Working Papers
January 1, 0001
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2000
October 1, 2000
Good, Bad or Ugly?on the Effects of Fiscal Rules with Creative Accounting
Description: Do fiscal rules likely lead to fiscal adjustment, or do they encourage the use of ‘creative accounting’? This question is studied with a model in which fiscal rules are imposed on ‘measured’ fiscal variables, which can differ from ‘true’ variables because there is a margin for creative accounting. The probability of detecting creative accounting depends on its size and the transparency of the budget. The model studies the effects on fiscal policy of different rules, separating structural from cyclical effects, and examines how these effects depend on the underlying fiscal distortion and on the degree of transparency of the budget.
October 1, 2000
Fiscal Policy Through Time-Varying Tax Rates: If and How
Description: This paper investigates if there are circumstances where time-varying tax rates could improve welfare and whether such policy can effectively be implemented in practice. While, in principle, variable taxes could improve welfare in some cases, the paper highlights the very particular circumstances that need to prevail. With liquidity constraints, a consumption-tax break is in a better footing to boost consumption and welfare than an income-tax break. A hike in consumption taxes can also be used to restrain consumption and improve welfare under time-consistency problems induced by hyperbolic discounting. However, variable taxes are subject to serious implementation problems fettering their use.
October 1, 2000
Tales From Two Neighbors: Productivity Growth in Canada and the United States
Description: This paper assesses productivity trends in Canada vis-a-vis the United States from two perspectives. The first one is based on estimates of total factor productivity. The second one decomposes productivity growth into two sources: investment-specific technical change, associated with improvements in the quality of the capital stock, and neutral technical change, associated with the organization of productive activities. The results indicate that investment-specific technical change is the major underlying cause of the pickup in productivity in Canada and the narrowing of the productivity gap with the United States.
October 1, 2000
The Plutocratic Bias in the CPI: Evidence from Spain
Description: We define the plutocratic bias as the difference between inflation measured according to the current official CPI and a democratic index in which all households receive the same weight. We estimate that during the 1990s the plutocratic bias in Spain amounts to 0.055 percent per year. However, positive and negative biases cancel off when averaging over the whole period. The mean absolute bias is significantly larger, 0.090. We can explain most of the oscillations experimented by the plutocratic bias by the price behavior of three goods: a luxury good and two necessities.
October 1, 2000
Health Care and its Financing in Italy: Issues and Reform Options
Description: In Italy, health care budget ceilings are not effective. The poor control by the central government results in excessive use of expensive inputs, in long waiting lines for medical procedures, and in the emergence of large arrears to suppliers and commercial banks. To fully gain the benefits of its decentralized structure, Italy needs to clarify the rules of the game and strengthen controls on local health authorities. Full fiscal responsibility should be extended to local governments on both the expenditure and revenue sides. The central government should be involved neither in decisions on the services that local governments should supply, nor in their planning and management.
October 1, 2000
The Effects of Monetary and Fiscal Policy on Aggregate Demand in a Small Open Economy: An Application of the Structural Error Correction Model
Description: This paper empirically analyzes the short-run effects of monetary and fiscal policy on aggregate demand, using the two-step structural error correction method. This method has an advantage over the standard reduced-form error correction method in providing a meaningful interpretation for impulse responses. The results are in sharp contrast to those of the traditional Mundell-Fleming and Dornbusch models: after the monetary (fiscal) policy is relaxed, the home currency depreciates (appreciates) for a substantial period of time, and the aggregate demand first expands (contracts) then gradually returns toward its original path.
October 1, 2000
Forecasting Inflation in Chile Using State-Space and Regime-Switching Models
Description: The paper estimates two time-varying parameter models of Chilean inflation: a Phillips curve model and a small open economy model. Their out-of-sample forecasts are compared with those of simple Box-Jenkins models. The main findings are; forecasts that include the pre-announced inflation target as a regressor are relatively better; the Phillips curve model outperforms the small open economy model in out-of-sample forecasts; and although Box-Jenkins models outperform the two models for short-term out-of-sample forecasts, their superiority deteriorates in longer forecasts. Adding a Markov-switching process to the models does not explain much of the conditional variance of the forecast errors.
October 1, 2000
Technological Adaptation, Trade, and Growth
Description: This paper extends Grossman and Helpman’s seminal work (1991), and presents an endogenous growth model where innovations created in a high-tech sector may be assimilated or adapted by a low-tech sector. Applying a simple Heckscher-Ohlin framework, the effects of technological diffusion are found to allow a country relatively scarce in human capital to benefit from nondecreasing rates of growth through its low-tech sector. The model is tested by using a dynamic panel data approach (Arellano and Bover, 1995). Results are consistent with the predictions of the model and robust to a broad range of definitions of technological intensity.
October 1, 2000
Inflation Targeting Under Potential Output Uncertainty
Description: To achieve their price stability objectives, many monetary authorities use the gap between current and potential output as an indicator of future price pressures. This policy-setting strategy has been criticized because potential output estimates have a high degree of uncertainty. In this paper, estimates of potential output uncertainty in New Zealand are used to examine the output gap’s usefulness. The results suggest that although output gap uncertainty leads to more inflation and output variability, policy based directly and/or indirectly on the output gap leads to better macroeconomic stability than policy based only on observable inflation and output growth.