Global commodity prices and global stock market volatility shocks: Effects across countries

We investigate the time-varying dynamics of global stock market volatility, commodity prices, domestic output and consumer prices. We find (i) stock market volatility and commodity price shocks impact each other and the economy in a gradual and endogenous adjustment process, (ii) impact of commodity price shock on global stock market volatility is significant during global financial crises, (iii) effects of global stock market volatility on the US output are amplified by endogenous commodity price responses, (iv) effects of global stock market volatility shocks on the economy are heterogeneous across nations and relatively larger in twelve developed countries, (v) four developing/small economies are more vulnerable to commodity price shocks.     

New evidence on sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in sub-Saharan African countries

Following a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) approach, this paper presents new evidence on the validity of international transmission of economic shocks from key trading partners as sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The GVAR model was estimated for 21 SSA countries grouped into three country classes—oil-rich, other-resources-rich and non-resource-based economies, to account for output shocks from crucial trading partner countries—United States, United Kingdom, China and Europe. Furthermore, the generalized forecast error variance decompositions results reveal that output shocks from key trading partners constitute significant contributors to changes in key macroeconomic indicators—real gross domestic product, inflation, exchange rate and short-term interest rate, in the SSA region. The generalized impulse response functions indicate that these economic shocks have more significant impacts on oil-rich countries than on other country groups. A key recommendation from this study is that SSA countries, especially the resource-rich economies, need to strengthen and diversify their economic structure, including the trade basket.     

The two-sided effect of financial globalization on output volatility

This paper provides evidence for a significant relation between international financial markets integration and output volatility. In the framework of a threshold model, it is empirically shown that this relation depends on the financial risk of a country as perceived by investors. In order to proxy financial risk, a financial risk rating employed by multinational firms, banks, and equity and currency traders is used. This rating relies on debt to GDP ratios amongst other indicators. In countries with low financial risk, financial openness decreases output volatility while financial openness increases output volatility in countries with high financial risk. Extensive robustness checks confirm this result.     

Inflationary shocks and real output growth in nine Muslim-majority countries: Implications for Islamic banking and finance

Low and stable inflation is important for maintaining the viability of Islamic banking and finance within a dual banking system. Inflationary shocks when transmitted to real output growth cause a shift of investment to fixed return products as a hedge against the uncertainty of returns on equity investment under Islamic profit-loss sharing contracts. This study examines the transmission of inflationary shocks to the real economy for nine Muslim-majority countries (Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) that have introduced Islamic banking, all except Iran within dual-banking systems. A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework is deployed to understand macroeconomic relationships using annual data from the late 1970s to 2014. The key finding is that inflationary shocks affect real interest and exchange rates which in turn impact real output growth. The paper argues that the absorption of inflationary shocks in real interest and exchange rates is the outcome of rigidities in nominal interest and exchange rates within repressed financial systems. Policy regimes that allow for greater adjustment in nominal interest and exchange rates under a deregulated financial system would offer better shock absorption capacity which would lead to less volatility in inflation, real interest and exchange rates, and real output growth. The resulting more stable macroeconomic environment would be more conducive to the development of an Islamic financial sector that would promote economic growth.     

后金融危机时期中国股市的国际地位——基于非线性视角的股市联动网络分析

后金融危机时期全球股市一体化程度不断提高,全面认识中国股市的国际地位对于揭示国际股市一体化联动中的传导机制,防范和应对国际金融风险冲击具有重要的理论意义和现实价值。文章应用非线性格兰杰因果检验方法和社会网络分析方法,对金砖国家和七国集团股市收益率和波动率的联动关系及其联动网络结构进行分析,揭示出中国在国际股市联动中的地位对传导关系的控制方式,定量分析出事件冲击下中国股市与国际股市之间的交互影响。研究发现：（1）国际股市收益率和波动率联动网络呈现出稳定的非线性联动关系网络结构,受其影响各国股市收益之间存在互惠性,而波动之间则存在传染性;（2）在收益率联动网络中,中国股市的作用和地位已与英国相当,远高于其他金砖国家,正逐渐由"从属地位"转向"中心地位";（3）在波动率联动网络中,中国股市是造成国际股市风险交叉影响的重要"桥梁"。综上而言,当前中国股市表现出"高风险低收益"的市场特征;（4）中国对国际股市的影响具有典型的"地缘特征",将网络中心国家股市的利好传递给地缘临近国家股市;（5）波动率联动网络中初始冲击强度较大的国家,往往是对中国股市持续大规模产生冲击的国家;（6）相比较国际股市调整波动冲击的时间而言,中国股市调整时间较短,这表明后金融危机时代中国致力于股市的一系列改革举措取得了显著成效。     

