Growth and risk at the industry level: The real effects of financial liberalization

This paper analyzes the effects of financial liberalization on growth and volatility at the industry level in a large sample of countries. We estimate the impact of liberalization on production, employment, firm entry, capital accumulation, and productivity. In order to overcome omitted variables concerns, we employ a number of alternative difference-in-differences estimation strategies. We implement a propensity score matching algorithm to find a control group for each liberalizing country. In addition, we exploit variation in industry characteristics to obtain an alternative set of difference-in-differences estimates. Financial liberalization is found to have a positive effect on both growth and volatility of production across industries. The positive growth effect comes from increased entry of firms, higher capital accumulation, and an expansion in total employment. By contrast, we do not detect any effect of financial liberalization on measured productivity. Finally, the growth effects of liberalization appear temporary rather than permanent.     

Power laws in firm size and openness to trade: Measurement and implications

Existing estimates of power laws in firm size typically ignore the impact of international trade. Using a simple theoretical framework, we show that international trade systematically affects the distribution of firm size: the power law exponent among exporting firms should be strictly lower in absolute value than the power law exponent among non-exporting firms. We use a dataset of French firms to demonstrate that this prediction is strongly supported by the data, both for the economy as a whole and at the industry level. Furthermore, the differences between power law coefficients for exporters and non-exporters are larger in sectors that are more open to trade. While estimates of power law exponents have been used to pin down parameters in theoretical and quantitative models, our analysis implies that the existing estimates are systematically lower than the true values. We propose two simple ways of estimating power law parameters that take explicit account of exporting behavior.     

The democratic transition

Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with rising levels of democracy. We find that primary schooling, and to a weaker extent per capita income levels, are strong determinants of the quality of political institutions. We find little evidence of causality running the other way, from democracy to income or education.     

Decomposing the effects of financial liberalization: Crises vs. growth

We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis. We also discuss several models of financial liberalization and growth whose predictions are consistent with our empirical findings.     

Online advertising and privacy

An online platform auctions an advertising slot. Several advertisers compete in the auction, and consumers differ in their preferences. Prior to the auction, the platform decides whether to allow advertisers to access information about consumers (disclosure) or not (privacy). Disclosure improves the match between advertisers and consumers but increases product prices, even without price‐discrimination. We provide conditions under which disclosure or privacy is privately and/or socially optimal. When advertisers compete on the downstream market, disclosure can lead to an increase or a decrease in product prices depending on the nature of the information.     

A Model for Monetary Policy Analysis for Sub-Saharan Africa

We develop a small open economy DSGE model usable for monetary policy in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper we apply the model to quarterly data from Ghana from 1981–2007. We find that permanent, but not transitory, technology shocks are the most important source of fluctuations. We find that the estimated monetary policy rule suggests that policy is aimed almost exclusively at fluctuations in output and ignores inflation, imports and exports. A negative result is that there appears to be significant issues in identifying some important parameters.     

Do Investors Pay Sufficient Attention to Banks’ Unrealized Gains and Losses on Available-for-sale Securities?

Abstract

Unrealized gains and losses on available-for-sale securities (AFSGL) are included in Other Comprehensive Income (OCI) and directly affect shareholders’ equity but are not included in earnings. We investigate whether unrealized AFSGL help predict future earnings and whether analysts and investors incorporate the information conveyed by unrealized AFSGL in a timely manner. We conduct our investigation on a sample of banks because unrealized AFSGL are material in the banking industry. First, we show that unrealized AFSGL are material and help in predicting next period realized AFSGL and future earnings change. Second, we document that financial analysts are slow to react to unrealized AFSGL and update their forecasts after AFSGL are realized in earnings. Third, we find that investors are also slow to react to unrealized AFSGL and do so only after AFSGL are included (realized) in earnings and after financial analysts update their forecasts. We document an annual difference of 5% in future abnormal returns between banks in the top and bottom quintiles of past unrealized AFSGL. A zero-cost trading strategy that relies on public information about unrealized AFSGL generates a sizeable monthly alpha that ranges between 1.8% and 1.9%.     

Practical guidelines for the estimation and inference of a dynamic logistic model with fixed-effects

This paper shows how to simply compute one of the estimators proposed by Honoré and Kyriazidou (2000), as well as its variance, through a reshaping of the original dataset that is then used in a weighted logistic regression with clustering.     

What Do We Know About Long–run Equilibrium Real Exchange Rates? PPPs vs Macroeconomic Approaches

Despite the fact that the presence of non tradable goods is one of the most frequently advanced reasons for the failure of PPP, the empirical analysis conducted in this paper shows that it explains only a very small portion of the long run behaviour of real exchange rates (RERs) in developed countries: in most cases, there appears to be a very strong long run relationship between RERs calculated on price indexes for tradables and non tradables. As a consequence, deviations from PPP usually appear to be as large for both kinds of goods. To a certain extent, this stylised fact is also verified in the case of the yen/dollar RER, yet formerly known as a typical illustration of the so–called Balassa–Samuelson effect. In this context, so–called macroeconomic approaches of ERERs may be viewed as an alternative to all versions of PPP. We develop a model which combines the contributions of the most fruitful dynamic approaches, namely the NATREX and the BEER. An estimate of this model shows that the main long run determinants of the dollar/euro RER are the rate of consumption and the level of technical progress of the euro area relative to the US.