OLD WINE FOR NEW BOTTLES: PUTTING OLD GROWTH THEORY BACK IN THE NEW

This paper shows how the mechanisms of endogenous growth can readily be incorporated within old growth theory, thereby resolving the principal impasse that stymied old growth theory. The key mechanism is the technological progress function which was originally developed by Kaldor (1957). The growth effects of monetary and fiscal policy operate through three channels. The first is the 'portfolio composition' channel, with policy serving to alter the money-capital mix of portfolios; the second is the money in the production function channel, with policy serving to alter the relative use of money and capital as inputs; the third is the money in the technological progress function channel, with policy affecting the dynamic allocative efficiency of investment via its impact on the level of financial intermediation. Since money and capital both enter the technological progress function. policies that affect the demands for money and capital affect the steady state rate of growth.     

Intermediation costs and capital flows

In this paper, we modify the standard neoclassical model by incorporating financial intermediation in order to deliver returns consistent with the observation that capital primarily flows to middle income countries. We build a static contracting framework where costly intermediation together with an adverse selection problem have quantitatively important effects on capital flows. When intermediation costs are ignored, the model behaves like the neoclassical model in terms of capital returns. However, when intermediation costs are considered, returns to capital in middle income countries could exceed those in poor and rich countries—high costs of intermediation cause poor countries to concentrate their investments in projects with low returns, while the standard neoclassical effect lowers returns in capital-rich countries. When we embed the return function from the static analysis in a two-country dynamic model, there is capital outflow from a poor country that removes capital controls and becomes open. Even though the closed economy dominates in terms of capital employed in production, it is the open economy that dominates in terms of income, consumption and welfare.     

金融发展、投资扩张模式与中国的资本回报率*

本文从理论上分析了金融发展对资本回报率的影响机理，并使用中国省际数据进行了实证验证，得出的主要结论有：中国的资本回报率由2008年之前的平稳期进入到大幅度下降期，但区域间趋同趋势明显；中国金融发展不足与发展过度问题并存，其对资本回报率的影响也因地区不同而出现了明显差异，在投资扩张系数较高的地区存在着“金融失效”现象，在投资扩张系数较低的地区存在着“金融诅咒”现象，在投资扩张系数居中的地区存在着“结构失调”现象；政府干预会加剧金融发展的不利影响，但该作用在不断减弱；资本积累对技术进步促进作用的缺失，是资本存量对资本回报率产生负向影响的重要原因；劳动力增强型技术进步不仅促进了资本回报率的提升，还延续了投资驱动型增长的时期；技术进步是中国资本回报率提升的重要动力。     

Financial Intermediation and Occupational Choice in Development

This paper presents evidence that the spread between the marginal product of capital and the return on financial assets is much higher in poor than in rich countries. A model with costly intermediation is developed. In this economy, individuals choose at each instant whether to work or to operate a technology. Entrepreneurs finance their business with their own savings and, if necessary, by borrowing from banks. I find that in this framework intermediation costs are not equivalent to a tax on the return of capital. The equivalence fails because costly intermediation affects not only the capital accumulation decision but also the occupational choice decision. I show that intermediation costs have important effects on per capita output and average business size in the economy. I conclude that taxing financial intermediaries can be a very bad policy for development. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E20, E60, O11, O16.     

反哺与分配:金融中介对经济增长的影响

企业家能力与物质资本的结合可以促进经济增长,而这两种要素禀赋可能由不同的个体持有,因此,只有在个体间合理分配这两个要素的报酬,经济才能增长。本文给出微观机制来表明企业家能力异质的一群个体如何形成金融中介联盟,并在个体层面引进无穷期动态拉姆齐模型,个体通过优化自身的选择而促进整个社会的经济增长。我们还给出了富人扶持穷人的价格涓流效应和反哺涓流效应,来描述金融中介对经济增长以及收入分配影响的途径。     

How financial intermediation impacts on financial stability?

The great financial crisis widened the role of financial intermediation in financial stability. This study develops a new financial intermediation variable, credit cash flow (CCF), which enables measurement of the net financial flow resulting from loan activity. An analysis provides evidence that CCF affects the capital buffer via credit gap behaviour, thus indicating the existence of a channel between the CCF and the capital buffer. Such a link offers the policy-maker the possibility to monitor the behaviour of financial intermediation carried out by banks, in order to avoid the outbreak of financial instability events.     

Dollarization and the inflation threshold

Abstract.  Empirical evidence suggests non-linearity in the impact of inflation on financial intermediation and real activity. Evidence also suggests that high inflation affects financial intermediation through the substitution of dollars 'under the mattress' for savings in domestic banks. We model an economy where inflation and real activity are positively related at low levels of inflation. However, when the inflation rate exceeds a threshold, agents substitute dollars for deposits issued by domestic banks, reducing the scale of financial intermediation and investment. As a consequence, at high levels of inflation, capital stock and output become negatively related to the inflation rate.     