External Shocks and High Volatility in Consumption in Low‐Income Countries

According to the well‐known concept of consumption smoothing, the volatility of consumption is low even when income is volatile; this is confirmed by data from G7 countries. Surprisingly, however, consumption volatility in many low‐income countries is nontrivially higher than income volatility. Here I examine what causes high consumption volatility in low‐income countries. In general, volatile consumption makes consumers worse off. Therefore, understanding the causes of high consumption volatility can contribute to improving welfare in low‐income countries by suggesting measures to assist in the stabilization of consumption. Unlike much previous research, I focus on international factors when explaining high consumption volatility. The results suggest that external shocks, which are far more volatile in low‐income countries than in industrialized countries, strongly swing consumption. By capturing these mechanisms, the model I use successfully accounts for consumption volatility's differences between the sample low‐income country and sample industrialized country.     

US vs. euro area: Who drives cross-border bank lending to EMs?

This paper analyzes the drivers of cross-border bank lending to 49 Emerging Markets (EMs) during the period 1990Q1–2014Q4, by assessing the impact of monetary, financial and real sector shocks in both the US and the euro area. The literature has traditionally highlighted the influence of US monetary policy on driving cross-border bank flows, and more recently the importance of both US and Euro Area (EA) financial/banking sectors’ related variables. Our contribution is the simultaneous analysis of the role of these US and EA drivers, as well as their interactions with real sector shocks. We corroborate the negative impact of US monetary policy tightening on cross-border lending to EMs, but we find that EA monetary policy seems to have an impact mostly on Emerging Europe, reflecting the fact that cross-border lending to most other EM regions is dollar denominated. We also find that real sector shocks in both the US and EA trigger an increase in cross-border lending, but less in EA when modeling the financial sector. Finally, for financial sector shocks, such as those associated with a decrease in bank leverage, our results indicate a broad-based overall contraction of cross-border lending if the shock originates in the US, and heterogenous effects across borrowing regions if the shock originates in the EA.     

Financial Development,Growth Volatility and Information Asymmetry in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Does Law Matter?

We re‐examine the law–finance theory relying on 33 countries in sub‐Saharan Africa over the period 2004–2011. Our evidence suggests that legal origin significantly explains cross‐country differences in financial development and economic volatility. More importantly, relative to civil law, English common law countries and those in Southern Africa have higher financial sector development both in terms of financial activity and banking efficiency on the back of lower volatility. While private credit bureau positively (negatively) affects financial development (economic volatility) with economically large impact for English legal legacy countries, the latter effect is contingent on the form of legal origin suggesting that, the establishment of information sharing offices per se may be insufficient in taming growth vagaries.     

Impact of international expansion strategy on the performance of Japanese banks

The effect of cross-border diversification on bank performance is part of the broader debate on how multinational banking and financial integration affect the global financial economy. Previous studies that examined this relationship present mixed results - namely that cross-border diversification improves bank performance but also increases bank risks that could lead to systemic failure. Even so, this line of debate has not been examined in the case of Japanese banks conducting international operations. The present study questions whether cross-border diversification improves the performance of Japanese banks and to what extent each cross-border expansion activity affects bank performance. The latter was largely ignored in previous studies. Our results show that cross-border diversification improves cost efficiency but decreases/harms the profit efficiency of the banks analyzed. In addition, we find that the expansion of foreign assets and foreign branch operations present funding risks and operational inefficiency. We offer two important recommendations. First, as a major player in international lending, the current expansion activities of Japanese banks require close monitoring and supervision to prevent systemic risk resulting from aggressive and risky overseas expansion activities. Second, the current expansion strategies of Japanese banks, especially the expansion of overseas assets and branch operations (retail banking), should be re-examined.     

