Working Papers
2023
February 3, 2023
What Policy Combinations Worked? The Effect of Policy Packages on Bank Lending during COVID-19
Description: This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal, monetary, and prudential policies during the COVID-19 pandemic on bank lending across a broad sample of countries. We combine a comprehensive announcementlevel dataset of policy actions with bank and firm-level information to analyze the effectiveness of different types of policies. We document that different types of policies were introduced together and hence accounting for policy combinations, or packages, is crucial. Lending grew faster at banks in countries that announced packages combining fiscal, monetary, and prudential measures relative to those that relied on some, but not all, policy dimensions. Within packages including all three types of policy measures, banks in countries with more and larger measures saw faster loan growth. The impact was larger among more constrained banks with low equity levels. Large packages combining fiscal, monetary and prudential policies also increased liquidity for bank dependent firms, but did not disproportionately benefit unviable firms.
February 3, 2023
Restructuring Domestic Sovereign Debt: An Analytical Illustration
Description: Sovereign domestic debt restructurings have become more common in recent years and touched upon a growing share of total public debt. This paper offers a simple framework for policymakers to think about the decision whether to restructure domestic sovereign debt as part of an effort to reduce overall public indebtedness. It also highlights a rather wide range of technical, legal, and operational issues a sovereign may face while restructuring domestic debt. As expected, factors such as debt reduction required to achieve sustainability, fiscal savings from a restructuring, and economic costs of a restructuring are key inputs into the decision making regarding a restructuring, but so are factors such as the composition of debt, financial stability costs, and crisis preparedness, all of which are discussed in the paper.
February 3, 2023
How to Mitigate the Impact of Economic Downturns on Labor Markets: Evidence from Nicaragua
Description: This paper studies the drivers of the labor market performance in Nicaragua with a particular focus on informality, to identify vulnerable groups during economic downturns; and estimates the speed of adjustment of employment to shocks. The paper compares this experience with the ones in other CAPDR countries (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama). Our findings are that while the high countercyclical informality in Nicaragua has been the active margin of adjustment during economic downturns mitigating unemployment, the trade-off has been a lower speed of adjustment to shocks hampering the country’s ability to revert to its potential. Policy recommendations relate to mitigating the impact of downturns on employment in Nicaragua, easing adjustments and inequalities in the labor market to hasten the employment recovery and thus, support growth.
February 3, 2023
Good Will Hunting: Do Disasters Make Us More Charitable?
Description: Humans are usually compassionate, caring and empathetic toward others, but are we really hardwired for altruism when a disaster hits? There is evidence that people exposed to natural disasters tend to behave more philanthropically, but most studies rely on small-scale surveys and experimental data. For that reason, this paper contributes to the literature by investigating whether the COVID-19 pandemic has altered prosocial tendencies and charitable donations, using a novel daily dataset of debit and credit card transactions. I conduct a real-time analysis of actual charitable donations in three European countries and find that the COVID-19 pandemic and government interventions have no significant effect on how much people contribute to charities as a share of total spending. A higher preference for precautionary savings in the midst of the pandemic appears to outweigh altruistic behavior, while government welfare programs crowds out private charitable donations.
February 3, 2023
How Costly Will Reining in Inflation Be? It Depends on How Rational We Are
Description: We document that past highly inflationary episodes are often characterized by a steeper inflationslack relationship. We show that model-generated data from a standard small Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model can replicate this empirical finding when estimated with different expectation formation processes. When inflation becomes de-anchored and expectations drift, we can observe high inflation even with a mildly positive output gap in response to cost-push shocks. The results imply that we should not use an unconditioned (not controlling for expectations change) Phillips curve estimated in normal times to predict the cost of reining in inflation. Our optimal policy exercises prescribe early monetary policy tightening and then easing in the context of positive output gaps and inflation far above the central bank target.
