Working Papers
2008
February 1, 2008
Central America’s Regional Trends and U.S. Cycles
Description: The economies of Central America share a close relationship with the United States, with considerable comovement of GDP growth over a long period of time. Trade, the financial sector, and remittance flows are all potential channels through which the U.S. cycle could affect the region. But just how dependent is growth in the region on the U.S.? Using the common cycles method of Vahid and Engle (1993), this paper suggests that the business cycle is dominated by the U.S.; region-specific growth drivers tend to be long-lasting shocks, rather than temporary fluctuations. The most cyclically sensitive countries include Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras.
February 1, 2008
Budget Deficits and Interest Rates: A Fresh Perspective
Description: We extend the literature on budget deficits and interest rates in three ways: we examine both advanced and emerging economies and for the first time a large emerging market panel; explore interactions to explain some of the heterogeneity in the literature; and apply system GMM. There is overall a highly significant positive effect of budget deficits on interest rates, but the effect depends on interaction terms and is only significant under one of several conditions: deficits are high, mostly domestically financed, or interact with high domestic debt; financial openness is low; interest rates are liberalized; or financial depth is low.
February 1, 2008
Importer and Producer Petroleum Taxation: A Geo-Political Model
Description: We derive non-cooperative Nash equilibrium (NE) importer and exporter petroleum excise taxes given full within-group tax coordination, but no coordination between groups, assuming that importers do not produce and exporters do not consume petroleum, and petroleum consumption causes a global externality. The aggregate NE tax is found to consist of an externality component and an optimal tariff component, and exceeds the standard Pigou tax. The environmental component in isolation is however less than the Pigou tax. With Stackelberg tax setting, the leader's tax is higher than in the Ne, and the follower's tax lower, and the overall tax higher. We show that importers prefer to set a tax instead of an import quota, since exporters' optimal response to a quota is a higher tax. An optimal cap-and-trade scheme will thus fare worse than an optimal tax scheme for importers, and will imply greater petroleum consumption and carbon emissions. When exporters behave as a cartel satisfying demand at a fixed export price, exporters' optimal tax is higher, while importers tax rule is Pigouvian. Exporters then gain at the expense of importers.
February 1, 2008
The Determinants of Stock Market Development in Emerging Economies: Is South Africa Different?
Description: This paper examines the institutional and macroeconomic determinants of stock market development using a panel data of 42 emerging economies for the period 1990 to 2004. The paper finds that macroeconomic factors such as income level, gross domestic investment, banking sector development, private capital flows, and stock market liquidity are important determinants of stock market development in emerging market countries. The results also show that political risk, law and order, and bureaucratic quality are important determinants of stock market development because they enhance the viability of external finance. This result suggests that the resolution of political risk can be an important factor in the development of emerging stock markets. The analysis also shows the factors identified above as determining stock market development in emerging economies can also explain the development of the stock market in South Africa.
January 1, 2008
Do Technology Shocks Lead to Productivity Slowdowns? Evidence from Patent Data
Description: This paper provides empirical evidence on the response of labor productivity to the arrival of new inventions. The benchmark measure of technological progress is given by data on patent applications in the U.S. over the period 1889-2002. The analysis shows that labor productivity may temporarily fall below trend after technological progress. However, the effects on productivity differ between the pre- and post-World War II periods. The pre-war period shows evidence of a productivity slowdown as a result of the arrival of new technology, whereas the post-World War II period does not. Positive effects of technology shocks tend to show up sooner in the productivity data in the later period.
January 1, 2008
Financial Frictions and Business Cycles in Middle-Income Countries
Description: A standard DSGE small open economy model can not generate the cyclical regularities of middle-income countries. It predicts excessive consumption smoothing, and procyclical, instead of countercyclical, real net exports. Previous studies have solved this problem by increasing the shocks’ persistence or by lowering the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. This paper tackles the problem by introducing market imperfections relevant for MICs into an otherwise standard model. More specifically, I build a model with limited access to the foreign capital market, identified as an external borrowing constraint, and asymmetric financing opportunities across nontradable and tradable sectors, identified as a sector-specific labor financing wedge. The key parameters associated to these frictions are deduced to replicate selected data for Chile between 1986 and 2004. I find that both frictions are necessary to replicate the cyclical regularities of middle-income countries as they help the model reproduce different features of the data: The external borrowing constraint makes investment and consumption of tradable goods more procyclical and volatile, and makes real net exports countercyclical, while the sector-specific labor financing wedge makes the model reproduce the cyclical moments of work hours and consumption of non tradable goods.
January 1, 2008
The Impact of Trade Liberalization on the Trade Balance in Developing Countries
Description: Using two recently constructed measures of trade liberalization dates, this research studies the impact of trade liberalization on imports, exports, and overall trade balance for a large sample of developing countries. We find strong and consistent evidence that trade liberalization leads to higher imports and exports. However, in contrast Santos-Paulino and Thirwall (2004) who find a robustly negative impact of trade liberalization on the overall trade balance, we only find mixed evidence of such a negative impact. In particular, we find little evidence of a statistically significant negative impact using our first measure of liberalization dates which extends Li (2004). Using a second measure of liberalization dates compiled by Wacziarg and Welch (2003), we find some evidence that liberalization worsens the trade balance, but the evidence is not robust across different estimation specifications, and the estimated impact is smaller than that reported by Santos-Paulino and Thirwall (2004).
January 1, 2008
Capital Flows and Demographics—An Asian Perspective
Description: This paper calibrates the production functions of 176 countries to fit 2003 data and examines the capital flows that emerge, when labor forces change according to the 2007 UN population projections. It finds that demographic factors are no help in correcting today's global imbalances; that Japan's capital outflows have as much to do with population aging as with the yen carry-trade; and that China is key to understanding Asia's demographic impact on the world. It also finds that Asia offers the greatest arbitrage opportunities worldwide during the demographic transition and has the greatest potential for regional financial integration among world regions. Moreover, the demographic transition is unlikely to result in an asset price meltdown and could even raise world interest rates under perfect capital mobility.
January 1, 2008
Financial Instruments to Hedge Commodity Price Risk for Developing Countries
Description: Many developing economies are heavily exposed to commodity markets, leaving them vulnerable to the vagaries of international commodity prices. This paper examines the use of commodity options-including plain vanilla, risk reversal, and barrier options-to hedge such risk. It then proposes the use of a new structured product-a sovereign Eurobond with an embedded option on a specific commodity price. By extracting commodity price risk out of the bond, such an instrument insulates the bond default risk from commodity price movements, allowing it to be marketed at a lower credit spread. The product is also designed to help developing countries establish a credit derivatives market, which would in turn enhance the marketability and liquidity of sovereign bonds.
January 1, 2008
Spillovers to Ireland
Description: This paper discusses Ireland's trade and financial linkages with key partner countries, and uses a vector autoregression to examine the impact of shocks to partner country GDP and shocks to Irish competitiveness on Irish GDP. Two main findings are that shocks to U.S. GDP have a larger impact on Irish GDP than shocks to the euro area or the U.K. Also, the share of the variance of Irish GDP explained by shocks to competitiveness rises with the forecast horizon, suggesting that past erosion of competitiveness may yet have a more substantial impact on economic activity.