Macroprudential policy with convertible debt

This paper studies the effectiveness of countercyclical capital requirements and contingent convertible capital (CoCos) in limiting financial instability, and its associated influence on the real economy. To do this, I augment both features into a standard business cycle framework with an equity market and a banking sector. The model is calibrated to real U.S. data and used for simulations. The findings suggest that a countercyclical capital adequacy rule and CoCos provide an effective dual approach to macroprudential policy. On the one hand, a capital adequacy rule mitigates the build-up of systemic risk through a capital buffer. On the other hand, CoCos are able to reduce the impact of a sudden decline in bank capital.     

Disinflation and the supply side

This paper studies the dynamics associated with permanent and temporary reductions in the devaluation rate. The analysis uses an intertemporal optimizing model of a small open economy with imperfect capital markets and endogenous labor supply. With a constant capital stock, the model predicts an initial reduction in real wages and an expansion in output. Consumption falls on impact but increases afterward. In addition, with a temporary shock, a current account deficit emerges and a recession sets in at a later stage. With endogenous capital accumulation, numerical simulations show that the model is also capable of predicting a boom in investment.     

银行盈利高增长下的蜕变:资本节约和效率提升

中国商业银行业正面临经营环境转变及监管层逆周期审慎监管的双重压力,其原有的盈利模式亟待转换。从可持续发展的高度指出资本节约及效率提升是中国商业银行业盈利模式转型的方向。通过对2011年上半年上市银行财务数据分析发现,商业银行在保持盈利高增长的同时中间业务迅速成长、中小企业贷款占比快速提高、费用控制卓有成效、资本内生已有体现,其转型方向在实践中具有可行性。     

The effects of longevity and distortions on education and retirement

This article studies the impact of longevity and taxation on life-cycle decisions and long run income. Individuals allocate optimally their total lifetime between education, working and retirement. They also decide at each moment how much to save or consume out of their income, and, after entering the labor market, how to divide their time between labor and leisure. The model incorporates experience–earnings profiles and return to education function that follows evidence from the labor literature. In this setup increases in longevity raises the investment in education—time in school—and retirement. The model is calibrated to the US and is able to reproduce observed schooling trends of the last century. It also reproduces the increase in retirement, as the evidence shows. Simulations show that a country equal to the US but with 20% smaller longevity will be 25% poorer, mostly because of the impact of life expectancy on human capital formation and retirement. In this economy labor taxes have a strong impact on the per capita income, as it decreases labor effort, time at school and retirement age, in addition to the general equilibrium impact over physical capital.     

Environmental capital flight and pollution tax

This paper analyzes the impacts of a production pollution tax on environmental capital flight and national product in a two-country static general equilibrium model with two-way foreign investment. It is assumed that the capital input in both countries is a composite good of domestic and imported capital. And pollution is assumed to originate in the production process. The productivity of capital in each country is negatively (or positively) related to the worldwide aggregate emissions.The analysis shows that when a domestic pollution tax is levied, domestic capital outflows increase and foreign capital inflows decrease for sufficiently high elasticities of substitution between labor (immobile input) and capital (mobile input) in both countries. Moreover, with negative transnational externalities, increases of a domestic pollution tax reduce domestic production and increase foreign production. The difficulty of substitution between immobile and mobile inputs hinders the optimal allocation of worldwide capital and national product. In this paper, the optimal pollution tax is based on global welfare maximization, not on global income maximization, taking into consideration the impact of income change on individual welfare. Therefore, an optimal pollution tax in the developing country should be lower for a given rate of pollution.     

Business cycles and schooling

It has been suggested that recessions are the appropriate time for undertaking activities that promote long-term performance (such as re-organization, human capital investments, R&D). In this paper, we study the cyclical patterns of one such activity, namely schooling. In particular, we examine the cyclicality in the school enrollment rates of various age groups in the US. The overall pattern is countercyclical. In addition, schooling seems to respond negatively to the expected real interest rate. Overall, the results seem to support the view that variation in opportunity costs associated with business cycles plays a major role in schooling decisions.     