January 27, 2023
Northern Triangle Undocumented Migration to the United States
Description: Undocumented migration from the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) to the United States has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years, accelerating at times. The paper investigates what factors could explain this fact, by estimating an investment decision model, using annual data over 1990-2019. Economic labor market conditions (real wages and unemployment rates, especially in the U.S.) play a major role in explaining undocumented migration. Less explored drivers of undocumented migration tied to living conditions at home also explain well undocumented migration (natural disasters, coffee production, higher temperatures, and homicide rates). Tighter border enforcement measures act as a deterrent, and perceptions regarding changes of these measures could also drive up undocumented migration at times. Policies that address the root causes of migration at home, including with the U.S. help, are essential in reducing the difference between perceived benefits and expected costs of migration.
January 27, 2023
Evaluating the Costs of Government Credit Support Programs during COVID-19: International Evidence
Description: Advanced economies made available more than 5 trillion USD through government-supported credit guarantee and direct loan programs to provide lifelines to firms in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the unprecedented scale of credit made available, an in-depth analysis of the fiscal consequences is missing, and the costs of these programs are not recognized in a transparent way. In this paper, we fill in an important aspect of the fiscal picture by estimating the subsidies that were provided by the largest credit guarantee programs introduced in 2020 in seven advanced economies. We estimate the subsidies on a fair value basis that provides a consistent and comprehensive upfront measure of cost. We explain the logic behind applying a fair value framework in a government context and compare it to alternative approaches. For the programs that we examine, total credit extended totaled 1.7 trillion USD. The subsidy element (cash-equivalent subsidy) is estimated to be 67 percent of loan principal on average (37 percent, excluding the US PPP), with a wide range across programs, from 12 to 100 percent. The variation is explained by differences across programs including eligibility criteria, loan terms, compensation to lenders, and other program design choices.
January 27, 2023
Commercial Real Estate in Crisis: Evidence from Transaction-Level Data
Description: During the past two decades, the commercial real estate (CRE) market has been impacted by major disruptions, including the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Using granular data from the U.S., we document how these crises have unfolded and elaborate on the role of heterogeneity and underlying shocks. Both a set of reduced-form approaches and a structural framework suggest a prominent role for demand-side local factors in the short run, along with significant shifts in preferences during crisis episodes. However, valuations become more closely linked to macro-financial factors over the long term. A one-standard deviation tightening in financial conditions is associated with a drop of about 3% in CRE prices in the following quarter, with a stronger impact on the retail sector and milder effects in states where household indebtedness is lower.
January 27, 2023
Gold as International Reserves: A Barbarous Relic No More?
Description: After moving slowly downward for the better part of four decades, central bank gold holdings have risen since the Global Financial Crisis. We identify 14 “active diversifiers,” defined as countries that purchased gold and raised its share in total reserves by at least 5 percentage points over the last two decades. In contrast to the diversification of foreign currency reserves, which has been undertaken by advanced and developing country central banks alike, active diversifiers into gold are exclusively emerging markets. We document two sets of factors contributing to this trend. First, gold appeals to central bank reserve managers as a safe haven in periods of economic, financial and geopolitical volatility, when the return on alternative financial assets is low. Second, the imposition of financial sanctions by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and Japan, the main reserve-issuing economies, is associated with an increase in the share of central bank reserves held in the form of gold. There is some evidence that multilateral sanctions imposed by these, and other countries have a larger impact than unilateral sanctions on the share of reserves held in gold, since the latter leave scope for shifting reserves into the currencies of other non-sanctioning countries.
January 27, 2023
Carbon Policy and Stock Returns: Signals from Financial Markets
Description: This paper uses institutional features of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) and highfrequency data on more than 2,000 publicly listed European firms over 2011–21 to study the impact of carbon policy on stock returns. After extracting the surprise component of regulatory actions, we show that events resulting in a higher carbon price lead to negative returns for firms with high emission intensities. This negative relationship is even stronger for firms in sectors which do not participate in the EU ETS. Taken together, our results indicate that investors price in transition risk stemming from the shift towards a low-carbon economy. We conclude that policies which increase carbon prices are effective in raising the cost of capital for emission intensive firms.