The transmission of foreign shocks to South Eastern European economies: A Bayesian VAR approach

The paper analyses the macroeconomic effects of foreign shocks in three South-East European (SEE) economies: Croatia, Macedonia and Bulgaria. In this regard, we investigate the transmission of several eurozone shocks (output gap, money market rates and inflation) on various macroeconomic variables in the aforementioned countries (output, inflation, money market rates and budget deficits). We trace the effects of foreign shocks on the basis of impulse response functions obtained from the Bayesian Vector Auto Regressions (VARs) separately for each country. The main findings from our study are: first, economic expansion in the eurozone has strong output and inflation effects on SEE economies, implying some degree of synchronization of business cycles; second, eurozone inflation is instantly and to a great extent transmitted to domestic inflation, suggesting that inflation in the SEE economies is mostly driven by foreign inflation; third, domestic money market rates are not closely linked with eurozone money markets; fourth, monetary policy in the SEE countries does not seem to be responsive to eurozone inflation shocks; and fifth, the fiscal authorities attempt to offset the spillover effects from both economic expansion and monetary tightening in the eurozone.     

By force of demand: Explaining cyclical fluctuations of international trade and government spending

This paper explores the role of demand shocks, as an alternative to productivity shocks, in driving both domestic and international business cycles within the international real business cycle (IRBC) framework. In addition to those well-documented domestic business cycle fluctuations (e.g., the volatility and cyclicality of output, consumption, investment, labor hours, and labor productivity) and international business cycle properties (e.g., the countercyclical net export and the comovement puzzle), this paper focuses on two additional stylized facts in the industrialized countries: the procyclical trade openness (the GDP fraction of trade volume) and the countercyclical government size (the GDP fraction of government spending). Using a parsimonious dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that the model׳s predictions under productivity shocks are not consistent with these facts. Instead, a demand-shock-driven model replicates the above facts while matching other domestic and international business cycle properties. An estimated version of the model confirms the quantitatively important impacts of demand shocks.     

Macroeconomic shocks and fluctuations in African economies

We estimate a monetary DSGE model to examine the role of macroeconomic shocks in generating fluctuations in ten African countries. The model is estimated with the Bayesian technique using twelve macroeconomic variables. The findings indicate that both the internal and external shocks significantly influence output fluctuations in African economies. Over a four quarter horizon, internal shocks are dominant and over eight to sixteen quarter horizons, external shocks are dominant. Among the external shocks, external debt, exchange rate, foreign interest rate and commodity price shocks account for a large part of output variations in African economies. Money supply and productivity shocks are the most important internal shocks contributing to output fluctuations in African countries.     

The role of credit supply shocks in pacific alliance countries: A TVP-VAR-SV approach

This paper analyzes the effect of loan supply shocks on the real economic activity of Pacific Alliance countries using a Time-Varying Parameter VAR with Stochastic Volatility (TVP-VAR-SV) model which is identified by sign restrictions. Two main results arise from the analysis. First, loan supply shocks have an important impact on real economic activity in all Pacific Alliance countries: about 1% in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, and about 0.5% in Chile. Thus, its contribution to business cycle fluctuations is similar to that of aggregate supply shocks and aggregate demand shocks in both stability and slowdown periods. Second, the power of loan supply shocks to affect economic activity do not remain constant over the time and its evolution across periods is heterogeneous among all Pacific Alliance countries. The sensitivity analysis indicates that the results of the model are robust to different priors specifications and to multiple sets of sign restrictions.     

Asset pricing with expectation shocks

This paper adds persistent shocks into the adaptive learning expectation formation process in stochastic growth asset pricing production and endowment economies. These expectation shocks, designed to capture psychological elements which can arise from news, changes in sentiment, herding and bandwagon effects, generate waves of optimism and pessimism in equity price forecasts. The paper estimates parameters of the expectation shock and adaptive learning process with the method of simulated moments, and compares simulation results to U.S. economic and financial market stylized facts. Numerical results for both the estimated production and endowment economies show that the expectation shock model matches several of the stylized facts better than does a model that assumes rational expectations or adaptive learning alone.     

Are European business cycles close enough to be just one?

We propose a comprehensive methodology to characterize the business cycle comovements across European economies and some industrialized countries, without imposing any given model but trying to ’leave the data speak’. We develop a novel method to show that there is no evidence of a ’European economy’ that acts as an attractor to the other economies of the area. We show that the establishment of the Monetary Union has not significantly increased the level of comovements across Euro-area economies. Finally, we are able to explain an important proportion of the distances across their business cycles using macrovariables related to the structure of the economy, to the directions of trade, and to the size of the public sector.     