Capital Flows,Financial Intermediation and Macroprudential Policies

This paper develops an open-economy DSGE model with an optimizing banking sector to assess the role of capital flows, macro-financial linkages, and macroprudential policies. The key result is that macroprudential measures can usefully complement monetary policy. Countercyclical macroprudential polices can help reduce macroeconomic volatility and enhance welfare. The results also demonstrate the importance of capital flows and financial stability for business cycle fluctuations as well as the role of supply side financial accelerator effects in the amplification and propagation of shocks.     

The main determinants of banking crises in OECD countries

Banks’ stability can be affected by economic fluctuations, banks’ risk-taking behavior, connections among banks and countries’ financial system structure. At the same time, banking regulation and supervision were designed to protect banks from failure, but a large number of banking crises were not prevented recently. Using binary response models for panel data and focusing on OECD countries, this paper studies the main determinants of banking crises over a period of 21 years. Results suggest a bank’s high debt and a country’s low GDP growth rate as the major determinants of banking crises. There is also evidence of contagion across countries from the same geographical region and from G7 to other countries, and that bank-based financial systems are less prone to borderline banking crises. Regulatory and supervision practices are found not to have been relevant in bankruptcy prevention.     

Was Expansionary Monetary Policy Feasible during the Great Contraction? An Examination of the Gold Standard Constraint

The recent consensus view that the gold standard was the leading cause of the worldwide Great Depression 1929-1933 stems from the two propositions: (1) Under the gold standard, deflationary shocks were transmitted between countries and, (2) for most countries, continued adherence to gold prevented monetary authorities from offsetting banking panics and blocked their recoveries. In this article we contend that the second proposition applies only to small open economies with limited gold reserves. This was not the case for the United States, the largest country in the world, holding massive gold reserves. The United States was not constrained from using expansionary policy to offset banking panics, deflation, and declining economic activity. Simulations, based on a model of a large open economy, indicate that expansionary open market operations by the Federal Reserve at two critical junctures (October 1930 to February 1931; September 1931 through January 1932) would have been successful in averting the banking panics that occurred, without endangering convertibility. Indeed had expansionary open market purchases been conducted in 1930, the contraction would not have led to the international crises that followed.     

Spillovers in Exchange Rates and the Effects of Global Shocks on Emerging Market Currencies

This paper provides an investigation into the spillover effects of exchange rate returns and volatility for developed and emerging market currencies, using data from 1997 to 2011. The results suggest that spillovers in exchange rate returns have increased steadily over time, in moderate reaction to economic events. In contrast, spillovers in total observed volatility (measured by squared returns) react more strongly to economic events, and this transmission has remained at a relatively high level since the global financial crisis. Furthermore, over the course of time, global shocks would appear to account for a larger proportion of aggregate exchange rate volatility (and the relative importance of domestic shocks has declined). The paper also considers whether the increase in volatility spillover is due to sudden shocks, or whether it is due to changes in the stochastic trend of the underlying volatility process. The results suggests that in most cases, this increase is due to sudden shocks, however, in certain instances country‐specific events may perpetuate changes to the trend of the underlying volatility spillover.     

跨境资本周期性波动对中国银行部门的风险溢出机制分析

本文从周期角度出发,构建结构模型和双重△CoVaR模型,探究跨境负债和资产的扩张或收缩对银行部门的风险溢出机制。结果显示:第一,跨境资本周期性波动对银行部门具有显著的风险溢出效应,跨境负债波动的溢出效应强于跨境资产。第二,跨境资本周期性波动通过影响中小银行风险承担和风险实现以及大型银行的风险放大作用影响银行部门。特别地,股份制银行在受冲击和风险放大方面均具有重要作用。第三,跨境资本扩张带来的风险承担会显著提高未来银行业系统性风险实现水平。本文为提高跨境资本管理质量提供了科学依据。     

全球流动性风险和对策

借鉴国际清算银行的测量框架,本文认为,私人流动性本质上指融资意愿,具有很强的传染性和跨境传递特征;其周期波动与金融危机密切相关,与主要国际货币发行国政策取向相关,而新兴市场是全球流动性的被动接受者;有效减缓全球流动性周期波动幅度、降低跨境流动性对宏观经济和金融体系的冲击、及时提供救助以避免系统性破产,是全球流动性管理的核心目标;实现这些目标,需要一个涵盖国别、双边、区域和全球在内的应对框架和全球金融安全网;全球流动性机制建设为中国参与国际金融治理提供了契机,也为国内各项政策协调提出了挑战。     

Banking and the Macroeconomy in China: A Banking Crisis Deferred?

