International Spillovers of Output Growth and Output Growth Volatility: Evidence from the G7

This paper examines the transmission of GDP growth and GDP growth volatility among the G7 countries over the period 1960Q1 – 2010Q4, using a multivariate GARCH model and volatility impulse response functions (VIRFs) to identify the source, magnitude and the duration of volatility spillovers. Results indicate the presence of positive own-country GDP growth spillovers in each country and cross-country GDP growth spillovers among most of the G7 countries. In addition, the large number of significant own-country output growth volatility spillovers and cross-country output growth volatility spillovers indicates that output growth shocks in most of the G7 countries affect output growth volatility in the other remaining countries. An additional finding is that the duration of output growth volatility spillovers has increased over time from some seven quarters in the 1970s to some ten quarters during the recent crisis, which is likely to be due to the increased integration of goods and financial markets.     

An empirical analysis of the US stock market and output growth volatility spillover effects on three Anglo-Saxon countries

This paper examines the dynamic and switching effects of volatility spillovers arising from US stock market returns and GDP growth on those of Australia, Canada and the UK. For this purpose, we use quarterly data (1961q1–2013q1) and a constant probability Markov regime switching model. We found that the US stock market volatility significantly affects the stock market volatility of all three countries at least in one of the two specified regimes over time. However, the stock market volatilities in none of the three countries are contemporaneously influenced by the US output volatility even after allowing for two distinct regimes. On the other hand, the US stock market volatility exerts significant influences on the output volatilities of both Australia and the UK. Compared with Australia and the UK, Canada and the US show substantial output volatility co-movements, thereby confirming the close association between the two neighbouring economies through the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). We conclude that shocks emanating from the US stock market have unequivocal flow-on effects on the output and return volatilities of the other economies.     

Output volatility and economic growth

This paper proposes a new instrument to identify the causal effect of output volatility on economic growth, which is based on (exogenous) volatility spillovers from abroad. Cross-section evidence from 128 countries points to a negative effect of volatility on growth.     

Exploring GDP growth volatility spillovers across countries

This study takes a portfolio approach to investigate GDP growth volatility spillovers among 120 countries of the world during the 1960–2017 period. Based on the ratios of growth rate to standard deviation, we rank these countries in pools of high-, midsize-, and low-income growth. Using a spillover index that is based on variance decompositions under a vector autoregressive framework, we analyze the sources of growth volatility dynamics in the world in terms of volatility proportions from and to others. We find that high-income growth countries are net transmitters, while low-income growth countries are net recipients of growth volatility. We also find that it takes several years for low-income growth countries to absorb growth shocks of global nature. Overall, our analyses illustrate the importance of partnership in risk sharing as it is related to portfolio strategies and risk management.     

Output volatility,composition of trade,and transmission of economic shocks across countries

In this paper we investigate how supply and demand shocks in one country affect output volatility in other countries. While the evidence for cross‐country transmission of demand shocks is mixed, we find that volatile supply in one country leads to larger imports and output volatility in other countries. As a result, the effect of trade openness on output volatility is highly heterogeneous across countries and depends on the composition of their trade. Those countries whose imports originate in economies with volatile supply experience a greater impact of trade on output volatility.     

Spillover Effects of Real and Nominal Uncertainties in India

This paper examines the spillover effects and the causality between inflation, output growth and its uncertainties for India. Using monthly data for the period from April 1980 to April 2011, we estimated a bi-variate GARCH in mean with BEKK representations. This study differs from the earlier works where the parameters in the BEKK representations are estimated individually and the inferences are drawn on the basis of the individual lagged variance, covariance, and error terms from the respective equations. The empirical evidence suggests that inflation uncertainty seems to have significant negative impact on output growth and positive impact on output uncertainty and there is a positive influence of output uncertainty on the inflation. More importantly, there are spillovers and volatility transmission effects between the macroeconomic uncertainties where the volatility in output growth is significantly influenced by the shocks and volatility in inflation.

     

Financial Globalization,International Business Cycles and Consumption Risk Sharing*

In spite of two decades of financial globalization, consumption‐based indicators do not seem to signal more international risk sharing. We argue that the fraction of idiosyncratic consumption risk that gets shared among industrialized countries has actually increased considerably over the period 1980–2000 and, in particular, during the 1990s—from around 30 to more than 60 percent. However, standard consumption‐based measures of risk sharing—such as the volatility of consumption conditional on output or international consumption correlations—have been unable to detect this increase because consumption has also been affected by the concurrent decline in the volatility of output growth in most industrialized countries since the 1980s. First, the volatility of output at business‐cycle frequencies has declined by more than has the volatility of permanent fluctuations. Since consumption reacts mainly to permanent shocks, it appears more volatile in relation to current changes in output. This effect seems to have offset the tendency of financial globalization to lower the volatility of consumption conditional on output. Second, because the variability of permanent global shocks has also fallen, international consumption correlations have also generally not increased as financial markets have become more integrated.     

