Working Papers
2004
December 1, 2004
Local Financial Development and the Aid-Growth Relationship
Description: With official development assistance (ODA) set to rise as countries strive to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aid effectiveness remains an important area of development policy. An increasing number of studies support the notion that ODA can contribute to growth in a nonlinear relationship. In this paper, we investigate a new hypothesis regarding this relationship: that deeper financial markets in aid-recipient countries facilitate the management of aid flows, thereby enhancing aid effectiveness. An empirical analysis, using a panel data set, finds robust support for the hypothesis.
December 1, 2004
Institutions and the External Capital Structure of Countries
Description: A widespread view holds that countries that finance themselves through foreign direct investment (FDI) and portfolio equity, rather than bonds and loans, are less prone to crises. But what determines countries' external capital structures? In a cross section of emerging markets and developing countries, we find that equity-like liabilities (FDI and, especially, portfolio equity) as a share of countries' total external liabilities (or as a share of GDP) are positively and significantly associated with indicators of educational attainment, natural resource abundance, and especially, institutional quality. These relationships are robust to attempts to control for possible endogeneity, suggesting that better institutional quality may help improve countries' capital structures. The results might also provide an explanation for the observed correlation between institutional quality and the frequency of crises.
December 1, 2004
Managing Confidence in Emerging Market Bank Runs
Description: In a rational-expectations framework, we model depositors' confidence as a function of the probability of future bank bailouts. We analyze the effect of alternative bank bailout policies on depositors' confidence in an emerging market setting, where liquidity shortages of banks are revealed sequentially and governments cannot credibly commit to bailing out all potentially distressed banks. Our findings suggest that allowing early bank failures and using available liquidity for credible commitments to later bailouts can better boost confidence than early bailouts. This conclusion arises because with a high chance of liquidity shortage in the future, depositors may lose confidence and hence withdraw deposits even from potentially sound banks. Such a policy of late bailouts is likely to receive political support when a full bailout needs to be financed by taxation. The logic of late bailout remains valid even when banks may hide their distress or when closures of early distressed banks create contagion.
December 1, 2004
Technology Shocks and Aggregate Fluctuations: How Well Does the RBC Model Fit Postwar U.S. Data?
Description: Our answer: Not so well. We reached that conclusion after reviewing recent research on the role of technology as a source of economic fluctuations. The bulk of the evidence suggests a limited role for aggregate technology shocks, pointing instead to demand factors as the main force behind the strong positive comovement between output and labor input measures.
December 1, 2004
Institutional Quality and International Trade
Description: The quality of institutions-meaning the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, shareholder protection, and the like-has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, it studies the consequences of trade when institutional differences are the source of comparative advantage among countries. Institutional differences are modeled within the Grossman-Hart-Moore framework of contract incompleteness. It is shown, among other things, that the less developed country may not gain from trade, and that factor prices may actually diverge as a result of trade. Second, the paper provides empirical evidence of "institutional content of trade:" institutional differences are shown to be important determinant of trade flows.
December 1, 2004
Can the Private Annuity Market Provide Secure Retirement Income?
Description: Annuity premiums are often assumed to be constant, although they can be expected to vary with the yield curve. Variations in premiums will become an important public policy issue as defined-contribution (DC) pension plans play an increasingly prominent role in providing retirement income. As DC plan holders retire, many will annuitize at least a part of their account balances. In the absence of current data on annuity prices, the paper relies on U.S. Treasury interest rate data to simulate the impact of interest rate variation on annuity premiums. For a spectrum of feasible interest rates, the variation in retirement income is not negligible.
December 1, 2004
Comesa and Sadc: Prospects and Challenges for Regional Trade Integration
Description: Regional integration has been seen in Africa as a means of encouraging trade and securing economies of scale. This paper examines in detail the prospects and challenges for trade expansion in the two most prominent arrangements in eastern and southern Africa: the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It finds that possibilities of growth in intraregional trade may be limited, but that the two arrangements offer opportunities for member countries to gain policy credibility for trade reforms and tariff liberalization and to address structural weaknesses. In this regard, the negotiation of the Economic Partnership Agreements with the European Union can also have a significant impact.
December 1, 2004
Trade Finance and Trade Flows: Panel Data Evidence From 10 Crises
Description: This paper assesses the effect of constrained trade finance on trade flows in countries undergoing financial and balance of payments crises. Most of the countries that had a major crisis had a significant trade contraction, while trade-related finance declined sharply. However, trade may also be affected by other variables such as world demand, domestic demand, banking crises, changes in export and import prices, and real exchange rate depreciation. To estimate the effect of constrained trade finance on trade flows, we estimate import and export volume equations including explicitly trade financing as an explanatory variable in addition to the usual variables such as relative prices and income. We conclude that constrained trade finance is a factor in explaining both export and import volumes in the short-run. A fall in external trade finance explains a relatively small part of the trade loss during crises, while a fall in trade financing in connection with domestic banking crisis can lead to a substantial loss of trade.
December 1, 2004
Macroeconomic Implications of Natural Disasters in the Caribbean
Description: Each year natural disasters affect about 200 million people and cause about $50 billion in damage. This paper compares the incidence of natural disasters across countries along several dimensions and finds that the relative costs tend to be far higher in developing countries than in advanced economies. The analysis shows that small island states are especially vulnerable, with the countries of the Eastern Caribbean standing out as among the most disaster-prone in the world. Natural disasters are found to have had a discernible macroeconomic impact, including large effects on fiscal and external balances, pointing to an important role for precautionary measures.
December 1, 2004
Inflation and Monetary Pass-Through in Guinea
Description: The paper analyzes the dynamics of inflation in Guinea during 1992-2003 applying cointegration and error-correction modeling to a bivariate model that includes consumer price and monetary variables. The empirical results, based on quarterly data, confirm the existence of a long-run relationship between money supply and consumer prices. This paper argues further that the pass-through has increased in recent years. Short-term dynamics are shown to accentuate the long-run impact. Impulse response analysis shows that a shock in the money stock will have an increasing impact over two years and will then stabilize at a higher level.