Measuring Regional Economic Resilience across Europe: Operationalizing a complex concept

This paper describes an approach developed to measure regional economic resilience across Europe which is novel in three key dimensions. Firstly, it seeks to date regional downturns as opposed to assuming that all regional economies are affected by economic shocks at the same point in time; secondly, it measures the amplitude and duration of economic downturns and subsequent recoveries; and thirdly, as well as measuring recovery, it measures the resistance of regional economies to economic shocks. The paper applies this methodology to selected European countries to provide an analysis of differential regional responses to several economic shocks since the early 1990s. The paper then reflects upon the utility of this methodology for operationalizing regional economic resilience in cross-comparative studies.     

What does a Monetary Policy Shock Do? An International Analysis with Multiple Filters*

What does a monetary policy shock do? We answer this question by estimating a new‐Keynesian monetary policy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for a number of economies with a variety of empirical proxies of the business cycle. The effects of two different policy shocks, an unexpected interest rate hike conditional on a constant inflation target and an unpredicted drift in the inflation target, are scrutinized. Filter‐specific Bayesian impulse responses are contrasted with those obtained by combining multiple business cycle indicators. Our results document the substantial uncertainty surrounding the estimated effects of these two policy shocks across a number of countries.     

Macroeconomic responses of emerging market economies to oil price shocks: An analysis by region and resource profile

We analyze the impact of oil price shocks on the macroeconomic fundamentals in emerging economies in three regions that have different resource endowments. The existing literature on emerging economies remains inconclusive on how regional factors and resource characteristics affect the response of macroeconomic variables to oil price shocks. We show that (1) exports in Europe and Central Asia are driven by oil more than East Asia and the Pacific and that (2) policy makers in East Asia and the Pacific should be concerned about real exchange appreciation following a positive oil shock to mitigate losses in the non-oil export market. Analysis by resource endowment further reveals that, in less-resource-intensive economies, an oil price shock causes large variations in consumption and has a negative and persistent impact on the real gross domestic product (GDP). In mineral-exporting economies, real GDP and interest rates are driven largely by oil price shocks. The response of real GDP in mineral-exporting economies is short lived. In oil-exporting economies, only real GDP has a large variation in response to oil price shocks. Our findings highlight the need for customized policy responses to oil price shocks, depending on resource endowments, as we show that a “one size fits all" policy does not exist.     

World,country, and sector factors in international business cycles

Do sector-specific factors common to all countries play an important role in explaining business cycle co-movement? We address this question by analyzing international co-movements of value added (VA) growth in a multi-sector dynamic factor model. The model contains a world factor, country-specific factors, sector-specific factors, and idiosyncratic components. We estimate the model using Bayesian methods for 30 disaggregated sectors in the G7 economies for the 1974–2004 period. Our findings show that, although there is a substantial role for sector-specific factors, fluctuations are dominated by country-factors. The world factor appears to play a minimal role because, when using aggregate data, the world factor captures both the factor common to all countries and industries and the factor common to the same industry across countries. We then examine how these factors evolved as globalization deepened over the past two decades. Our results suggest that business cycles at a disaggregate level have not become more synchronized internationally. This is mainly driven by a substantial fall in the volatility of world shocks during the globalization period, rather than a lower sensitivity of sectoral growth to world factors. Our results also reveal that world factors appear to be more important for industries with a higher level of international vertical integration.     

Does income inequality lead to banking crises in developing countries? Empirical evidence from cross-country panel data

This study empirically examines whether increasing income inequality results in banking crises using panel data for 68 countries covering the years 1973 to 2010. The results show that developing countries with high inequality tend to have higher levels of domestic credit and that domestic credit booms increase the probability of banking crises. We also find that developing economies display direct channels from inequality to banking crises without an association with credit booms. We find no consistent evidence that income inequality contributes to banking crises in advanced economies. In developing countries, the probability of banking crises increases dramatically as income inequality levels increase: The probability of a systemic banking crisis within three years is 9.5% when the Gini is as low as 0.2 in developing countries and increases to 57.4% when the Gini is 0.4. These results are robust to several specifications.     

The transmission of international shocks to CIS economies: A global VAR approach

This paper employs a Global Vector Auto Regressive (GVAR) model to study the evolution of the response of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to foreign output and oil price shocks. During an observation period of two decades, cross-country trade and financial linkages experience notable changes. We find CIS countries to be highly sensitive to global and regional shocks, with that sensitivity increasing after the global financial crisis. CIS countries show the strongest responses to output shocks originating in the US, Russia and within the region itself, but their sensitivity to euro area shocks also increases substantially. Despite growing trade relations with China, the responses of CIS countries to output shocks originating in China are still relatively moderate.     

Globalisation and monetary policy—A FAVAR analysis for the G7 and the eurozone

We assess the significance of global shocks for the world economy and national central banks and governments. More specifically, we investigate whether monetary policy has become less effective in the wake of financial globalization. We also analyze whether there is increasing uncertainty for central banks due to globalization-driven changes in the national economic structure. A FAVAR framework is applied to identify structural shocks on a world level and their effect on other global and national variables. To estimate our macroeconomic model, we employ quarterly data from Q1 1984 to Q4 2007 for the G7 countries and the euro area. According to our results, global liquidity shocks significantly influence the world economy and also various national economies. But common shocks driven by real estate prices and GDP also turn out to be significant at a global scale. These results prove to be robust across different specifications.     

