The Role of Productivity and Financial Frictions in the Business Cycles of a Small Open Economy: Hong Kong 1984–2011

This paper analyzes the business cycle properties of the Hong Kong economy during the 1984–2011 period, which includes the financial crisis experienced in 1997/98 and the economic crisis of 2008–2010. We show that the volatility respectively, of output, of the growth rate of output and of real interest rates in Hong Kong are higher than the corresponding average volatility among developed economies. Furthermore, interest rates are countercyclical. We build a stochastic neoclassical small open‐economy model estimated with a Bayesian likelihood approach that seeks to replicate the main business cycle characteristics of Hong Kong, and through which we try to quantify the role played by exogenous total factor productivity (TFP) shocks (transitory and permanent), real interest rate shocks and financial frictions. The main finding is that financial frictions, jointly with the assumption that the country spread is endogenous, seem important in explaining the countercyclicality of the real interest rates.     

Evaluating monetary policy with financial stability objective: rules vs. discretion

This article explores whether adding the goal of financial stability to the more traditional goals of output and price stability could improve optimality of monetary policy. A Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model that endogenously incorporates financial frictions is used to derive optimality conditions across rule-based and discretionary monetary policy environments. The results indicate that it is optimal for the Central Bank to keep output below the potential level in the short term so as to dampen the inflationary effects arising from supply and financial shocks. When the economy is exposed to a financial shock, both leverage and credit spread rise significantly, thereby tipping the economy into a financial crisis and raising the probability of macroeconomic risk.     

The propagation of U.S. shocks to Canada: Understanding the role of real financial linkages

This paper examines the role of financial frictions in affecting the transmission of U.S. real and financial shocks to Canada using a dynamic stochastic general‐equilibrium model with an active banking sector and financial frictions. We find that the U.S. banking and interbank markets can be a potentially important source of variability of Canadian output and inflation—consistent with the financial crisis. The presence of both the demand and the real supply sides of credit in the model help to capture the stylized facts of both the domestic and the international business cycles.     

The role of financial frictions during the crisis: An estimated DSGE model

After the recent banking crisis in 2008, financial market conditions have turned out to be a relevant factor for economic fluctuations. This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the impact of financial frictions on the U.S. business cycle. The analysis compares the original Smets and Wouters model (2003, 2007) with an alternative version augmented with the financial accelerator mechanism á la Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1996, 1999). Both versions are estimated using Bayesian techniques over a sample extended to 2012. The analysis supports the role of financial channels, namely the financial accelerator mechanism, in transmitting dysfunctions from financial markets to the real economy.The Smets and Wouters model, augmented with the financial accelerator mechanism, is suitable to capture much of the historical developments in U.S. financial markets that led to the financial crisis. The model can account for the output contraction in 2008, as well as the widening in corporate spreads, and supports the argument that financial conditions have amplified the U.S. business cycle and the intensity of the recession.     

Financial frictions and total factor productivity: Accounting for the real effects of financial crises

Financial crises in emerging economies are accompanied by a large fall in total factor productivity. We explore the role of financial frictions in exacerbating the misallocation of resources and explaining this drop in TFP. We build a two-sector model of a small open economy with a working capital constraint on the purchase of intermediate goods. The model is calibrated to Mexico before the 1995 crisis and subjected to an unexpected shock to interest rates. The financial friction generates an endogenous fall in TFP and output and can explain more than half of the fall in TFP and 74 percent of the fall in GDP per worker.     

Macroeconomic Control in the Transforming Chinese Economy: An Analysis of the Long‐Run Effect

This paper analyzes the issue of macroeconomic control in the Chinese economy where there is a dual structure (consisting of a state sector and a non‐state sector) and the financial sector is still under tight control by the government. Given the dual structure and financial repression, when inflation is a severe problem, the authors investigate whether it is possible for the government to bring inflation under control without hampering long‐term economic growth performance. The investigation is conducted within the context of an endogenous growth model that incorporates the two major institutional features of the transforming Chinese economy. The paper evaluates the long‐run effects of changes in government monetary and fiscal policies on the major macroeconomic aggregates. The analysis suggests that increasing in the interest rate on government bonds will reduce inflation without affecting the growth rate of output; while increasing the nominal interest rate on bank deposits will exert a stagflationary effect on the economy: raising the inflation rate but reducing the growth rate of output.     

