Working Papers
2008
April 1, 2008
Competitiveness in the Southern Euro Area: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain
Description: This collection of studies analyzes developments in nonprice external competitiveness of France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. While France, Italy, and Portugal have experienced substantial export market share losses, Greece and Spain performed relatively well. Export market share losses appear associated with rigidities in resource allocation (sectoral, geographical, technological) relative to peers and lower productivity gains in high value-added sectors. Disaggregated analysis of goods and services export markets provides insights on aspects such as quality, market concentration, growth of destination markets, and geographical and sectoral diversification. Also, increased import penetration, offshoring and FDI could improve productivity and export performance.
April 1, 2008
Fiscal Coverage in the Countries of the Middle East and Central Asia: Current Situation and a Way Forward
Description: This paper reviews some broad principles of fiscal coverage, building on cross-country experience. It discusses the level of coverage that would be appropriate to conduct good quality fiscal analysis, while striking the right balance between the costs and the benefits of expanding the coverage. In this context, the paper examines the current status of statistical fiscal coverage in the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia (MECA), and proposes operational approaches to improving it.
April 1, 2008
Is There a Novelty Premium on New Financial Instruments? The Argentine Experience with GDP-Indexed Warrants
Description: This paper examines the Argentine experience with GDP-indexed warrants in order to gauge the existence of a novelty premium on new financial instruments. It develops a Monte Carlo pricing exercise to calculate the expected net present value of payments, on the basis of various forecast assumptions. The results show that the residual premium paid by these warrants over standard bonds declined significantly by about 600 basis points between December 2005 and July 2007. This suggests that financial innovation may be associated with premia, which decay reasonably fast.
April 1, 2008
Credit Booms and Lending Standards: Evidence From the Subprime Mortgage Market
Description: This paper links the current sub-prime mortgage crisis to a decline in lending standards associated with the rapid expansion of this market. We show that lending standards declined more in areas that experienced larger credit booms and house price increases. We also find that the underlying market structure mattered, with entry of new, large lenders triggering declines in lending standards by incumbent banks. Finally, lending standards declined more in areas with higher mortgage securitization rates. The results are consistent with theoretical predictions from recent financial accelerator models based on asymmetric information, and shed light on the relationship between credit booms and financial instability.
April 1, 2008
International R&D Spillovers and Institutions
Description: The empirical analysis in "International R&D Spillovers" (Coe and Helpman, 1995) is first revisited by applying modern panel cointegration estimation techniques to an expanded data set that we have constructed for the purpose of this study. The new estimates confirm the key results reported in Coe and Helpman about the impact of domestic and foreign R&D capital stocks on TFP. In addition, we show that domestic and foreign R&D capital stocks have measurable impacts on TFP even after controlling for the impact of human capital. Furthermore, we extend the analysis to include institutional variables, such as legal origin and patent protection, in order to allow for parameter heterogeneity based on a country's institutional characteristics. The results suggest that institutional differences are important determinants of total factor productivity and that they impact the degree of R&D spillovers.
April 1, 2008
A Simple Stochastic Approach to Debt Sustainability Applied to Lebanon
Description: This paper applies a simple probabilistic approach to debt sustainability analysis to the case of Lebanon. The paper derives "fan charts" to depict the probability distribution of the government debt to GDP ratio under a medium-term adjustment scenario, as a result of shocks to GDP growth and interest rates. The distribution of shocks is derived from the past shocks to these variables and the related variance covariance. Because we are interested in assessing the sustainability of a particular policy scenario, we do not consider independent fiscal policy shocks or the endogenous policy response to shocks.
April 1, 2008
Real and Financial Sector Linkages in China and India
Description: In the spirit of what is known as business cycle accounting, this paper finds that the investment wedge-the gap between household's rate of intertemporal substitution and the marginal product of capital-is large and quantitatively significant in explaining China's and India's growth. Specific financial sector policies are shown to map well the size and changes in the investment wedge. In the case of China, nonperforming loans, borrowing constraints, and uncertainty over changes in government guidance in bank lending, have implied large transfers from households to firms that have kept capital cost low and encouraged investment. In the case of India, post-1992 financial sector reforms, particularly the reduction in the funds preempted by the government from the banking system, has played an important role in reducing the cost of capital. Simulations show that for rebalancing growth in China and sustaining high investment rate in India, further financial sector reforms could turn out to be key.
April 1, 2008
The Anatomy of Banking Crises
Description: This paper uses a Binary Classification Tree (BCT) model to analyze banking crises in 50 emerging market and developing countries during 1990-2005. The BCT identifies key indicators and their threshold values at which vulnerability to banking crisis increases. The three conditions identified as crisis-prone-(i) very high inflation, (ii) highly dollarized bank deposits combined with nominal depreciation or low liquidity, and (iii) low bank profitability-highlight that foreign currency risk, poor financial soundness, and macroeconomic instability are key vulnerabilities triggering banking crises. The main results survive under alternative robustness checks, confirming the importance of the BCT approach for monitoring banking system vulnerabilities.
April 1, 2008
Current Account Developments in New Member States of the European Union: Equilibrium, Excess, and EU-Phoria
Description: This paper analyzes current account (CA) developments in the following 10 new EU members states: Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. During the last 15 years, these countries, on average, have run CA deficits that are considerably higher than the average CA deficit of other developing countries. However, more recently, a diverging pattern has emerged among these countries with one group, consisting of the Baltic countries, Bulgaria and Romania, experiencing rapid widening, while the others seeing a stabilization in their CA balances. Using panel data for 59 countries, this paper empirically investigates the following three questions: Are higher average deficits in EU-10 explained by medium-term macroeconomic fundamentals? What explains the diverging CA behavior among EU-10? And finally, how challenging is it for the group experiencing rapidly widening CA deficits to reverse the trend?
April 1, 2008
Business Cycles in Small Developed Economies: The Role of Terms of Trade and Foreign Interest Rate Shocks
Description: Empirical evidence for small developed economies finds that consumption is procyclical and as volatile as output, and real net exports are coutercyclical. Earlier studies have not been able to reproduce these regularities in a DSGE small open economy model when productivity shocks drive the business cycles and households have a normal intertemporal elasticity of substitution. Instead, these studies have reduced this elasticity to make consumption more procyclical and volatile and real net exports countercyclical. This paper shows that a standard model can reproduce these regularities, without lowering the intertemporal substitution, if the terms of trade and foreign interest rate are added as source of business cycle fluctuations. These shocks, compared to productivity shocks, make consumption and investment more volatile and procyclical relative to output, and make real net exports countercyclical.