Product mix,transactions and cost behaviour: a study of South African bank branches

This paper utilizes microeconomic theory and a panel data set to assess the impact of product mix and transactions on cost behaviour of bank branches in South Africa over the short and long‐term. Estimates of properties of concavity and monotonocity indicate that the cost functions of typical bank branches in South Africa are neither consistent with short‐term nor long‐term cost‐minimizing behaviour. This corroborates earlier findings which indicate that South African banks have low production efficiency and high market power. In addition the cost functions and two production‐output type indices indicate that overall, the intermediation‐output type mix (foreign exchange and custodial services) has a more significant effect on cost behaviour than the production‐output type mix (cheque and deposit accounts). The variety of production‐output type services provided by a branch appears to have limited effect on costs. However the financial value of production‐output type transactions has an impact on costs while the financial value of intermediation type products does not. Branches that provide intermediation‐output type products tend to have higher variable costs – the key determinant of costs is the number of transactions.     

创新型增长视角下的金融发展：综述及展望

传统经济增长理论分析框架下,金融系统只影响资本形成,并不创造社会财富,它对经济增长的作用只有水平效应而没有增长效应。新增长理论,尤其是熊彼特增长理论．突破了新古典增长理论关于技术进步的外生性假设,强调资本积累和创新是促进技术进步和经济增长的重要力量,这为研究金融体系对技术进步和经济增长的促进作用提供了全新视角。当前,中国金融发展现状与创新型增长要求之间存在一定程度的不相容性,需要在制度、政策和监管体系上不断完善与变革,逐步实现科技创新和金融发展的良性互动。     

The economics of poverty traps part one: Complete markets

This paper lists theoretical reasons why neoclassical models of one-sector growth imply that nations with identical economic structures need not converge to the same steady state or balanced growth path, and outlines the empirical significance and policy implications of conditional nonconvergence. We survey poverty traps in both convex and nonconvex economies with complete market structures. Among the potential causes of traps are subsistence consumption; distorted international trade in intermediate inputs; demographic transitions when fertility is endogenous; technological complementarities in the production of consumption goods, financial intermediation services, manufactures, or human capital; coordination failures among voters; various restrictions on borrowing; indivisibilities in human capital formation or child rearing; and monopolistic competition in product or factor markets.     

Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth: the Role of Financial Intermediation

This paper analyzes the impact of public debt on financial efficiency in an overlapping‐generations model. We argue that public debt may reduce intermediation costs by increasing the collateral of entrepreneurs. This effect is stronger, the stronger the non‐Ricardian component of public debt, i.e. the more it is associated with intergenerational redistribution. This effect can be interpreted as future generations acting as a guarantee for the loans provided to the entrepreneurs of the current generation. Furthermore, multiple growth paths may arise as low taxes increase private collateral, which in turn boosts growth via financial efficiency, while higher growth allows to maintain the same debt/GDP ratio with reduced taxes.     

Financial development and economic growth: long‐run equilibrium and transitional dynamics

We analyze the impact of financial development on economic growth. Differently from previous studies that focus mainly on balanced growth path outcomes, we also analyze the transitional dynamics of our model economy by using a finance‐extended Uzawa–Lucas framework where financial intermediation affects both human and physical capital accumulation. We show that, under certain rather general conditions, economic growth may turn out to be non‐monotonically related to financial development (as suggested by the most recent empirical evidence) and that too much finance may be detrimental to growth. We also show that the degree of financial development may affect the speed of convergence, which suggests that finance may play a crucial role in determining the length of the recovery process associated with exogenous shocks. Moreover, in a special case of the model, we observe that, under a realistic set of parameters, social welfare decreases with financial development, meaning that even when finance positively affects economic growth the short‐term costs associated with financial activities more than compensate their long‐run benefits.     

Agency Costs in Dynamic Economic Models

We consider an overlapping generations economy where capital is produced from bank loans under stochastic constant returns to scale, and subject to idiosyncratic shocks whose realisations are costly to verify. Our formulation differs from earlier work in permitting investment projects to be infinitely divisible and private agency costs to be convex. If there are external economies to financial intermediation, then deviations from steady-state output are negatively correlated with the spread between loan and deposit rates. Moreover, the capital stock correspondence is set-valued, a result consistent with poverty traps, growth cycles, and hump-shaped impulse response functions.     