Performance of interest rate rules under credit market imperfections

The stabilization effects of Taylor rules are analyzed in a limited participation framework with and without credit market imperfections in capital goods production. Financial frictions substantially amplify the impact of shocks, and also reinforce the stabilizing or destabilizing effects of interest rate rules on output. However, these effects are reversed relative to new Keynesian models: under limited participation, interest rate rules are stabilizing for productivity shocks, but imply an output-inflation tradeoff for demand shocks. Moreover, because financial frictions imply excessive fluctuation, stabilization via an interest rate rule can be a welfare-improving response to productivity shocks.     

An empirical study of credit shock transmission in a small open economy

In this paper, we identify and estimate the dynamic effects of foreign (US) and national (Canadian) credit shocks in a small open economy. We use standard credit spreads as proxies to the external finance premium. Our first result suggests that the US and Canadian credit spreads contain substantial forecasting power for several measures of the Canadian real economic activity, especially during the recent financial crisis and its aftermath. Secondly, an adverse US credit shock generates a significant and persistent economic slowdown in Canada: the national external finance premium rises immediately while interest rates, credit aggregates, output and employment indicators decline. Variance decomposition reveals that credit shocks have a sizeable effect on real activity measures, leading indicators and credit spreads. Yet, the unexpected shocks in domestic credit spreads are not able to generate any significant dynamic response of the real activity once we control for the US credit market conditions.     

External debt sustainability and policy rules in a small globalized economy

The paper develops a Post Keynesian macroeconomic model which discusses the conditions that lead to an external debt crisis in a small developing economy fully integrated to global goods and financial markets. The focus is on how policy rules affect the stability of the economy. Two kinds of policy rules are discussed, namely inflation target and real exchange rate target, implemented through an interest rate operation procedure (IROP). It is argued that in both cases the evolution of the real exchange rate should be closely monitored to avoid external instability. It is also suggested that a real exchange rate target may be more effective to stabilize the economy if there is a strong tendency towards the equality of the foreign and domestic real interest rates.     

The Effects of Open Market Operations in a Model of Intermediation and Growth

This article presents a monetary growth model where spatial separation and limited communication create a role for banks. Monetary policy interacts with the financial system's liquidity provision to affect the existence, multiplicity, and dynamical properties of equilibria. Moderate levels of risk aversion and tight monetary policy can lead to multiple steady states. Dynamical equilibria can be indeterminate, with oscillatory paths. Thus financial market frictions are a source of indeterminacies and endogenous volatility. Under plausible conditions, tight monetary policy raises the nominal interest rate and inflation rate and reduces long run output. Thus, a central bank's liquidity provision can promote growth.     

Europe's income convergence and the latest global financial crisis

This paper examines the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on economic growth and convergence across European countries from 1973 to 2012. Employing cross-sectional and dynamic panel data techniques, the results show that the global financial crisis has brought a greater absolute convergence rate rather than divergence, affected richer members more heavily and, presumably, allowed less developed members to recover more quickly. We find evidence that creating the European Union has contributed toward economic growth and convergence; meanwhile, no similar evidence is found concerning the European Monetary Union. Moreover, we present evidence that both the average output per capita and the rate of convergence during the financial crisis fell around 7%.     

OPTIMAL FOREIGN BORROWING REVISITED

Foreign capital has become increasingly important in financing investment and growth in developing countries. Foreign capital flows, however, can be volatile as is evident from the recent financial crises. It has also recently been noted by researchers that there is little systematic empirical evidence that foreign capital contributes to the economic growth of developing countries. In this context, this paper attempts to theoretically reevaluate the borrowing behaviour of a developing economy that relies on foreign borrowing for its capital formation. In particular, this paper investigates the implications of different lending policies of international financial institutions. It is found that no matter whether the borrowing interest rate increases with the level of foreign debt per capita or with the foreign‐capital/total‐capital ratio, the economy always moves toward the stationary state. The result holds even when the representative agent regards the interest rate given as constant. This implies that foreign borrowing does help economic growth, irrespective of lending policies of international financial institutions.     

Collateral Constraints and the Interest Rate

This paper develops a model in which an increase in financial frictions leads to a fall in the steady-state rate of interest. A perpetual youth overlapping generations (OLG) model is extended to incorporate a collateral constraint, this results in a transmission mechanism in which an interest rate fall occurs endogenously from a disruption to the credit market. It is found that that non-linearities exist in the relationship between changes in financial frictions and the interest rate. By specifying the mechanism by means of which this occurs, the model provides an explanation for why low interest rates have been observed with such persistence since the financial crisis.     

