity requirements, and higher capital requirement and/or dynamic provisioning on foreign exchange loans.