Working Papers
January 1, 0001
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January 1, 0001
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January 1, 0001
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2000
July 1, 2000
What Should Macroeconomists Know About Health Care Policy: A Primer
Description: This primer aims to provide IMF macroeconomists with the essential information they need in situations where they must address issues concerning health sector policy and when they have significant macroeconomic implications. Such issues can also affect equity and growth and are fundamental to any strategy of poverty reduction. The primer highlights the appropriate roles for the state and market in health care financing and provision. It also suggests the situations in which macroeconomists should engage health sector specialists in policy formulation exercises. Finally, it illustrates the different health policy issues that confront countries at alternative stages of economic development and the range of appropriate policy options.
July 1, 2000
Can Fiscal Decentralization Strengthen Social Capital?
Description: Countries where social and political institutions stimulate interpersonal trust, civic cooperation, and social cohesiveness tend to have more efficient governments, better governance systems, and faster growth. This paper provides cross-country evidence, based on a sample of developing and developed countries, that fiscal decentralization—the assignment of expenditure functions and revenue sources to lower levels of government—can boost social capital and therefore be integrated into second-generation reforms.
July 1, 2000
Real Effective Exchange Rate and the Constant Elasticity of Substitution Assumption
Description: The real effective exchange rate is an aggregation of several bilateral real exchange rates with respect to other countries. The aggregation is usually done under the assumption of constant elasticity of substitution (CES) between products from different countries. We investigate the validity of this assumption by estimating manufacturing export equations for 56 countries over 26 years. We find that the hypothesis of CES is rejected and that the export equations that contain two real effective exchange rates (one in relation to OECD countries and one in relation to non-OECD countries) perform on average considerably better than the traditional ones.
July 1, 2000
Life-Cycles, Dynasties, Savings: Implications for Closed and Small, Open Economies
Description: This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of life-cycle and dynastic saving behavior for closed and small, open economies. Using an extended version of Blanchard’s overlapping agents model, the analytical framework nests these two competing views, treating agents as either dynastic households or disconnected generations. Calibrating the life-cycle variant using empirical age-earnings profiles, the analysis compares the long-run effects of fiscal policy shocks under both perspectives. The results quantify the implications of life-cycle considerations for the effects of deficit finance on real interest rates and the capital stock or net foreign assets.
July 1, 2000
Costly Collateral and the Public Supply of Liquidity
Description: This paper addresses two complications arising from the use of collateral requirements in debt contracts between wealth-constrained entrepreneurs and banks. First, costly asset liquidation is found to enhance the susceptibility of debt finance to interest rate volatility. Second, aggregate uncertainty in conjunction with limited bank capitalization is shown to produce excessive credit constraints that, under certain conditions, justify the public supply of liquidity. The paper suggests applications with respect to models of interest rate smoothing and self-fulfilling currency crises.
July 1, 2000
Cost of Living Adjustment and Business Cycles: Disaggregated Evidence
Description: For a sample of US industries, nominal wage and price inflation follow aggregate price inflation closely during economic expansions. Hence, fluctuations in profit markup and real output are moderate in the face of expansionary demand shocks. During recessions, however, industrial nominal wage deflation exceeds that of the aggregate price level. This is in contras to producers’ attempt to maintain, or even increase, industrial real price inflation during recessions. Consistently, the increase in the profit markup is correlated with an increase in output contraction and a reduction in workers’ real standard of living during recessions.
July 1, 2000
The Transfer Problem Revisited: Net Foreign Assets and Real Exchange Rates
Description: The relationship between international payments and the real exchange rate—the “transfer problem”—is a classic question in international economics. We use new data on countries’ net external positions together with real exchange rate data to shed light on this question. We present a model yielding testable implications on the long-run co-movements of real exchange rates, external positions, relative GDP and terms of trade, and cross-country and time-series evidence on the subject. Countries with net external liabilities are found to have more depreciated real exchange rates, with the main channel of transmission working through the relative price of nontraded goods.