Monetary policy tradeoffs between financial stability and price stability

We analyze the impact of interest rate policy on financial stability in an environment where banks can experience runs on their short‐term liabilities forcing them to sell assets at fire‐sale prices. Price adjustment frictions and a state‐dependent risk of financial crisis create the possibility of a policy tradeoff between price stability and financial stability. Focusing on Taylor rules with monetary policy possibly reacting to banks’ short‐term liabilities, we find that the optimized policy uses the extra tool to support investment at the expense of higher inflation and output volatility.     

A new approach to capital flows: Theory and evidence

This paper examines how an open economy determines its financial openness and deals with volatile capital flows when deciding to utilize them for output growth. We find that higher economic instability is an inevitable price paid for faster growth if a country permits wider openness without reversing its financial vulnerability. We prove that the country can leave its capital market wider open to achieve higher growth and lower instability if its financial system has been strengthened substantially. We show why some financially advanced countries request reluctant developing countries to liberalize their immature markets and how the conflict of interest between the two parties is formulated. The paper also presents a large sample of cross-country experiences with tradeoffs between growth and instability, with the observed evidence supporting our theoretical predictions.     

Monetary policy and credit cycles: A DSGE analysis

The recent financial crisis revealed several flaws in both monetary and financial regulation. Contrary to what was believed, price stability is not a sufficient condition for financial stability. At the same time, micro-prudential regulation alone becomes insufficient to ensure the financial stability objective. In this paper, we propose an ex-post analysis of what a central bank could have done to improve the reaction of the economy to the financial bubble. We study by means of a financial accelerator DSGE model the dynamics of our economy, first, when the central bank has only traditional objectives, and second, when an additional financial stability objective is added. Overall, results indicate that a more aggressive monetary policy would have had little success in improving the response of the economy to the financial bubble, as the actions of the central bank would have remained limited by the use of a single instrument, the interest rate.     

Sudden stops,sectoral reallocations,and the real exchange rate

A sudden stop of capital flows into a developing country tends to be followed by a rapid switch from trade deficits to surpluses, a depreciation of the real exchange rate, and decreases in output and total factor productivity. Substantial reallocation takes place from the nontraded sector to the traded sector. We construct a multisector growth model, calibrate it to the Mexican economy, and use it to analyze Mexico's 1994–95 crisis. When subjected to a sudden stop, the model accounts for the trade balance reversal and the real exchange rate depreciation, but it cannot account for the decreases in GDP and TFP. Extending the model to include labor frictions and variable capital utilization, we still find that it cannot quantitatively account for the dynamics of output and productivity without losing the ability to account for the movements of other variables.     

On measuring the effects of fiscal policy in global financial crisis: Evidences from an export-oriented island economy

Following the 2008 financial crisis, Taiwan implemented various fiscal policies so that they could offset the shocks from the financial crisis. In the present study, we investigate whether these two fiscal policies alleviated the shock generated by the 2008 financial crisis on Taiwan's economy and unemployment. The findings provide that the economic and employment effects generated by the public work investment project were the most substantial in the public sector. By contrast, the economic and employment effects generated by the consumption vouchers policy were the largest in the service sector. These outcomes are closely related to Taiwan's industry structure. The fiscal multiplier of the public investment project and consumer vouchers distribution was 1.94 and 1.47. The evidence in the present study also seems to suggest that the two fiscal policies examined could not induce an effective long-term transformation of Taiwan's economic system.     

中国遭遇国际贸易摩擦的必然性与合理性研究

2008年全球性金融危机之后,贸易保护主义重新抬头,中国遭遇的国际贸易摩擦愈演愈烈。但是通过贸易理论分析和世界经济、中国经济的发展实践来看,中国遭遇国际贸易摩擦有其必然性和合理性,它是中国经济和对外贸易所处历史阶段下的必然产物,国际贸易摩擦有其存在的合理性。     

A neoclassical analysis of the Korean crisis

In late 1997, Korea experienced a huge and unusual economic crisis. The three main features of this crisis are the sudden recession, the rapid recovery and a consumption drop as large as the output drop. A large body of literature qualitatively explains the Korean crisis in terms of financial and monetary variables such as exchange rates and interest rates. This paper complements these studies by quantitatively analyzing fluctuations in real macroeconomic variables such as real GDP and consumption. A stochastic small open economy neoclassical model can quantitatively account for the Korean crisis taking TFP and real interest rates as exogenous.