Capital controls and welfare with cross-border bank capital flows

This performance of time-varying capital controls on cross-border bank borrowing is studied in an open-economy, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with financial frictions and imperfect capital mobility. The model is parameterized for a middle-income country and replicates the stylized facts associated with a drop in world interest rates—capital inflows, real appreciation, credit boom, asset price pressures, and output expansion. A capital controls rule, which is fundamentally macroprudential in nature, is defined in terms of changes in bank foreign borrowing. The welfare-maximizing rule is established numerically and compared to the Ramsey policy. The analysis is then extended to solve jointly for optimal countercyclical reserve requirements and capital controls rules. The results show that the implementation of a countercyclical credit-based reserve requirement rule induces less reliance on capital controls. Thus, these two instruments are partial substitutes in maximizing welfare.     

中国不同时期短期国际资本流动影响因素比较

将2003—2012年细分为8个时间段,具体分析8个时间段内中国短期国际资本流动的情况及其影响因素。结果显示:正的国内外利差对短期国际资本流入的吸引力较小;2003—2012年期间的2个短期国际资本流入高峰是由人民币快速升值引致的;高股价收益率的持续时间较短,其对短期国际资本流入的总体影响较小;正的房价收益率能够引致稳定的短期国际资本净流入。     

Extent and intensity of investment with multiple capital goods

Overall investment is the product of the number of capital goods for which triggering has occurred (the extensive or reductive margin) and the depth of investment per capital good (intensive margin). Based on a longitudinal plant-level data and using dynamic panel techniques we investigated the validity of the hypothesis that the intensity of investment increases as its extent increases. Our results indicate a strong linkage between the extent and intensity of investment decisions, finding which holds both for positive and negative investment decisions. This linkage suggests that the decision on how many capital types to initiate investment is closely connected to the decision regarding the depth of investment expenditures. Moreover, the intensity–extent derivative remains positive but its magnitude decreases with plant size, providing indirect evidence for higher complementarity between capital types for smaller plants.     

R&D intensity of investment across Europe before and after the crisis

In this paper we investigate the comovements between the R&D intensity of private investment and GDP growth in different European Union (EU) areas over the period 1999–2014. Our empirical analysis shows that only core countries display a common countercyclical mechanism leading to an increased intensity of R&D over prolonged downturns. The lack of an effective countercyclical pattern of R&D intensity over the evolution of GDP growth in periphery countries makes this area highly vulnerable to persistent recessions, with potentially harmful consequences for long‐term growth. For recent EU members the evidence of acyclicality should be evaluated in the light of the catching‐up process still at work in this area. Our analysis suggests that any successful EU innovation policy should not disregard the potential divergence in R&D performance due to the dispersion of the countercyclical properties of the investment intensity in productivity enhancing activities in the different EU areas.     

Working time reduction and employment in a finite world*

We study the consequences of a working time reduction (WTR) in a growth model with efficiency wages and an essential natural resource (natural capital), and in which technical progress cannot reduce the resource content of final production to zero. We show that if natural capital is scarce enough, a WTR increases the long-term levels of the hourly wage and employment. A numerical analysis of the transitory impacts of a WTR confirms that when natural capital is scarcer, a WTR increases employment more and the hourly wage less, with a less negative initial impact on output.     

人口老龄化、社会保障与人力资本投资

本文以我国养老保险的"统账结合"模式为例,探讨了社会保障制度对人口老龄化和人力资本投资的影响。根据本文的推导和验证,增加"统账结合"模式中个人账户的比例,将会对居民的人力资本投资产生一定的激励作用,并延缓其退出劳动力市场的时间,从而缓解人口老龄化对经济和社会发展带来的压力。另外,本文还在"统账结合"模型下,分析了人力资本投资与退休的关系,结果发现,增加人力资本投资,可以延长居民的劳动参与时间。由此,我国的社会保障制度应该在以下两个方面进行改革:适当增加"统账结合"模式中个人承担的比例;加快农村的社会保障体系建设,促进覆盖全国的社会保障体系的形成。     

Demographic structure and capital accumulation

This paper develops an overlapping-generations (OLG) model to analyze the consequences of demographic structure changes induced by an exogenous shift in the birth rate. We first show that a finite growth rate of the population that maximizes long-run capital per capita exists. Then, we examine the theoretical properties of this growth rate by showing that: (i) it corresponds to the demographic structure such that the average ages of capital holders and workers are equal; (ii) it is associated to an efficient steady state; (iii) it increases with compulsory transfers from younger to older generations. Finally, we explain why standard OLG models do not exhibit such a growth rate.     

