Information sharing and credit: Firm-level evidence from transition countries

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability and lower cost of credit to firms. This correlation is stronger for opaque firms than transparent ones and stronger in countries with weak legal environments than in those with strong legal environments. In cross-sectional estimates, we control for variation in country-level aggregate variables that may affect credit, by examining the differential impact of information sharing across firm types. In panel estimates, we also control for the presence of unobserved heterogeneity at the firm level, as well as for changes in macroeconomic variables and the legal environment.     

Survey Under‐Coverage of Top Incomes and Estimation of Inequality: What is the Role of the UK's SPI Adjustment?

Survey under‐coverage of top incomes leads to bias in survey‐based estimates of overall income inequality. Using income tax record data in combination with survey data is a potential approach to address the problem; we consider here the UK's pioneering ‘SPI adjustment’ method that implements this idea. Since 1992, the principal income distribution series (reported annually in Households Below Average Income) has been based on household survey data in which the incomes of a small number of ‘very rich’ individuals are adjusted using information from ‘very rich’ individuals in personal income tax return data. We explain what the procedure involves, reveal the extent to which it addresses survey under‐coverage of top incomes and show how it affects estimates of overall income inequality. More generally, we assess whether the SPI adjustment is fit for purpose and consider whether variants of it could be employed by other countries.     

Price adjustment and exchange rate pass-through

This paper develops a simple theoretical model that can be used to account for the determinants of exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices. While recent evidence has found low estimates of pass-through in many countries, there is little consensus on an explanation for this. Our paper argues that sticky prices represent a key determinant of exchange rate pass-through. We make this argument in two stages. First, holding the frequency of price change constant, we show that our model calibrated to data from low-inflation countries can reproduce the estimates of very low pass-through for these countries. The principal determinant of low pass-through in this case is the slow adjustment of prices. We then extend the model to allow the frequency of price change to be endogenous. Calibrating to a wider set of countries, including both low-inflation and high-inflation countries, we show that our model implies that exchange rate pass-through is increasing in average inflation, but at a declining rate. Performing the identical exercise on the data, we find a striking correspondence between the predictions of the model and those of the data.     

Exchange rates and ‘news’: A comment

Although in a world with more than two countries the error term in standard exchange market efficiency tests will be correlated across exchange rates, such information cannot be exploited in tests of market efficiency since the relevant information variables are the same in all equations and thus seemingly unrelated regression estimates are the same as ordinary least squares estimates.     

Is newer better? Penn World Table Revisions and their impact on growth estimates

This paper sheds light on two problems in the Penn World Table (PWT) GDP estimates. First, we show that these estimates vary substantially across different versions of the PWT despite being derived from very similar underlying data and using almost identical methodologies; that the methodology deployed to estimate growth rates leads to systematic variability, which is greater: at higher data frequencies, for smaller countries, and the farther the estimate from the benchmark year. Moreover, this variability matters for the cross-country growth literature. While growth studies that use low frequency data remain robust to data revisions, studies that use annual data are less robust. Second, the PWT methodology leads to GDP estimates that are not valued at purchasing power parity (PPP) prices. This is surprising because the raison d’être of the PWT is to adjust national estimates of GDP by valuing output at common international (purchasing power parity [PPP]) prices so that the resulting PPP-adjusted estimates of GDP are comparable across countries. We propose an approach to address these two problems of variability and valuation.     

Household Survey Data and Pricing Policies in Developing Countries

In recent years, household survey data from developing countrieshave increasingly become available and have been increasinglyused to cast light on important questions of policy. The reformof prices, whether agricultural prices, consumer taxes, subsidies,or tariffs, has consequences for individual welfare and forgovernment revenues, and these can be investigated empiricallywith household survey data. The gainers and losers from pricechanges can be identified, and the magnitudes of their gainsand losses measured. Nonparametric estimation techniques providea straightforward and convenient way of displaying this information.The procedure is illustrated for the effects of rice pricingin Thailand using data from more than five thousand rural households.Estimates of the revenue effects of price reforms are harderto obtain, because they require estimates of supply and demandelasticities, estimates that are not easily obtained for manydeveloping countries. A procedure is presented for estimatingprice elasticities of demand from spatial price variation asrecorded in household survey data. The main innovations liein the appropriate treatment of quality variations and measurementerror. Applications of the procedure in Côte d'lvoire,Indonesia, and Morocco are reviewed.     