Oil shocks and stock volatility: new evidence via a Bayesian,graph-based VAR approach

ABSTRACT

This article examines the temporal dependence between three oil shocks and realized volatility in the stock markets of G20 countries between 1994 and 2019. By applying a novel, graphical, Bayesian VAR (BGVAR) model, we calculate unidirectional linkages of oil and stock volatility with a full and segmented sample. The results suggest an overall causality from stock volatility to oil shocks. For certain short, specific periods, the causal direction reverses. Depending on the country and the source of an oil shock, the magnitude and type of the effect can vary considerably. Specific oil-market shocks occur most often in our full sample. In a time-varying structure, oil supply shocks’ impact on stock volatility is more prominent, and net oil-importing countries’ responses to these shocks are greater than for oil-exporting countries. In addition, we find that relationship dynamics can capture market information, such as global economic growth during the 2008–2009 financial crisis.     

Dynamic frequency connectedness between oil and natural gas volatilities

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we study dynamic volatility connectedness between oil and natural gas over the period 1994 to 2018. Second, we examine the frequency dynamics of the transmission mechanism arising from frequency-specific responses to volatility shocks. To do so, we adopt a newly introduced approach that decomposes connectedness measures based on variance decompositions into their components at different frequency ranges. Our results summarize as follows: (a) there is a substantial variation in volatility spillovers over time; (b) the natural gas market was a net transmitter during the central part of our sample period; (c) the magnitude of spillovers was smaller after the financial crisis, but volatilities are not decoupled. (d) The volatility propagation mechanism is frequency dependent. Connectedness is typically created at low-frequencies, with volatility shocks across markets having long-lasting effects. However, during some specific periods, such as after Katrina, volatility was transmitted much faster, with shocks dissipating in the short-run.     

THE DYNAMIC RELATION BETWEEN RETURNS,TRADING VOLUME,AND VOLATILITY: LESSONS FROM SPILLOVERS BETWEEN ASIA AND THE UNITED STATES

This paper investigates the dynamic relationship between index returns, return volatility, and trading volume for eight Asian markets and the US. We find cross‐border spillovers in returns to be non‐existent, spillovers in absolute returns between Asia and the US to be strong in both directions, and spillovers in volatility to run from Asia to the US. Trading volume, especially on the Asian markets, depends on shocks in domestic and foreign returns as well as on volatility, especially those shocks originating in the US. However, only weak evidence is found for trading volume influencing other variables. In the light of the theoretical models, these results suggest sequential information arrivals, with investors being overconfident and applying positive feedback strategy. Furthermore, new information causes price volatility to rise due to differences in its interpretation among traders, but the subsequent market reaction takes the form of adjustment in price level, not volatility. Lastly, the intensity of cross‐border spillovers seems to have increased following the 1997 crisis, which we interpret as evidence of increased noisiness in prices and diversity in opinions about news originating abroad. Our findings might also help to understand the nature of financial crises, to predict their further developments and consequences.     

Post COVID-19 exit strategies and emerging markets economic challenges

We study emerging markets' 1980s lost growth decade, triggered by the massive reversal of the snowball effect in the US during 1974–1984, finding that higher flow costs of servicing debt overhang explain the dramatic decline in growth rates of exposed emerging markets. We also show how lowering the US cost of servicing its public debt has been associated with higher US, Japan, and Western Europe real output growth rates during the post WWII recovery decades, 1946–1956, and validate that fiscal adjustments of large countries have strong growth and volatility spillovers effects on exposed emerging markets and developing countries.     

Does industrial concentration impact on the relationship between policies and volatility?

It is usually recommended that countries diversify their economies to guard against any negative shocks that might impact on one industry. However, previous research has not identified how concentration can impact on the effectiveness of macroeconomic policies. This paper attempts to evaluate the relationship between industrial concentration, policies and economic volatility for a sample of 147 countries for the period 1970 to 2005. The study reports that less concentrated countries tend to have lower rates of output, consumption and investment growth volatility. In addition, while trade and capital account openness variables alone tend to diminish economic volatility, in concentrated economies opening both the capital and trade account can increase economic volatility.     

Macroeconomic volatility and anti-refugee violence in developing countries: Evidence from commodity price shocks

I investigate the effect of macroeconomic (output) volatility on anti-refugee violence in developing countries. Opportunity cost, rapacity, and state capacity theories predict ambiguous effects. For causal inference I leverage output volatility caused by plausibly exogenous commodity price shocks. I find that adverse commodity price shocks increase both violence of natives against refugees and violence between refugees. My results suggest that anti-refugee violence increases during recessions and decreases during economic booms.     

Asymmetric volatility spillovers between the U.K. regional worker flows and vacancies

This article investigates volatility spillovers between the U.K. regional job finding, job separation and vacancy rates. Employing a large Bayesian logistic smooth transition vector autoregression model, we find high volatility spillovers between the U.K. regional labour markets. Analyses of net spillovers show that, in general, shocks to job separation rates tend to spread into job finding and vacancy rates, while vacancy rates are usually at the receiving end of shocks transmitted from the job separations and job findings. To shed further light on the shock propagation mechanism, we also look into more detailed matters such as the differences in spillovers between regions within the same regime, and that of the same region but in different regimes.     

