Public capital in the 21st century: as productive as ever?

The global financial crisis and the euro area sovereign debt crisis that followed induced a rapid deterioration in the fiscal positions of countries across the globe. In the ensuing fiscal adjustment process, public investments were severely reduced in many countries. How harmful is this for growth perspectives? Our main objective is to find out whether the importance of public capital for long run output growth has changed in recent years. To this end, we expand time series on public capital stocks for 20 OECD countries and estimate country-specific recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. Results show that the effect of public capital shocks on economic growth has not increased in general, although results differ widely between countries. This suggests that the current level of public investments generally does not pose an immediate threat to potential output. Of course, this could change if low investment levels are sustained for a long time.     

Is the exchange rate a shock absorber or a source of shocks? Evidence from the U.S.

We examine the stabilization role of the exchange rate in the U.S. economy using a factor augmented vector autoregression model. We find that exchange rate shock explains a large fraction of the variation in exchange rate and transmits major disturbances to the real economy. Further, we find that demand and supply shocks explain less than a quarter of the exchange rate movement. We provide robust evidence that although the exchange rate plays some role as a shock absorber, its role as an independent source of shocks is more dominant for the U.S. economy. The foreign exchange market breeds its own shocks which are destabilizing not only to the value of the dollar but to the overall economy as well. Our results suggest that policymakers need to take foreign exchange market fluctuations into account when making macroeconomic policy decisions.     

Does the foreign sector help forecast domestic variables in DSGE models?

This paper evaluates the forecasting performances of several small open-economy DSGE models relative to a closed-economy benchmark using a long span of data for Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. We find that opening the model economy usually does not improve the quality of point and density forecasts for key domestic variables, and can even cause it to deteriorate. We show that this result can be attributed largely to an increase in the forecast error due to the more sophisticated structure of the extended setup, which is not compensated for by a better model specification. This claim is based on a Monte Carlo experiment in which an open-economy model fails to beat its closed-economy benchmark consistently even if the former is the true data generating process.     

Financing government investment and its implications for public capital: A small open economy perspective

Expenditure reductions played a key role in many small open economies during fiscal consolidation, with large declines in public investment. This led to a reduction in public capital stock and affected the competitiveness of these economies. After the sovereign debt crisis, the governments that consider increasing investment to replenish the public capital stock have limited fiscal space and have to avoid external imbalances. We show that using budget-neutral investment spending can generate long-term benefits of higher public capital stock while at the same time limiting negative consequences for the public finances and the trade balance. The best way of financing government investment, which preserves fiscal and trade balances, and increases welfare, is by reducing other government spending. The second-best is financing investment with value-added tax. Financing with debt worsens fiscal and trade balances, while using distortionary labour taxes reduces labour supply, increases wage costs and worsens the trade deficit in the short run.     

Analysis of shock transmissions to a small open emerging economy using a SVARMA model

Using a parsimonious structural vector autoregressive moving average (SVARMA) model, we analyse the transmission of foreign and domestic shocks to a small open emerging economy under different policy regimes. Narrower confidence bands around the SVARMA responses compared to the SVAR responses, advocate the suitability of this framework for analysing the propagation of economic shocks over time. Malaysia is an interesting small open economy that has experienced an ongoing process of economic transition and development. The Malaysian government imposed exchange rate and capital control measures following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Historical decomposition and variance decomposition allow contrast of shocks propagating under different policy regimes. Malaysia is highly exposed to foreign shocks, particularly under the managed float exchange rate system. During the pegged exchange rate period, Malaysian monetary policymakers experienced some breathing space to focus on maintaining price and output stability. In the post-pegged period, Malaysia's exposure to foreign shocks increased and in recent times are largely driven by world commodity price and global activity shocks.     

Big data and complexity: Is macroeconomics heading toward a new paradigm?

The paper discusses the extent to which the availability of unprecedentedly rich data-sets and the need for new approaches – both epistemological and computational – is an emerging issue for Macroeconomics. By adopting an evolutionary approach, we describe the paradigm shifts experienced in the macroeconomic research field and emphasize that the types of data the macroeconomist has to deal with play an important role in the evolutionary process of the development of the discipline. After introducing the current debate over Big Data in social sciences, the paper presents a detailed discussion of possible and existing interactions between Big Data and Computational Behavioral Macroeconomics. We argue that Big Data applied to economic questions can lead to new styles of thinking and research methods, namely to the development of a new research paradigm.     

新凯恩斯主义经济理论评析——基于宏观经济理论前沿的视角

从宏观经济理论前沿的视角,通过对新凯恩斯主义经济理论产生的背景、基本假设及主要观点的评述,阐明新凯恩斯主义经济理论如何吸纳传统凯恩斯主义和新古典宏观经济学的有用成果并建立微观基础的过程。进而对新凯恩斯主义经济理论体系的缺陷及未来发展方向进行了评析。     

Sequential coordination,higher-order belief dynamics and the E-stability principle

This paper explores convergence in higher-order beliefs – otherwise called eductive stability – when coordination is sequential, that is, when each agent of a given type fixes his own actions after observing the ones of earlier types in a given order. The presence of sequential types enhances expectational coordination in the case of strategic substitutability, but not in the case of strategic complementarity. In particular, eductive stability can be obtained for any degree of substitutability, provided the number of sequential types is large enough. Therefore, sequential coordination opens up to the possibility that eductive convergence occurs at the same conditions of adaptive convergence, in accordance to the E-stability principle.     

Agent based-stock flow consistent macroeconomics: Towards a benchmark model

The paper moves from a discussion of the challenges posed by the crisis to standard macroeconomics and the solutions adopted within the DSGE community. Although several recent improvements have enhanced the realism of standard models, we argue that major drawbacks still undermine their reliability. In particular, DSGE models still fail to recognize the complex adaptive nature of economic systems, and the implications of money endogeneity. The paper argues that a coherent and exhaustive representation of the inter-linkages between the real and financial sides of the economy should be a pivotal feature of every macroeconomic model and proposes a macroeconomic framework based on the combination of the Agent Based and Stock Flow Consistent approaches. The papers aims at contributing to the nascent AB-SFC literature under two fundamental respects: first, we develop a fully decentralized AB-SFC model with several innovative features, and we thoroughly validate it in order to check whether the model is a good candidate for policy analysis applications. Results suggest that the properties of the model match many empirical regularities, ranking among the best performers in the related literature, and that these properties are robust across different parameterizations. Second, the paper has also a methodological purpose in that we try to provide a set or rules and tools to build, calibrate, validate, and display AB-SFC models.     

不同目标制下的中国最优货币政策分析

在更灵活的汇率制度下,中国货币政策会对经济产生什么影响？通过建立一个统一的开放宏观经济模型,发现如果中央银行要实现开放经济下不同目标制的最优货币政策,浮动汇率制成为稳定国内经济,有效应对国内外冲击与实施独立和内向型货币政策的最优选择。