The downturn in the world economy following the global banking crisis has left the Chinese economy relatively unscathed. This paper develops a model of the Chinese economy using a DSGE framework with a banking sector to shed light on this episode. It differs from other applications in the use of indirect inference procedure to test the fitted model. The model finds that the main shocks hitting China in the crisis were international and that domestic banking shocks were unimportant. However, directed bank lending and direct government spending was used to supplement monetary policy to aggressively offset shocks to demand. The model finds that government expenditure feedback reduces the frequency of a business cycle crisis but that any feedback effect on investment creates excess capacity and instability in output.     

Do contagion effects exist in capital flow volatility?

The cross-border transmission of a financial shock has been a subject of rich literature. While a large number of studies have focused on the phenomenon of strong co-movements of asset prices and capital flows in the event of financial stress, very few discussed the contagion or spillover effects in terms of capital flow volatility. This paper is one of the first attempts to assess, empirically, whether or not there is a global and regional spillover effect in the volatility of capital flows to emerging and developing countries. Based on the sample of 49 emerging and developing countries for the period 1980–2009, the empirical results suggest strong and significant contagion effects in the volatility of capital flows to individual economies. The magnitudes of contagion vary depending on the type of capital flows, whether it is foreign direct investment (FDI) or portfolio and other investment (mostly bank lending). The findings also suggest the volatility dynamics of gross flows is different from that of net flows. The volatility of net inflows is more exposed to intra-regional contagion compared to that of gross inflows.     

WELFARE GAINS OF AID INDEXATION IN SMALL OPEN ECONOMIES

Foreign-aid flows to poor, aid-dependent economies are highly volatile and pro-cyclical. Shortfalls in aid coincide with shortfalls in GDP and government revenues. This increases the consumption volatility in aid dependent countries, thereby causing substantial welfare losses. This paper finds that indexing aid flows to exogenous shocks, like a change in the terms of trade, can significantly improve the welfare of an aid-dependent country by lowering its output and consumption volatility. Compared to the benchmark specification with stochastic aid flows, indexation of aid flows to terms-of-trade shocks can reduce the cost of business-cycle fluctuations in the recipient country by 4% of permanent consumption. Moreover, use of indexed aid can allow donors to reduce the aid flows by 3% without lowering the level of welfare in the recipient country.     

A Quantitative Assessment of the Role of Incomplete Asset Markets on the Dynamics of the Real Exchange Rate

I develop a two-country New Keynesian model with capital accumulation and incomplete international asset markets that provides novel insights on the effect that imperfect international risk-sharing has on international business cycles and RER dynamics. I find that business cycles appear similar whether international asset markets are complete or not when driven by a combination of non-persistent monetary shocks and persistent productivity (TFP) shocks. In turn, international asset market incompleteness has sizeable effects if (persistent) investment-specific technology (IST) shocks are a main driver of business cycles. I also show that the model with incomplete international asset markets can approximate the RER volatility and persistence observed in the data, for instance, if IST shocks are near-unit-root. Hence, I conclude that the nature of shocks, the extent of financial integration across countries and the existing limitations on asset trading are central to understand the dynamics of the real exchange rate and the endogenous international transmission over the business cycles.     

Emerging and small open economies,unconventional monetary policy and exchange rates – a survey

At the outset of the Great Recession emerging in 2007, central banks of major-currency economies have adopted non-standard monetary policies. We examine whether and to what extent these measures pose a challenge to central banking in emerging and small open economies. In particular we assess how global liquidity spillovers caused by major central banks affect the economic dynamics of emerging and small open economies. In this respect, economies which are close to or even at the periphery of major-currency economies are particularly prone to “unbalanced” real exchange rate dynamics. In the short run, corresponding level and volatility effects in key relative prices may endanger financial stability in the recipient country. The long-term effects include a metamorphosis of the anchoring of private-sector inflation expectations into a perilous tightrope act in central banking of these economies.