Working Papers
2011
June 1, 2011
Avoid Filling Swiss Cheese with Whipped Cream: Imputation Techniques and Evaluation Procedures for Cross-Country Time Series
Description: International organizations collect data from national authorities to create multivariate cross-sectional time series for their analyses. As data from countries with not yet well-established statistical systems may be incomplete, the bridging of data gaps is a crucial challenge. This paper investigates data structures and missing data patterns in the cross-sectional time series framework, reviews missing value imputation techniques used for micro data in official statistics, and discusses their applicability to cross-sectional time series. It presents statistical methods and quality indicators that enable the (comparative) evaluation of imputation processes and completed datasets.
June 1, 2011
The Role of Monetary Policy in Turkey During the Global Financial Crisis
Description: Turkey is an interesting case study because it was one of the hardest hit emerging economies by the global financial crisis, with a year-over-year contraction of 15 percent during the first quarter of 2009. At the same time, anticipating the fallout from the crisis, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT) decreased policy rates by an astounding 1025 basis points over the November 2008 to November 2009 period. In this context, this paper addresses the following broad question: If an inflation targeting framework underpinned by a flexible exchange rate regime was not adopted, how much deeper would the recent recession have been? Counterfactual experiments based on an estimated structural model provide quantitative evidence which suggests that the recession would have been substantially more severe. In other words, the interest rate cuts implemented by the CBRT and exchange rate flexibility both helped substantially soften the impact of the global financial crisis.
June 1, 2011
The Real Exchange Rate and Employment in China
Description: We examine the impact of real exchange rate fluctuations on sectoral and regional employment in China from 1980 to 2008. In contrast to theoretical predictions, employment in both the tradable and non-tradable sectors contracts following a real appreciation. Our results are robust across different sub-samples, levels of sectoral disaggregation, and are more pronounced for regions with higher export exposure. We attribute our findings to the importance of services as intermediate input in exportable production. We test this channel of exchange rate transmission using regional input-output tables linked with employment data at the region-sector level. The results of this paper have important implications for China's labor market adjustment should the Chinese RMB strengthen in the future. To mitigate the costs of short-run labor market adjustment, appropriate demand management and structural reforms in the non-traded sectors should play an important role.
June 1, 2011
Resource Windfalls, Macroeconomic Stability and Growth: The Role of Political Institutions
Description: We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the performance of commodity-exporting countries in terms of macroeconomic stability and economic growth in a panel of up to 129 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main findings are threefold. First, we find that overall government spending in commodity-exporting countries has been procyclical. Second, we find that resource windfalls initially crowd out non-resource GDP which then increases as a result of the fiscal expansion. Third, we find that in the long run resource windfalls have negative effects on non-resource sector GDP growth. Yet, the effects turn out to be statistically insignificant when controlling for government spending. Both the effects of resource windfalls on macroeconomic stability and economic growth are moderated by the quality of political institutions.
June 1, 2011
Asean Bond Market Development: Where Does it Stand? Where is it Going?
Description: Since the Asian crisis, ASEAN5 countries have expended considerable effort in trying to develop their domestic bond markets. Yet today these markets are not much larger, relative to GDP, than they were a decade before. How can we explain this? And does this mean that domestic markets have not, in fact, developed? The paper argues that bond market growth has been held back by a sharp fall in investment rates, which has left firms with little need for bond borrowing. Even so, markets have developed in other ways, to such an extent that substantial amounts of foreign portfolio investment have begun to flow into ASEAN5 bonds. These developments have important ramifications. With the investor base growing and infrastructure investment likely to rise, ASEAN5 bond markets could expand rapidly over the next decade, holding out the prospect that the region could finally achieve "twin engine" financial systems.
June 1, 2011
The Distributive Effects of Land Titleon Labor Supply: Evidence From Brazil
Description: This paper studies the effects of property-titling on labor supply. The role of legal ownership security is isolated by comparing the effect that being part of, or excluded from, a land title program in a unique quasi-experiment in two similar communities in the Brazilian city of Osasco. Our main innovation is the estimation of the distributive impact of land title on hours worked via the quantile regression methodology and the weighting estimator of Firpo (2007). The estimates suggest that the impact of land-titling on labor supply is heterogeneous and greater for those households with fewer hours worked before the program.
June 1, 2011
The IMF's Government Finance Statistics Yearbook: Maps of Government for 74 Countries
Description: A useful but little known feature of the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY) is the information on the structure of governments. Institutional tables, included in the GFSY, provide detail on the central, state, and local levels of governments, social security, and extrabudgetary units. We refer to the main levels of government as GL1, GL2, and GL3 in ascending order of institutional coverage. We present maps of the various levels of government for 74 countries to illustrate the usefulness of this database and make it more accessible to users. The maps provide information about how centralized or decentralized government finances and employment are and their size relative to the overall economy. Government map data facilitate the monitoring of fiscal policy and fiscal rules.
June 1, 2011
Information Rigidity in Growth Forecasts: Some Cross-Country Evidence
Description: We document information rigidity in forecasts for real GDP growth in 46 countries over the past two decades. We investigate: (i) if rigidities are lower around turning points in the economy, such as in times of recessions and crises; (ii) if rigidities differ across countries, particularly between advanced countries and emerging markets; and (iii) how quickly forecasters incorporate news about growth in other countries into their growth forecasts, with a focus on how advanced countries‘ growth forecasts incorporate news about emerging market growth and vice versa.
June 1, 2011
Sectoral Composition of Foreign Direct Investment and External Vulnerability in Eastern Europe
Description: In the run up to the global crisis, countries in Central Eastern and Southeastern Europe attracted large capital inflows and some of them built up large external imbalances. This paper investigates whether these imbalances are linked to the sectoral composition of FDI. It shows that FDI in the tradable sectors leads to an improvement of the external balance. We also find that the countries with large market size, good infrastructure, greater trade integration, and educated labor force are more likely to receive more FDI in the tradable sectors.
June 1, 2011
Inflation Dynamics and the Great Recession
Description: This paper examines inflation dynamics in the United States since 1960, with a particular focus on the Great Recession. A puzzle emerges when Phillips curves estimated over 1960-2007 are ussed to predice inflation over 2008-2010: inflation should have fallen by more than it did. We resolve this puzzle with two modifications of the Phillips curve, both suggested by theories of costly price adjustment: we measure core inflation with the median CPI inflation rate, and we allow the slope of the Phillips curve to change with the level and vairance of inflation. We then examine the hypothesis of anchored inflation expectations. We find that expectations have been fully "shock-anchored" since the 1980s, while "level anchoring" has been gradual and partial, but significant. It is not clear whether expectations are sufficiently anchored to prevent deflation over the next few years. Finally, we show that the Great Recession provides fresh evidence against the New Keynesian Phillips curve with rational expectations.