Endogenous cycles and human capital

Existing evidence shows that human capital investment is countercyclical. In a dynamic model, I show that countercyclical investment in human capital arises as a result of a parametric combination relating to preferences and technologies. This countercyclical reaction is responsible for complex dynamics in the evolution of human capital, thus initiating a self-sustained sequence of events that generate endogenous cycles.     

人力资本与区域经济发展的计量分析

基于1990年与2000年人口普查数据,运用回归分析研究了区域人力资本指标10年间的差异及其变化趋势对地区经济发展水平变动的影响.结果表明,对人均GDP的增长率有显著影响的因素,按其影响程度由大到小依次为:平均受教育年限增长率、识字率提高率、教育投资占GDP 的比例变动和每千人医生数增长率,但它们对人均GDP影响的方向不同,这一结论不同于许多学者的总量研究结果.本文还利用因子分析进一步解释了人力资本各指标的层次结构对经济作用的影响.这对于在经济转型期深刻认识人力资本在促进区域经济发展中的作用有参考价值.     

Gender gap,capital accumulation and the demographic transition

This paper focuses on explaining the demographic transition and some of the broad patterns that are associated with it. We present an endogenous growth model that incorporates altruism and son preference within the family as well as gender wage gap and gender wage discrimination in the labour market. We show that with the accumulation of physical capital and human capital, the output share of mental labour increases and the gender wage gap narrows. In the early stages of economic development, gender discrimination is becoming prevalent and the substitution effect of capital accumulation, which raises the cost of child rearing, is dominated by the income effect, so the growth rate of population increases with income. When the degree of gender wage discrimination starts to decline, the increased cost of child rearing induces families to invest more in the human capital of children and the growth rate of the population falls. The quantitative analysis shows that gender wage discrimination is indeed an important contributor to the demographic transition.     

The cyclical behavior of bank capital buffers in an emerging economy: Size does matter

Using a panel of Colombian banks and quarterly data between 1996:1 and 2010:3, we study the relationship between short-run adjustments in bank capital buffers and the business cycle. We follow a partial adjustment framework and control for several variables that have been identified as important determinants of bank capital buffers in previous studies, and find that bank capital buffers vary over the business cycle. We are able to identify a negative co-movement of capital buffers and the business cycle. However, we also find that capital buffers of small and large banks behave asymmetrically during the business cycle. While the former appear to be constant over time, once the appropriate set of control variables is used, the latter present a countercyclical behavior. Our results suggest the possible need of the implementation of regulatory policy measures in developing countries.     

微博社会资本的影响因素

采用新浪微博的数据,通过聚类分析、社会网络分析和回归分析,研究了微博用户的主动行为和真实世界中的社会资本对其微博社会资本的影响。研究结果显示:微博用户的主动行为和线下社会资本对其微博社会资本都有正向影响,且线下社会资本的影响较大;线下桥接社会资本对微博纽带社会资本的影响较大。     

退休年龄选择机理：基于人力资本与社会保障的视角

近年来,延长退休年龄问题日益成为社会和学界的热点话题。本文从我国人口老龄化社会的到来并渐近达到峰值谈起,指出人口老龄化趋势、人均寿命的延长以及我国人口平均人力资本存量的不断增加要求我们实行延迟退休制度。     

Effectiveness of the reserve option mechanism as a macroeconomic prudential tool: evidence from Turkey

This article assesses the effectiveness of a novel macroprudential tool – the reserve option mechanism (ROM) – which Turkey’s central bank developed during the post-2008 period and has employed to control the risk associated with excessive capital flows. We assess how capital flows have affected economic variable changes since the introduction and usage of the ROM. Empirical evidence gathered from Turkey suggests that the tool decreases the effect of capital flow on capital flow (positive shock to capital flow dies out faster or becomes less persistent) and diminishes the effects of capital flow shocks on exchange and interest rates.