Global Stock Markets in the Twentieth Century

Long-term estimates of expected return on equities are typically derived from U.S. data only. There are reasons to suspect that these estimates are subject to survivorship, as the United States is arguably the most successful capitalist system in the world. We collect a database of capital appreciation indexes for 39 markets going back to the 1920s. For 1921 to 1996, U.S. equities had the highest real return of all countries, at 4.3 percent, versus a median of 0.8 percent for other countries. The high equity premium obtained for U.S. equities appears to be the exception rather than the rule.     

Liquidity of emerging markets

Emerging markets are characterized by volatile, but substantial returns that can easily exceed 75% per annum. Balancing these lofty returns are liquidity costs that, using the bid–ask spread as a basis, range from 1% for the Taiwanese market to over 47% for the Russian market. However, the paucity of bid–ask spread information across countries and time requires the use of liquidity estimates in emerging markets even though little is known about the efficacy of these estimates in measuring bid–ask spread costs. Using firm-level quoted bid–ask spreads as a basis, I find that price-based liquidity measures of Lesmond et al. [Review of Financial Studies 12 (1999) 1113] and Roll [Journal of Finance 39 (1984) 1127] perform better at representing cross-country liquidity effects than do volume based liquidity measures. Within-country liquidity is best measured with the liquidity estimates of either Lesmond, Ogden, and Trzcinka or, to a lesser extent, Amihud (2002). Examining the impact of legal origin and political institutions on liquidity levels shows that countries with weak political and legal institutions have significantly higher liquidity costs than do countries with strong political and legal systems, even to the exclusion of legal origin or insider trading enforcement. Higher incremental political risk is associated with a 10 basis point increase in transaction costs, using the Lesmond, Ogden, and Trzcinka estimate, or a 1.9% increase in price impact costs, using the Amihud estimate.     

Misclassification of the dependent variable in a debt–repayment behavior context

This paper estimates a model of the household debt–repayment decision that accounts for the possibility of misclassification of self-reported debt–repayment status. It likewise estimates the extent of misclassification in a sample of data from different European countries. The evidence suggests that many households that are in arrears do not report this condition, so that the true level of arrears is, on average, 24% higher than that observed in our data. Furthermore, the effects on the incidence of arrears of adverse income and expense shocks are substantially greater than those predicted by estimators that ignore the possibility of misclassification.     

Approaches and Experiences in Projecting Mortality Patterns for the Oldest-Old

Abstract

In 1998 the United Nations Population Division extended the age format of its estimates and projections of population dynamics for all countries and areas of the world from 80 years and above to 100 years and above. The paper is based on experiences made during the implementation of relevant mortality projection methodologies and their application in two rounds of global population projections.

The paper first briefly addresses the need for the explicit inclusion of very old population segments into the regular UN estimates and projections. It is argued that since population aging is an important issue for both developed and developing countries, the need for more information regarding the elderly, and the oldest-old in particular, is significant.

The paper then documents the methods that have been evaluated and implemented, namely, the relational mortality standard proposed by Himes, Preston, and Condran, the Coale-Kisker extrapolation method for extending empirical age patterns of mortality to very high ages, and the Carter-Lee projection method for projecting model patterns of mortality to very high levels of life expectancy at birth. The methods are critically reviewed, and possible improvements to the methods are discussed.

The paper concludes with a discussion of different views regarding the future evolution of mortality at older ages, their regional variability, and the necessity to improve the coverage and quality of data collected in this area.     

Institutions,Informal Economy,and Economic Development

Using cross-national panel data, we examine the evolution of the informal economy through the course of economic development. Borrowing from previously published informal economy estimates for 141 countries over the period 1984-2009 and using panel data estimation techniques, we investigate the relationship between informal economy and the level of economic development, proxied by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Our findings suggest that institutional quality strongly interacts with this relationship. Specifically, we find that a higher GDP per capita is associated with a larger informal sector size in countries where the institutional quality is low. The opposite is true in countries with good institutions. These results are also in line with a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model.     

