Working Papers
2010
January 1, 2010
Recovery Determinants of Distressed Banks: Regulators, Market Discipline, or the Environment?
Description: Based on detailed regulatory intervention data among German banks during 1994-2008, we test if supervisory measures affect the likelihood and the timing of bank recovery. Severe regulatory measures increase both the likelihood of recovery and its duration while weak measures are insignificant. With the benefit of hindsight, we exclude banks that eventually exit the market due to restructuring mergers. Our results remain intact, thus providing no evidence of "bad" bank selection for intervention purposes on the side of regulators. More transparent publication requirements of public incorporation that indicate more exposure to market discipline are barely or not at all significant. Increasing earnings and cleaning credit portfolios are consistently of importance to increase recovery likelihood, whereas earnings growth accelerates the timing of recovery. Macroeconomic conditions also matter for bank recovery. Hence, concerted micro- and macro-prudential policies are key to facilitate distressed bank recovery.
January 1, 2010
International Pricing of Emerging Market Corporate Debt: Does the Corporate Matter?
Description: We examine risk spreads charged on corporate bonds placed by emerging market borrowers on international exchanges. While global developments have an important effect on spreads, changes in firm-level default risk also matter significantly in a way consistent with theory and experience in mature markets. In contrast, except during periods of financial crisis, country factors play a limited role. These findings go against the supposition that limited information on emerging market firms or significant agency problems prevent firm-level credit discrimination by international investors. The firm-level information capitalization into spreads possibly reflects protection afforded by the exchange listing on international markets.
January 1, 2010
A Model for Full-Fledged Inflation Targeting and Application to Ghana
Description: A model in which monetary policy pursues full-fledged inflation targeting adapts well to Ghana. Model features include: endogenous policy credibility; non-linearities in the inflation process; and a policy loss function that aims to minimize the variability of output and the interest rate, as well as deviations of inflation from the long-term low-inflation target. The optimal approach from initial high inflation to the ultimate target is gradual; and transitional inflation-reduction objectives are flexible. Over time, as policy earns credibility, expectations of inflation converge towards the long-run target, the output-inflation variability tradeoff improves, and optimal policy responses to shocks moderate.
January 1, 2010
An Estimated Model with Macrofinancial Linkages for India
Description: This paper develops a small open economy dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with macrofinancial linkages. The model includes a financial accelerator--entrepreneurs are assumed to partially finance investment using domestic and foreign currency debt--to assess the importance of financial frictions in the amplification and propagation of the effects of transitory shocks. We use Bayesian estimation techniques to estimate the model using India data. The model is used to assess the importance of the financial accelerator in India and the optimality of monetary policy.
January 1, 2010
The Outlook for Financing Japan's Public Debt
Description: Despite the rapid rise in public debt and large fiscal deficits, Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields have remained fairly stable. Possible factors include: Japan's sizeable pool of household savings, presence of large and stable institutional investors, and strong home bias. These factors are likely to persist for some time, but going forward, the market's capacity to absorb debt is likely to diminish, as population aging reduces savings inflows and financial reforms enhance risk appetite. This could in turn strengthen the link between JGB yields and the stock of public debt. In light of these structural changes in the market, fiscal consolidation will be key for maintaining market stability.
January 1, 2010
China: Does Government Health and Education Spending Boost Consumption?
Description: Consumption in China is unusually low and has continued to decline as a share of GDP over the past decade. A key policy question is how to reverse this trend, and rebalance growth away from reliance on exports and investment and toward consumption. This paper investigates whether the sizable increase in government social spending in recent years lowered precautionary saving and increased consumption. The main findings are that spending on health, but not education, had an impact on household behavior. The impact, moreover, is large. A one yuan increase in government health spending is associated with a two yuan increase in urban household consumption.
January 1, 2010
Estimating Poland's Potential Output: A Production Function Approach
Description: The paper develops a methodology based on the production-function approach to estimate potential output of the Polish economy. The paper concentrates on obtaining a robust estimate of the labor input by deriving Poland's natural rate of unemployment. The estimated unemployment gap is found to track well pressures on resource constraints. Moreover, the overall results show that, prior to the recent global financial crisis, Poland's output and employment were both growing above potential. The production function is also used to derive medium-term projections of the output gap. According to our methodology, in the aftermath of the global crisis, Poland is not expected to experience a sizable and persistent negative output gap.
January 1, 2010
Are Financial Crises Alike?
Description: This paper investigates whether financial crises are alike by considering whether a single modeling framework can fit multiple distinct crises in which contagion effects link markets across national borders and asset classes. The crises considered are Russia and LTCM in the second half of 1998, Brazil in early 1999, dot-com in 2000, Argentina in 2001-2005, and the recent U.S. subprime mortgage and credit crisis in 2007. Using daily stock and bond returns on emerging and developed markets from 1998 to 2007, the empirical results show that financial crises are indeed alike, as all linkages are statistically important across all crises. However, the strength of these linkages does vary across crises. Contagion channels are widespread during the Russian/LTCM crisis, are less important during subsequent crises until the subprime crisis, where again the transmission of contagion becomes rampant.
January 1, 2010
Sovereign Default Risk and Private Sector Access to Capital in Emerging Markets
Description: Top down spillovers of sovereign default risk can have serious consequences for the private sector in emerging markets. This paper analyzes the effects of these spillovers using firm-level data from 31 emerging market economies. We assess how sovereign risk affects corporate access to international capital markets, in the form of external credit (loans and bond issuances) and equity issuances. The study first analyzes the impact of sovereign debt crises during the 1980s and 1990s. It goes on to examine the 1993 to 2007 period, using additional measures of sovereign risk-sovereign bond spreads and sovereign ratings-as explanatory variables. Overall, we find that sovereign default risk is a crucial determinant of private sector access to capital, be it external debt or equity. We also find that crisis resolution patterns matter and that defaults towards private creditors have stronger adverse consequences than defaults to official creditors.
January 1, 2010
Post-Crisis Bank Behavior: Lessons From Mercosur
Description: Did the occurrence of systemic banking crises in the 1990s and 2000s significantly alter the behavior of banks in the Mercosur? The objective of this paper is to answer this question by analyzing changes in bank behavior after crises in the Mercosur region. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to apply the convergence methodology-which is common in the growth literature-to post-crisis bank behavior. Using a panel dataset of commercial banks during the period 1990-2006, we analyze the impact of crises on four sets of financial indicators of bank behavior-profitability, maturity preference, credit supply, and risk. The paper finds that most indicators of bank behavior, such as profitability, in fact revert to previous or more normal levels. However, a key finding of the paper is that private sector intermediation is significantly reduced for prolonged periods of time and that high levels excess liquidity persist well after the crisis.