Working Papers
2008
October 1, 2008
Writing Clearly: ECB’s Monetary Policy Communication
Description: The paper presents a methodology for measuring the clarity of central bank communication, illustrating it with the case of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 1999-2007. The analysis identifies the ECB's written communication as clear about 95 percent of instances, which is comparable to, or even better than, other central banks for which a similar analysis is available. We also find that the additional information contained in the ECB's Monthly Bulletins helps to improve communication clarity compared to ECB's press releases. In particular, the Bulletins contain useful clarifying information on individual inflation factors and the overall forecast risk; in contrast, the bulletin's communication on monetary shocks has a negative, albeit small, impact on clarity.
October 1, 2008
Perspectives on High Real Interest Rates in Turkey
Description: The Turkish economy is typically characterized as having particularly high real interest rates. Fundamental considerations, such as high growth rates or high returns to capital, do not provide a satisfactory resolution of this puzzle. Instead, we find that two other factors- doubts about the sustainability of disinflation and the existence of a risk premium-have a significant impact on the level of real interest rates in Turkey. Importantly, fiscal policy variables are shown to affect both these factors, suggesting that a more credible and prudent fiscal policy can help reduce real interest rates in Turkey.
October 1, 2008
Trade Effects of Currency Unions: Do Economic Dissimilarities Matter?
Description: This paper provides a general equilibrium analysis of the trade effects of the formation of a currency union, and of its subsequent enlargement to include an economically dissimilar country. Furthermore, it investigates how economic dissimilarities among countries affect the magnitude of the trade effects fostered by a common currency. We show that sharing a common currency enhances the volume of bilateral trade among countries. However, the more economically dissimilar is an accession country, compared to the original members of a currency union, the smaller are the gains in trade that would follow the enlargement of a currency union.
October 1, 2008
Banks’ Precautionary Capital and Persistent Credit Crunches
Description: Periods of banking distress are often followed by sizable and long-lasting contractions in bank credit. They may be explained by a declined demand by financially impaired borrowers (the conventional financial accelerator) or by lower supply by capital-constrained banks, a "credit crunch". This paper develops a bank model to study credit crunches and their real effects. In this model, banks maintain a precautionary level of capital that serves as a smoothing mechanism to avert disruptions in the supply of credit when hit by small shocks. However, for larger shocks, highly persistent credit crunches may arise even when the impulse is a one time, non-serially correlated event. From a policy perspective, the model justifies the use of public funds to recapitalize banks following a significant deterioration in their capital position.
October 1, 2008
Interest Rate Elasticity of Residential Housing Prices
Description: We examine the interest rate elasticity of housing prices, advancingthe empirical literature in two directions. First, we take a commonly used cross-country panel dataset and evaluate the housing price equation using a consistent estimator in the presence of endogenous explanatory variables and a lagged dependent variable. Second, we carry-out a novel analysis of determinants of residential housing prices in a cross-section of countries. Our results show that the short-term interest rate, and hence monetary policy, has a sizable impact on residential housing prices.
October 1, 2008
Do Interest Groups Affect U.S. Immigration Policy?
Description: While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobby expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.
October 1, 2008
Does Openness to International Financial Flows Raise Productivity Growth?
Description: This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between financial openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using an extensive dataset that includes various measures of productivity and financial openness for a large sample of countries. We find that de jure capital account openness has a robust positive effect on TFP growth. The effect of de facto financial integration on TFP growth is less clear, but this masks an important and novel result. We find strong evidence that FDI and portfolio equity liabilities boost TFP growth while external debt is actually negatively correlated with TFP growth. The negative relationship between external debt liabilities and TFP growth is attenuated in economies with higher levels of financial development and better institutions.
October 1, 2008
A Theory of International Crisis Lending and IMF Conditionality
Description: We present a framework that clarifies the financial role of the IMF, the rationale for conditionality, and the conditions under which IMF-induced moral hazard can arise. In the model, traditional conditionality commits country authorities to undertake crisis resolution efforts, facilitating the return of private capital, and ensuring repayment to the IMF. Nonetheless, moral hazard can arise if there are crisis externalities across countries (contagion) or if country authorities discount crisis costs too much relative to the national social optimum, or both. Moral hazard can be avoided by making IMF lending conditional on crisis prevention efforts-"ex ante" conditionality.
October 1, 2008
Growing Apart? A Tale of Two Republics: Estonia and Georgia
Description: We compare and contrast the economic growth performance of Estonia and Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 in an attempt to understand better the extent to which the growth differential between the two countries can be traced to increased efficiency in the use of capital and other resources (intensive growth) as opposed to brute accumulation of capital (extensive growth). On the basis of a simple growth accounting exercise, we infer that advances in education at all levels, good governance, and institutional reforms have played a more significant role in raising economic output and efficiency in Estonia than in Georgia which remains marred by various problems related to weak governance in the public and private spheres.
October 1, 2008
Inflation Targeting and Communication: It Pays Off to Read Inflation Reports
Description: Inflation-targeting central banks have a respectable track record at explaining their policy actions and corresponding inflation outturns. Using a simple forward-looking policy rule and an assessment of inflation reports, we provide a new methodology for the empirical evaluation of consistency in central bank communication. We find that the three communication tools-inflation targets, inflation forecasts, and verbal assessments of inflation factors contained in quarterly inflation reports-provided a consistent message in five out of six observations in our 2000-05 sample of Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Thailand, and Sweden.