Mortality Measurement at Advanced Ages: A Study of the Social Security Administration Death Master File

Accurate estimates of mortality at advanced ages are essential to improving forecasts of mortality and the population size of the oldest old age group. However, estimation of hazard rates at extremely old ages poses serious challenges to researchers: (1) The observed mortality deceleration may be at least partially an artifact of mixing different birth cohorts with different mortality (heterogeneity effect); (2) standard assumptions of hazard rate estimates may be invalid when risk of death is extremely high at old ages and (3) ages of very old people may be exaggerated. One way of obtaining estimates of mortality at extreme ages is to pool together international records of persons surviving to extreme ages with subsequent efforts of strict age validation. This approach helps researchers to resolve the third of the above-mentioned problems but does not resolve the first two problems because of inevitable data heterogeneity when data for people belonging to different birth cohorts and countries are pooled together. In this paper we propose an alternative approach, which gives an opportunity to resolve the first two problems by compiling data for more homogeneous single-year birth cohorts with hazard rates measured at narrow (monthly) age intervals. Possible ways of resolving the third problem of hazard rate estimation are elaborated. This approach is based on data from the Social Security Administration Death Master File (DMF). Some birth cohorts covered by DMF could be studied by the method of extinct generations. Availability of month of birth and month of death information provides a unique opportunity to obtain hazard rate estimates for every month of age. Study of several single-year extinct birth cohorts shows that mortality trajectory at advanced ages follows the Gompertz law up to the ages 102-105 years without a noticeable deceleration. Earlier reports of mortality deceleration (deviation of mortality from the Gompertz law) at ages below 100 appear to be artifacts of mixing together several birth cohorts with different mortality levels and using cross-sectional instead of cohort data. Age exaggeration and crude assumptions applied to mortality estimates at advanced ages may also contribute to mortality underestimation at very advanced ages.     

Mortality Measurement at Advanced Ages

Abstract

Accurate estimates of mortality at advanced ages are essential to improving forecasts of mortality and the population size of the oldest old age group. However, estimation of hazard rates at extremely old ages poses serious challenges to researchers: (1) The observed mortality deceleration may be at least partially an artifact of mixing different birth cohorts with different mortality (heterogeneity effect); (2) standard assumptions of hazard rate estimates may be invalid when risk of death is extremely high at old ages and (3) ages of very old people may be exaggerated. One way of obtaining estimates of mortality at extreme ages is to pool together international records of persons surviving to extreme ages with subsequent efforts of strict age validation. This approach helps researchers to resolve the third of the above-mentioned problems but does not resolve the first two problems because of inevitable data heterogeneity when data for people belonging to different birth cohorts and countries are pooled together. In this paper we propose an alternative approach, which gives an opportunity to resolve the first two problems by compiling data for more homogeneous single-year birth cohorts with hazard rates measured at narrow (monthly) age intervals. Possible ways of resolving the third problem of hazard rate estimation are elaborated. This approach is based on data from the Social Security Administration Death Master File (DMF). Some birth cohorts covered by DMF could be studied by the method of extinct generations. Availability of month of birth and month of death information provides a unique opportunity to obtain hazard rate estimates for every month of age. Study of several single-year extinct birth cohorts shows that mortality trajectory at advanced ages follows the Gompertz law up to the ages 102–105 years without a noticeable deceleration. Earlier reports of mortality deceleration (deviation of mortality from the Gompertz law) at ages below 100 appear to be artifacts of mixing together several birth cohorts with different mortality levels and using cross-sectional instead of cohort data. Age exaggeration and crude assumptions applied to mortality estimates at advanced ages may also contribute to mortality underestimation at very advanced ages.     

Religion and Female Educational Attainment

The paper reviews the literature on the education, gender, and religion nexuses and identifies plausible hypotheses that religion adversely affects female education. The link between major religions and female educational attainment is examined using the Barro-Lee data set for a sample of 97 countries. The estimates include control variables for colonial heritage, urbanization, labor force participation, and young adult mortality. The estimates show powerful negative links between female educational attainment and the proportion of ethnoreligions, Hindu, and Muslim adherents in a country, with similar results for the gender gap. The paper offers some interpretative thoughts and research agendas.     

