Working Papers
2002
December 1, 2002
Macroeconomic News and Stock Returns in the United States and Germany
Description: Using daily data for the January 1997 to June 2002 period, we analyze the impact of a broad set of macroeconomic news on stock prices in the United States and Germany. With GARCH specifications we test five hypotheses and find that news on real economic activity has a significant impact on stock prices. The effects vary between different types of stocks and depend on the state of the economy. In a boom period, bad economic news may be good news for stock prices. For German stock prices, international news is at least as important as domestic news. The analysis of bihourly data suggests that the main effect occurs within a short period of time.
December 1, 2002
Compiling and Using Export and Import Price Indices
Description: Export and import price indices are essential for assessing the impact of international trade on the domestic economy. Among their most important uses are analyzing developments in the trade balance, measuring foreign prices' contribution to domestic inflation, and deflating nominal values of exports and imports for estimating the volume of gross domestic product. This paper discusses the main uses of trade indices and the data sources used to compile them. It also presents various approaches used to compile foreign trade price indices, addresses various problems encountered in developing these indices, and provides some recommendations on how to address them.
December 1, 2002
Monetary Union in West Africa: Who Might Gain, Who Might Lose, and Why?
Description: We develop a multicountry model in which governments aim at excessive spending in order to serve the narrow interests of the group in power. This puts pressure on the monetary authorities to extract seigniorage, and thus affects the incentives countries would have to participate in a monetary union. This feature, ignored by the monetary union literature for Europe, is potentially important in Africa. We calibrate the model to data for West Africa and use it to assess proposed ECOWAS monetary unions. We conclude that monetary union with Nigeria would not be in the interests of other ECOWAS countries, unless it were accompanied by effective discipline over Nigeria's fiscal policies.
December 1, 2002
Monetary Policy and Asset Prices: Does "Benign Neglect" Make Sense?
Description: The link between monetary policy and asset price movements has been of perennial interest to policymakers. In this paper, we consider the potential case for preemptive monetary restrictions when asset price reversals can have serious effects on real output. First, we present some stylized facts on boom-bust dynamics in stock and property prices in developed economies. We then discuss the case for a preemptive monetary policy in the context of a stylized model. We find that the optimal policy depends on the economic conditions in a complex, nonlinear way and cannot be summarized by a simple policy rule of the type considered in the inflation-targeting literature.
December 1, 2002
Explaining the Exchange Rate Pass-Through in Different Prices
Description: This paper examines the performance of different new open economy macroeconomic models in explaining the exchange rate pass-through in a wide range of prices. Quantitative versions of different models are used to derive the dynamic response of various prices to an exchange rate shock. Predicted responses are compared with the evidence based on VAR models to examine how well different models fit the data. The results show that the best-fitting model incorporates a number of features highlighted by different strands of the literature: sticky prices, sticky wages, distribution costs, and a combination of local and producer currency pricing.
December 1, 2002
Income from Bonds: Treatment in the System of National Accounts 1993
Description: How to account for interest on bonds in a system as integrated as the System of National Accounts 1993 (1993 SNA) has been a source of much controversy. Two main positions emerge: the debtor treatment based on the contractual arrangements of the bonds; and the creditor treatment based on current interest rates and prices of assets/liabilities. Using the discounted cash flow model, this paper explores the treatment of income and other benefits from assets in the 1993 SNA. It finds that the debtor approach to bond interest conforms with the 1993 SNA recording income and other benefits from assets, as that approach captures the results of effective decision making between institutional units.
December 1, 2002
Welfare Effects of Transparency in Foreign Exchange Markets: The Role of Hedging Opportunities
Description: This paper studies the impact of enhanced transparency on risk sharing opportunities in the foreign exchange market and the associated implications for ex ante welfare. Transparency is measured in this model by the informational content of publicly observable signals about exchange rate developments. We find that in this model more transparency improves welfare in economies that are poorly endowed with capital and/or where investors are not very risk-averse, while welfare is reduced in economies with large capital endowments and/or where investors are highly risk-averse.
December 1, 2002
Financial Contagion and Investor "Learning": An Empirical Investigation
Description: There have been several episodes of financial market "contagion" in the 1990s. Is contagion driven by herd behavior? Does it reflect fundamental economic linkages between countries? Or are episodes of contagion driven by investor learning and risk reassessment about a select group of countries? We pursue these questions by studying the persistence in the spillover of shocks following the bond market developments in Hong Kong SAR in 1997. Our results suggest that this contagion, at least for a few countries, was a consequence of adverse sentiment shifts arising from investor learning and was not merely driven by changes in fundamentals.
December 1, 2002
A Political-Economic Model of the Choice of Exchange Rate Regime
Description: Facing electoral uncertainty, a government chooses its exchange regime in a trade-off among three incentives: (i) tying the hands of its opponent should it lose the election; (ii) facilitating its own future policy implementation should it win the election; and (iii) increasing its chance of reelection.
December 1, 2002
On National or Supranational Objectives: Improving the Effectiveness of Targeted Expenditure Programs
Description: Central governments or the international community at large are concerned about subnational service delivery. The design of targeted expenditure programs features frequently in central efforts to redistribute infrastructure and social spending or assure minimum standards. These programs are typically financed by the center, often with external assistance, but are implemented at the subnational level, which may not have incentives to spend the resources as intended by the center or donors. We discuss mechanisms for improving the effectiveness of targeted public expenditure programs, modeling the interaction between different levels of government as a dynamic game. An incentive structure could be designed that compelled local governments to truthfully reveal their ability to implement national programs in a cost-effective manner and to exert the effort required to maximize the expected benefits. The models have direct policy relevance in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs), where donor-financed resources are used for poverty-reduction at the local level, or in large countries such as China, where there is an effort to redirect social and infrastructure spending to particular regions.