Economic systems in developing countries – A macro cluster approach

This study is an attempt to close a gap in the comparative capitalism literature. Studies in that field focus mostly on industrialized countries, discuss economic systems in developing regions separately, and do not provide evidence based on a worldwide sample. We use an established macroeconomic cluster approach to identify economic systems in a worldwide sample of 115 developing and industrialized countries. We use an innovative approach to correct for income-related differences that would otherwise distort the cluster results. The major results are (1) that two broad categories of economic systems exist in developing countries (liberal and coordinated), which mirrors the results for industrialized countries, and (2) that economic systems in developing countries are apparently determined by a mixture of colonial heritage—with the transfer of more liberal institutions in the case of British colonialization—and regional affiliation, which explain differences within continents and between continents.     

Exchange rate dynamics and their effect on macroeconomic volatility in selected CEE countries

To understand the potential for forming an optimum currency area it is important to investigate the origins of macroeconomic volatility. We focus on the contribution of real exchange rate shocks to macroeconomic volatility in selected Central and Eastern European countries. The contribution of real exchange rate shocks relative to other shocks allows us to evaluate whether the real exchange rate is a source of volatility or a buffer against shocks, as the theory suggests. The identification of the contributions is based on variance decomposition in two-country structural VAR models, which are identified by the sign restriction method. For most of the countries in the sample, shocks are predominantly symmetric relative to their effective counterpart, although the role of non-symmetric shocks is non-negligible. In general, for all the countries considered except Bulgaria and Slovenia, the real exchange rate does not generate large volatility over the business cycle and, with the exception of Bulgaria and Romania, is mostly driven by the non-symmetric shocks. These results are consistent with the real exchange rate having a shock-absorbing nature.     

The cross market effects of short sale restrictions

This paper considers the impact of the 2008 short selling bans on the cross-market dynamics of stock indices across a wide range of countries. We measure the transmission of shocks between markets using a modified version of the spillover index of Diebold and Yilmaz (2009). The results show that the transmission of shocks between countries which did impose short sale bans was reduced and transmissions from countries with bans to countries without bans were also generally lower. In contrast, short sale bans did not provide protection from shocks emanating from countries which did not impose bans, as shocks from non-banning markets tended to have an increased impact on other markets during periods where bans were in place. Overall, the evidence supports the redirection of volatility in the system affecting the relationships between the groups of markets with bans and those without.     

Wars and capital destruction

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to investigate the impact of conflicts and wars on key macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. Using a panel data with 9 countries from 1870 onwards, we first show that the consumption-to-output ratio is minimal during WWII for participants. While this can be explained by an increase in public spending in the USA, this cannot be the case in other countries that participated in WWII, as they experience a large fall in output during wartime. To account for this, we build a variation of a Real Business Cycle model first proposed by Hercowitz and Sampson (1991). We extend the initial model to account for specific shocks that destroy private and public capital stocks – as conflicts do – by assuming an (exogenously) time-varying parameter in the law of capital accumulation. In addition, the model imbeds generalized TFP shocks capturing standard technological factors as well as the potential effects of war on the labor force. The model is estimated and used (i) to assess the importance of capital shocks during war episodes, and (ii) to quantify the welfare effects of conflicts. We show that capital shocks are crucial to account for the macroeconomic dynamics of countries that have experienced large war-related destruction, and that the welfare losses from fluctuations can be quite large when considering data samples that include major war episodes.     

Do IMF forecasts respect Okun’s law? Evidence for advanced and developing economies

This paper provides an assessment of the IMF’s unemployment forecasts, which have not received much scrutiny to date. The focus is on the internal consistency of the IMF’s growth and unemployment forecasts, and specifically on seeing whether the relationship between the two is consistent with the relationship in the data, i.e., with Okun’s Law. We find that the average performance is good, in the sense that the relationship between growth and unemployment forecasts is fairly comparable to that which prevails in the data: on average, the Okun coefficient in the forecasts mirrors the Okun coefficient in the data. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement, particularly in the year-ahead forecasts and for the group of middle-income countries. We show that a linear combination of Okun-based unemployment forecasts and WEO unemployment forecasts can deliver significant gains in forecast accuracy for developing economies.     

Solving the multi-country real business cycle model using a Smolyak-collocation method

We describe a sparse-grid collocation method to compute recursive solutions of dynamic economies with a sizable number of state variables. We show how powerful this method can be in applications by computing the non-linear recursive solution of an international real business cycle model with a substantial number of countries, complete insurance markets and frictions that impede frictionless international capital flows. In this economy, the aggregate state vector includes the distribution of world capital across different countries as well as the exogenous country-specific technology shocks. We use the algorithm to efficiently solve models with up to 10 countries (i.e., up to 20 continuous-valued state variables).