Trade Preferences to Small Developing Countries and the Welfare Costs of Lost Multilateral Liberalization

The proliferation of preferential trade liberalization overthe last 20 years has raised the question of whether it slowsmultilateral trade liberalization. Recent theoretical and empiricalevidence indicates that this is the case even for unilateralpreferences that developed countries provide to small and poorcountries, but there is no estimate of the resulting welfarecosts. This stumbling block effect can be avoided by replacingthe unilateral preferences with a fixed import subsidy, whichgenerates a Pareto improvement. More importantly, this paperpresents the first estimates of the welfare cost of preferentialliberalization as a stumbling block to multilateral liberalization.Recent estimates of the stumbling block effect of preferenceswith data for 170 countries and more than 5,000 products areused to calculate the welfare effects of the European Union,Japan, and the United States switching from unilateral preferencesfor least developed countries to an import subsidy scheme. Ina model with no dynamic gains to trade, the switch producesan annual net welfare gain for the 170 countries that adds about10 percent to the estimated trade liberalization gains in theDoha Round. It also generates gains for each group: the EuropeanUnion, Japan, and the United States ($2,934 million), leastdeveloped countries ($520 million), and the rest of the world($900 million).     

The Dynamic Effects of Public Capital: VAR Evidence for 22 OECD Countries

The issue of whether public capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that provides internationally comparable capital stock estimates, this paper estimates the dynamic effects of public capital using the vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology for a large set of OECD countries. The empirical results suggest that there is evidence for positive output effects of public capital in OECD countries, but hardly any evidence for positive employment effects.JEL Code: C32, E62, H54     

The usefulness of accounting estimates for predicting cash flows and earnings

Accounting estimates and projections potentially improve the relevance of financial information by providing managers a venue to convey to investors forward-looking, inside information. The quality of financial information is, however, compromised by the increasing difficulty of making reliable estimates and forecasts and the frequent managerial misuse of estimates. Given the ever-increasing prevalence of estimates in accounting data, particularly due to the move to fair value accounting, whether these opposing forces result in an improvement in the quality of financial information is among the most fundamental issues in accounting. We examine the contribution of accounting estimates embedded in accruals to the quality of financial information, as reflected by their usefulness in the prediction of enterprise cash flows and earnings. Our out-of-sample prediction tests indicate that accounting estimates beyond those in working capital items (excluding inventory) do not improve the prediction of cash flows. Estimates do, however, improve the prediction of next year’s earnings, though not of subsequent years’ earnings. We conclude that the usefulness of accounting estimates to investors is limited and provide suggestions for improving the usefulness of estimates.     

Credit information,consolidation and credit market performance: Bank-level evidence from developing countries

Paying particular attention to the degree of banking market concentration in developing countries, this paper examines the effect of credit information sharing on bank lending. Using bank-level data from African countries over the period 2004 to 2009 and a dynamic two-step system generalised method of moments (GMM) estimation, it is found that credit information sharing increases bank lending. The degree of banking market concentration moderates the effect of credit information sharing on bank lending. The results are robust to controlling for possible interactions between credit information sharing and governance.     

Bayesian estimation of truncated data with applications to operational risk measurement

Data insufficiency and reporting threshold are two main issues in operational risk modelling. When these conditions are present, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) may produce very poor parameter estimates. In this study, we first investigate four methods to estimate the parameters of truncated distributions for small samples—MLE, expectation-maximization algorithm, penalized likelihood estimators, and Bayesian methods. Without any proper prior information, Jeffreys’ prior for truncated distributions is used. Based on a simulation study for the log-normal distribution, we find that the Bayesian method gives much more credible and reliable estimates than the MLE method. Finally, an application to the operational loss severity estimation using real data is conducted using the truncated log-normal and log-gamma distributions. With the Bayesian method, the loss distribution parameters and value-at-risk measure for every cell with loss data can be estimated separately for internal and external data. Moreover, confidence intervals for the Bayesian estimates are obtained via a bootstrap method.     

Do locals know better? A comparison of the performance of local and foreign institutional investors

We compare the performance of local versus foreign institutional investors using a comprehensive data set of equity holdings in 32 countries during the 2000–2010 period. We find that foreign institutions perform as well as local institutions on average, but only domestic institutions show a trading pattern consistent with an information advantage. Our results suggest a smart-money effect of local institutions in countries subject to higher information asymmetry, non-English speaking countries, countries with less efficient stock markets, with poor investor protection, or high levels of corruption. The local advantage is more pronounced in periods of market turmoil and in illiquid stocks.