Working Papers
2009
July 1, 2009
Country Experiences with the Introduction and Implementation of Inflation Targeting
Description: This is the tenth chapter of a forthcoming monograph entitled, "On Implementing Full- Fledged Inflation-Targeting Regimes: Saying What You Do and Doing What You Say." It describes the experiences of a number of countries with the introduction and implementation of inflation targeting regimes. It discusses their motivation for introducing IT; how they fared in meeting the various conditions that some have argued are needed in advance of introducing IT; how they transitioned to a full-fledged IT framework and coordinated their preparations with other economic policies and reforms; the benefits they gained by adopting IT; the challenges they faced in implementation; and the lessons from their experiences.
July 1, 2009
How Effective is Fiscal Policy Response in Systemic Banking Crises?
Description: This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy response in 118 episodes of systemic banking crisis in advanced and emerging market countries during 1980-2008. It finds that timely countercyclical fiscal measures contribute to shortening the length of crisis episodes by stimulating aggregate demand. Fiscal expansions that rely mostly on measures to support government consumption are more effective in shortening the crisis duration than those based on public investment or income tax cuts. But these results do not hold for countries with limited fiscal space where fiscal expansions are prevented by funding constraints. The composition of countercyclical fiscal responses matters as well for output recovery after the crisis, with public investment yielding the strongest impact on growth. These results suggest a potential trade-off between short-run aggregate demand support and medium-term productivity growth objectives in fiscal stimulus packages adopted in distress times.
July 1, 2009
Revenue Mobilization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges from Globalization
Description: This paper evaluates the nature and extent of, and possible responses to, two of the central challenges that globalization poses for revenue mobilization in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): from corporate tax competition, and from trade liberalization. It does so using a new dataset with features needed to meaningfully address these issues: a distinction between resourcerelated and other revenues, and a disentangling of tariff from commodity tax revenue. Countries' experiences vary quite widely, nonresource revenues have been essentially stagnant. Corporate tax revenues have held up, despite a reduction in rates and evidence of substantial base-narrowing-something of a puzzle-and trade tax revenue reductions have been largely offset by other measures. Options for dealing with the continuation and intensification of the challenges, which the present crisis is likely to accelerate-including through regional cooperation-are discussed.
July 1, 2009
Spillovers From the Rest of the World Into Sub-Saharan African Countries
Description: This paper investigates the impact of a global slowdown on individual African countries using a series of dynamic panel regressions for countries in the region, relating real growth in domestic output to world growth in trade weighted by partner countries and several control variables: oil prices, non-oil prices, financial variables, and country fixed effects. Estimates are then applied to prepare country-specific simulations. The model, which is shown to estimate well out-of-sample spillover effects in the region, shows that countries in the region are significantly affected by lower external demand for their exports, declines in commodity prices and the terms of trade, and tighter financial conditions abroad. The last, proxied by the spread of three-month Libor to US treasury bills, is to our knowledge one of the first applications of such a measure of financial conditions for countries in the region.
July 1, 2009
Why Are Canadian Banks More Resilient?
Description: This paper explores factors behind Canadian banks' relative resilience in the ongoing credit turmoil. We identify two main causes: a higher share of depository funding (vs. wholesale funding) in liabilities, and a number of regulatory and structural factors in the Canadian market that reduced banks' incentives to take excessive risks. The robust predictive power of the depository funding ratio is confirmed in a multivariate analysis of the performance of 72 largest commercial banks in OECD countries during the turmoil.
July 1, 2009
How the Financial Crisis Affects Pensions and Insurance and Why the Impacts Matter
Description: This paper discusses the key sources of vulnerabilities for pension plans and insurance companies in light of the global financial crisis of 2008. It also discusses how these institutional investors transit shocks to the rest of the financial sector and economy. The crisis has re-ignited the policy debate on key issues such as: 1) the need for countercyclical funding and solvency rules; 2) the tradeoffs implied in marked based valuation rules; 3) the need to protect contributors towards retirement from excessive market volatility; 4) the need to strengthen group supervision for large complex financial institutions including insurance and pensions; and 5) the need to revisit the resolution and crisis management framework for insurance and pensions.
July 1, 2009
Bank Competition, Risk, and Asset Allocations
Description: We study a banking model in which banks invest in a riskless asset and compete in both deposit and risky loan markets. The model predicts that as competition increases, both loans and assets increase; however, the effect on the loans-to-assets ratio is ambiguous. Similarly, as competition increases, the probability of bank failure can either increase or decrease. We explore these predictions empirically using a cross-sectional sample of 2,500 U.S. banks in 2003, and a panel data set of about 2600 banks in 134 non-industrialized countries for the period 1993-2004. With both samples, we find that banks' probability of failure is negatively and significantly related to measures of competition, and that the loan-to-asset ratio is positively and significantly related to measures of competition. Furthermore, several loan loss measures commonly employed in the literature are negatively and significantly related to measures of bank competition. Thus, there is no evidence of a trade-off between bank competition and stability, and bank competition seems to foster banks' willingness to lend.
July 1, 2009
Will they Sing the Same Tune? Measuring Convergence in the new European System of Financial Supervisors
Description: In June 2009 a new financial supervisory framework for the European Union (EU) was endorsed, consisting of a macro- and a micro-prudential pillar. The latter is composed of a Steering Committee, a supranational layer and a network of national supervisory authorities at the bottom, de facto establishing a complex multiple principals-multiple agents network. This paper focuses on the network of national agencies. Starting from an analysis of supervisory architectures and governance arrangements, we assess to what extent lack of convergence could undermine efficient and effective supervision. The main conclusion is that harmonization of governance arrangements towards best practice would better align supervisors' incentive structures and, hence, be beneficial for the quality of supervision.
July 1, 2009
Banking Crises and Crisis Dating: Theory and Evidence
Description: Many empirical studies of banking crises have employed "banking crisis" (BC) indicators constructedusing primarily information on government actions undertaken in response to bank distress. Weformulate a simple theoretical model of a banking industry which we use to identify and constructtheory-based measures of systemic bank shocks (SBS). Using both country-level and firm-level samples, we show that SBS indicators consistently predict BC indicators based on four major BCseries that have appeared in the literature. Therefore, BC indicatorsactually measure lagged government responses to systemic bank shocks, rather than the occurrence of crises per se. We re-examine the separate impact of macroeconomic factors, bank market structure, deposit insurance, andexternal shocks on the probability of a systemic bank shocks and on the probability of governmentresponses to bank distress. The impact of these variables on the likelihood of a government responseto bank distress is totally different from that on the likelihood of a systemic bank shock.Disentangling the effects of systemic bank shocks and government responses turns out to be crucial inunderstanding the roots of bank fragility. Many findings of a large empirical literature need to be re-assessed and/or re-interpreted.
July 1, 2009
International Risk Sharing: Through Equity Diversification or Exchange Rate Hedging?
Description: Well-known empirical puzzles in international macroeconomics concern the large divergence of equilibrium outcomes for consumption across countries from the predictions of models with full risk sharing. It is commonly believed that these risk-sharing puzzles are related to another empirical puzzle-the home-bias in equity puzzle. However, we show in a series of dynamic models that the full risk sharing equilibrium may not require much diversification of equity portfolios when there is price stickiness of the degree typically calibrated in macroeconomic models. This conclusion holds under a range of assumptions about home bias in preferences, price setting as PCP or LCP, and with or without nominal wage stickiness as long as there is some price rigidity.