The optimality of a gulf currency union: Commonalities and idiosyncrasies

A high degree of shared national elements that drive the bulk of observed output volatility between countries is generally seen as a necessary prerequisite for the formation of a successful monetary union. This is because countries in a monetary union accept a one-size-fits all, resigning regions to policies that are based on some aggregate macroeconomic target rather than a country-specific one. For this reason, the cost of monetary union membership depends on the incidence of asymmetric (nation-specific) shocks rather than symmetric, or common shocks. This criteria is examined for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, who reaffirmed plans for the implementation of a single currency. This paper quantifies, using structural factor models with common factor restrictions, changes in output synchronisation, the importance of common factor or idiosyncratic shocks between the regions, and the synchronisation of these shocks across the GCC as well as the implications for GCC-wide macroeconomic policy at short-to-medium term horizons. Despite current difficulties in fulfilling the convergence criteria goals to monetary union, the results show the synchronisation of output growth fluctuations between economies of the GCC to have increased over the past 25 years. This paper also finds that a fairly sizeable proportion of output fluctuations in business cycle frequencies are driven by a common component that, to some degree, reflects U.S. monetary policy and U.S. demand shocks as well as changes in crude oil prices.     

The interplay between labor market rigidity and volatility-growth nexus

Using a simple innovation‐driven growth model I investigate to what extent labor market regulations underlie the devastating effects of output volatility on long‐run growth trends. Empirical analysis conducted for 154 countries over the 1996–2005 period shows that an increase from low values of the rigidity of employment index strengthens the influence of volatility on growth. This effect weakens with further increases in rigidity. Hence implementation of labor protection legislation is recommended in economies frequently hit by shocks.     

Monetary union with sticky prices and direct spillover channels

This paper derives a sticky-price, forward-looking model of a monetary union (MU) of two countries, with trade across countries and immobile labour. Contrasting to the existing literature, the resulting laws-of-motion do not resort to spillovers via aggregate, union-wide magnitudes but instead feature direct impact of the output gap of the respective other country, and indirect impact of price dynamics via the the consumer price indices (CPIs). Further, the paper analyses the equilibrium dynamics of a variant of the model under various exogenous shocks, most prominently, idiosyncratic shocks to cover diverging developments of the different regions of an MU. A numerical analysis of the parameter calibration for saddlepath-stable behaviour is provided. I find i.a. that idiosyncratic shocks result in heavily oscillating behaviour due to unsynchronised spillovers and reactions of the central bank.     

Business cycles through international shocks: A structural investigation

This paper investigates the sources of output volatility by decomposing the international shocks into finance and trade shocks. Through structural Bayesian estimations of an open-economy DSGE model on 16 countries, on average, international shocks explain around 70% of output fluctuations.     

Aid, Volatility, and Growth Again: When Aid Volatility Matters and When it Does Not

In previous papers the authors have argued that aid is likely to mitigate the negative effects of external shocks on economic growth (i.e. that aid is more effective in countries which are more vulnerable to external shocks). Recently an important debate has emerged about the possible negative effects of aid volatility itself. However, the cushioning effect of aid may involve some volatility in aid flows, which then is not necessarily negative for growth. In this paper the authors examine to what extent the time profile of aid disbursements may contribute to an increase or a decrease of aid effectiveness. They first show that aid, even if volatile, is not clearly as pro-cyclical as is often argued, and, even if pro-cyclical, is not necessarily destabilizing. They measure aid volatility by several methods and assess pro-cyclicality of aid with respect to exports, thus departing from previous literature, which usually assess pro-cyclicality of aid with respect to national income or fiscal receipts. The stabilizing/destabilizing nature of aid is measured by the difference in the volatility of exports and the volatility of the aid plus export flows. Then, in order to take into account the diversity of shocks to which aid can respond, they consider the effect of aid on income volatility and again find that aid is making growth more stable, while its volatility reduces this effect. They finally show through growth regressions that the higher effectiveness of aid in vulnerable countries is to a large extent due to its stabilizing effect.     

Does a Regional Trade Agreement Lessen or Worsen Growth Volatility? An Empirical Investigation

This paper assesses how regional trade agreements (RTAs) impact on growth volatility for a sample of 170 countries over the period 1978–2012. Notwithstanding concerns that trade openness through RTAs might heighten exposure to shocks, RTAs through enhanced policy credibility, improved policy coordination and reduced risk of conflicts can also ease growth volatility. Empirical estimations suggest the benefits outweigh the costs as RTAs are consistently associated with lower growth volatility. In addition, smaller economies benefit more from the reduced growth volatility associated with RTAs than larger ones. The nature of the RTA also matters as shallow agreements such as partial‐scope preferential trade agreements do not appear to have a significant effect on growth volatility, whereas free trade areas and customs unions do. Finally, in investigating the drivers of RTAs, the regression results confirm that countries that are more prone to shocks are more likely to join an RTA, in particular with countries with relatively less volatile growth.