DO INVESTMENT‐SPECIFIC TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES MATTER FOR BUSINESS FLUCTUATIONS? EVIDENCE FROM JAPAN

The observed decline in the relative price of investment goods to consumption goods in Japan suggests the existence of investment‐specific technological (IST) changes. We examine whether IST changes are a major source of business fluctuations in Japan, by estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model using Bayesian methods. We show that IST changes are less important than neutral technological changes in explaining output fluctuations. We also demonstrate that investment fluctuations are mainly driven by shocks to investment adjustment costs. Such shocks represent variations of costs involved in changing investment spending, such as financial intermediation costs. We find that the estimated series of the investment adjustment cost shock correlates strongly with the diffusion index of firms' financial position in the Tankan (Short‐term Economic Survey of Enterprises in Japan). Therefore, we argue that the large decline in investment growth in the early 1990s was due to an increase in investment adjustment costs stemming from firms' financial constraints after the collapse of Japan's asset price bubble.     

Increasing Wealth and Increasing Instability: The Role of Collateral

In development economics, growth in credit is generally associated with faster long-run growth as financial intermediation improves the efficiency of channeling capital to productive investment. Yet, among developing countries high growth in credit almost always guarantees the outbreak of a financial crisis. The authors attempt to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory facts with an endogenous growth model in which entry to international borrowing entails some significant fixed cost. The poorest countries are excluded from international borrowing because of the fixed cost. The higher-income developing countries will find it optimal to sink the fixed cost to borrow internationally, growing faster as a result, but also become prone to fluctuations arising from shocks to the international financial market.     

International Financial Liberalization, Corruption, and Economic Growth

This paper examines the effects of capital account liberalization on the long-run growth of a developing economy. A general-equilibrium, endogenous growth model is constructed in which corruption forms an integral part of the governance system of the country. By undermining the profitability of innovations, corruption lowers the rate of return to capital and reduces the rate of technological change. The impact of international financial liberalization on long-run growth in this model can be either positive or negative. A drop in growth is obtained when the level of corruption is high enough to cause domestic rates of return to capital before liberalization to drop below those in the rest of the world. In this case, liberalization generates capital outflows, which act as a constraining force on innovation, reducing the rate of technological change and lowering output growth. On the other hand, if the level of corruption is sufficiently low, the capital account liberalization will serve as a boost to the country's technical change and growth.     

农村金融发展对农村经济增长的作用机理——基于内生增长理论的实证研究

基于内生增长理论的农村金融发展作用于农村经济增长的主要机理是农村金融发展通过储蓄效应、投资效应和资源配置效应推动物质资本积累、人力资本积累和技术进步,以促进农村经济增长。实证研究表明,农村金融发展通过规模促进农村经济增长的渠道是有效的;农村金融发展通过提高效率促进农村经济增长的渠道是无效的,也即当前农村金融发展效率不能促进农村经济增长。     

金融发展与中国的经济增长——从储蓄动员型向市场配置的消费型经济转变

隐形税收机制瓦解后,储蓄动员型的金融发展模式取代了财政投资的主导地位,通过金融支持政策为公有经济部门融资,支撑了经济的高速增长。然而,随着市场约束机制的变化,金融支持政策的收益逐渐下降,成本却在递增。本文认为储蓄动员型的金融支持政策在一定阶段促进了经济的发展,但是也伴随着一系列经济发展的成本,比如降低了资本配置效率,过度投资产生的宏观经济成本和经济持续增长的外部风险加大等。因此,中国金融体制应深化改革,提高金融体系的资本配置效率,促进技术进步和生产效率的改进。同时,通过发展消费信贷和商业保险,减少信贷约束和不确定性,推动消费型经济的增长。     

A simple endogenous growth model of financial intermediation with multiplicity and indeterminacy

This paper analyzes the role of financial intermediation in a simple endogenous growth model. The results suggest that multiple endogenous growth paths can exist in connection with various levels of financial development, due to the reciprocal externality between financial and real sectors. According to multiplicity, the growth effects of shocks on the technology of intermediation are opposite, depending on the balanced growth path. Furthermore, transitional dynamics is examined, and reveals that the high equilibrium is a saddle path, while the low-growth is locally stable. Therefore, the model presents local and global indeterminacy. These theoretical results support the large empirical literature on the relationship between financial development and growth which depicts conflicting impacts.     

Financial innovation,economic growth,and the consequences of macroprudential policies

We leverage a ‘catch-all’ measure of financial innovation—research and development spending in the financial sector—to assess the net relationship between financial innovation and economic growth and evaluate the influence of macroprudential policy on this relationship. Using a panel of 23 countries over the period of 1996–2014, our results demonstrate a net-positive relationship between financial innovation and gross capital formation. We find no evidence of a net-negative impact of financial innovation on economic growth, challenging the popular and political stigma surrounding financial innovation. We also find little robust evidence of macroprudential policy influencing the relationship between financial innovation and economic growth. Our results support a functional approach to the regulation of financial innovation, which improves the intermediation process, leading to increased capital formation.