Working Papers
2010
July 1, 2010
Public Capital and Growth
Description: This paper estimates the impact of public capital on economic growth for forty-eight OECD and non-OECD countries during 1960 - 2001. Using the production function and its extensions, it finds a positive - but concave - elasticity of output with respect to public capital, which is robust to changes in time intervals and varying depreciation rates. Furthermore, in non-OECD countries the growth impact of public capital is higher once longer time intervals are considered.
July 1, 2010
Peru: Drivers of De-dollarization
Description: Peru has successfully pursued a market-driven financial de-dollarization during the last decade. Dollarization of credit and deposit of commercial banks - across all sectors and maturities - has declined, with larger declines for commercial credit and time and saving deposits. The analysis presented in this paper confirms that de-dollarization has been driven by macroeconomic stability, introduction of prudential policies to better reflect currency risk (such as the management of reserve requirements), and the development of the capital market in soles. Further de-dollarization efforts could focus on these three fronts. Given the now consolidated macroeconomic stability, greater exchange rate flexibility could foster de-dollarization; additional prudential measures could further discourage banks’ lending and funding in foreign currency; while further capital market development in domestic currency would help overall financial de-dollarization.
July 1, 2010
Does Procyclical Fiscal Policy Reinforce Incentives to Dollarize Sovereign Debt?
Description: This paper explores the link between the cyclical patterns of macroeconomic and policy variables and the currency composition of domestic sovereign debt in emerging market countries. The empirical analysis is anchored in an equilibrium model, in which the dollarization of sovereign debt arises as a result of the optimal portfolio choices by risk-averse investors, and of a sovereign debt manager who takes fiscal policy as given. The model predicts that in countries where the exchange rate is countercyclical (i.e., the exchange rate depreciates during recessions), a more procyclical fiscal policy (i.e., expansionary in good times and contractionary in bad times) would lead, on average, to a more dollarized domestic sovereign debt. The empirical analysis using the Jeanne-Guscina EM Debt database (2006) on the currency structure of the central government debt in 22 emerging market countries over 1980 - 2005, supports these predictions.
July 1, 2010
China’s Economic Growth: International Spillovers
Description: This paper presents some facts on China’s role in the world economy and measures the impact of China’s growth on growth in the rest of the world in the short and long term. Short-run estimates based on VARs and error-correction models suggest that spillover effects of China’s growth have increased in recent decades. Long-term spillover effects, estimated through growth regressions based on panel data, are also significant and have extended in recent decades beyond Asia. The estimates are robust to the effects of global and regional shocks, changes in model specification, and sample period.
July 1, 2010
Financial Innovation, the Discovery of Risk, and the U.S. Credit Crisis
Description: Uncertainty about the riskiness of new financial products was an important factor behind the U.S. credit crisis. We show that a boom-bust cycle in debt, asset prices and consumption characterizes the equilibrium dynamics of a model with a collateral constraint in which agents learn "by observation" the true riskiness of a new financial environment. Early realizations of states with high ability to leverage assets into debt turn agents optimistic about the persistence of a high-leverage regime. The model accounts for 69 percent of the household debt buildup and 53 percent of the rise in housing prices during 1997-2006, predicting a collapse in 2007.
July 1, 2010
Budget Consolidation: Short-Term Pain and Long-Term Gain
Description: The paper evaluates the costs and benefits of fiscal consolidation using simulations based on the IMFs global DSGE model GIMF. Over the longer run, well-targeted permanent reductions in budget deficits lead to a considerable increase in both the growth rate and the level of output. The gains may be enhanced by shifting some of the tax burden from incomes to consumption. In the short run, credibility plays a crucial role in determining the size of initial output loses. Global current account imbalances would be significantly reduced if budget consolidation was larger in countries with current account deficits.
July 1, 2010
World Food Prices and Monetary Policy
Description: The large swings in world food prices in recent years renew interest in the question of how monetary policy in small open economies should react to such imported price shocks. We examine this issue in a canonical open economy setting with sticky prices and where food plays a distinctive role in utility. We show how world food price shocks affect natural output and other aggregates, and derive a second order approximation to welfare. Numerical calibrations show broad CPI targeting to be welfare-superior to alternative policy rules once the variance of food price shocks is sufficiently large as in real world data.
July 1, 2010
External Finance, Sudden Stops, and Financial Crisis: What is Different This Time?
Description: This paper develops a two-country DSGE model to investigate the transmission of a global financial crisis to a small open economy. We find that economies hit by a sudden stop arising from financial distress in the global economy are likely to face a more prolonged crisis than sudden stop episodes of domestic origin. Moreover, in contrast to the existing literature, our results suggest that the greater a country's trade integration with the rest of the world, the greater the response of its macroeconomic aggregates to a sudden stop of capital flows.
July 1, 2010
Should African Monetary Unions Be Expanded? An Empirical Investigation of the Scope for Monetary Integration in Sub-Saharan Africa
Description: This paper develops a full-fledged cost-benefit analysis of monetary integration, and applies it to the currency unions actively pursued in Africa. The benefits of monetary union come from a more credible monetary policy, while the costs derive from real shock asymmetries and fiscal disparities. The model is calibrated using African data. Simulations indicate that the proposed EAC, ECOWAS, and SADC monetary unions bring about net benefits to some potential members, but modest net gains and sometimes net losses for others. Strengthening domestic macroeconomic frameworks is shown to provide some of the same improvements as monetary integration, reducing the latter’s relative attractiveness.
July 1, 2010
Automatic Stabilizers and the Size of Government: Correcting a Common Misunderstanding
Description: The size of government is a commonly used variable in many analytical studies on the effects of fiscal policy. An accepted practice is to measure it as the ratio of government spending to GDP. However, this is not the correct metric when computing the stabilization effects of nondiscretionary fiscal policy. Intuitively, public spending does not react to cyclical conditions as much as taxes do - as reflected in the standard zero-one elasticity assumptions for spending and revenue, respectively. This paper shows that the revenue to GDP ratio is the appropriate indicator of government size for the purpose of assessing the stabilization effects of nondiscretionary fiscal policy.