What expenditure does Anglosphere foreign borrowing fund?

This paper examines the extent to which foreign borrowing funds private investment, consumption and government expenditure in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (the Anglosphere), advanced economies which have been the world's largest international borrowers since 1990. Using a bivariate predictive regression model, we estimate the relative importance of these expenditure aggregates as predictors of their external deficits, and hence foreign borrowing. Overall, based on quarterly macroeconomic data for the period 1990–2011, the evidence suggests that foreign borrowing has not financed higher household consumption in these economies over recent decades, with the possible exception of the United States. While results concerning government spending are mixed due to policy reaction, business cycle and public-private saving offset effects, strong results for private investment augur well for the sustainability of this grouping's foreign borrowing.     

Bubbles and capital flow volatility: Causes and risk management

Emerging market economies are fertile ground for the development of real estate and other financial bubbles. Despite these economies’ significant growth potential, their corporate and government sectors do not generate the financial instruments to provide residents with adequate stores of value. Capital often flows out of these economies seeking these stores of value in the developed world. Bubbles are beneficial because they provide domestic stores of value and thereby reduce capital outflows while increasing investment. But they come at a cost, as they expose the country to bubble-crashes and capital flow reversals. We show that domestic financial underdevelopment not only facilitates the emergence of bubbles, but also leads agents to undervalue the aggregate risk embodied in financial bubbles. In this context, even rational bubbles can be welfare reducing. We study a set of aggregate risk management policies to alleviate the bubble-risk. We show that liquidity requirements, sterilization of capital inflows and structural policies aimed at developing public debt markets ‘collateralized’ by future revenues, all have a high payoff in this environment.     

International welfare effects of monetary policy

In this paper, I examine the international welfare effects of monetary policy. I develop a New Keynesian two-country model, where central banks in both countries follow the Taylor rule. I show that a decrease in the domestic interest rate, under producer currency pricing, is a beggar-thyself policy that reduces domestic welfare and increases foreign welfare in the short term, regardless of whether the cross-country substitutability is high or low. In the medium term, it is a beggar-thy-neighbour (beggar-thyself) policy, if the Marshall-Lerner condition is satisfied (violated). Under local currency pricing, a decrease in the domestic interest rate is a beggar-thy-neighbour policy in the short term, but a beggar-thyself policy in the medium term. Both under producer and local currency pricing, a monetary expansion increases world welfare in the short term, but reduces it in the medium term.     

Capital inflows and asset prices: Evidence from emerging Asia

The withdrawal of foreign capital from emerging countries at the height of the recent financial crisis and its quick return sparked a debate about the impact of capital flow surges on asset markets. This paper addresses the response of property prices to an inflow of foreign capital. For that purpose we estimate a panel VAR on a set of Asian emerging market economies, for which the waves of inflows were particularly pronounced, and identify capital inflow shocks based on sign restrictions. Our results suggest that capital inflow shocks have a significant effect on the appreciation of house prices and equity prices. Capital inflow shocks account for – roughly – twice the portion of overall house price changes they explain in OECD countries. We also address cross-country differences in the house price responses to shocks, which are most likely due to differences in the monetary policy response to capital inflows.     

International evidence on fiscal solvency: Is fiscal policy “responsible”?

We conduct a cross-country empirical analysis of fiscal solvency based on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium conditions. The results show evidence of fiscal solvency, in the form of a robust positive conditional response of the primary balance to changes in public debt, in panels for emerging and industrial economies and in a combined panel. Emerging economies show a stronger response and hence converge to lower mean debt-output ratios, as observed in the data. The results are weaker for countries with debt ratios exceeding panel means and medians. Hence, we can separate countries where fiscal solvency holds from those where it remains in doubt.     

Unconditionally optimal monetary policy

We develop a simple and intuitive approach for analytically deriving unconditionally optimal (UO) policies, a topic of enduring interest in optimal monetary policy analysis. The approach can be employed in both general linear-quadratic problems and in the underlying non-linear environments. A detailed example is provided using a canonical New Keynesian framework.     

International price dispersion in state-dependent pricing models

Menu-cost models predict a hump-shaped relationship between real and nominal exchange rate volatility. The hump occurs at higher values of nominal exchange rate volatility, the higher trade costs and lower international substitution elasticities are. These predictions accord well with the negative relationship between relative price and nominal exchange rate volatility I document using a data set of prices collected in Eastern Europe in a volatile environment. In contrast, trade costs must be sufficiently high or international substitution elasticities low in order for the model to account for the positive correlation between real and nominal exchange rate volatility in the aggregate data.     

International business cycles with domestic and foreign lenders

We examine the international transmission of business cycles in a two-country model where credit contracts are imperfectly enforceable. In our economy, foreign lenders differ from domestic lenders in their ability to recover value from borrowers’ assets and, therefore, to protect themselves against contractual non-enforceability. The relative importance of domestic and foreign credit frictions changes over the cycle. This induces entrepreneurs to adjust their debt exposure and allocation of collateral between domestic and foreign lenders in response to exogenous productivity shocks. We show that such a model can explain the comovement of output across countries.     

A present value test of habits and the current account

Forecasts derived from standard intertemporal current account (ICA) models generally fail to match the volatility of actual current accounts. This paper offers a solution to the “excess volatility” problem of standard ICA models by incorporating consumption habits into the standard model. The model, as developed in the paper, shows that significant habit formation implies increased current account volatility, as sluggishness is introduced into the consumption adjustment process that follows income shocks. A theory-consistent measure of the degree of habit formation is estimated using GMM. The estimated habit parameter is found to be statistically significant in six of eight quarterly samples.     

Business cycles with staggered prices and international trade in intermediate inputs

International trade in intermediate inputs and, increasingly, in goods produced at multiple stages of processing has been widely studied in the real trade literature. We assess the role of this feature of modern world trade in accounting for some stylized facts about international business cycles. Our model with staggered prices and trade in intermediates across four stages of processing does well in explaining the observed international correlations in aggregate quantities, and it performs much better than a single-stage model with no trade in intermediates. The model in itself does not provide a full account of the cyclical behavior of the real exchange rate, but, compared to the single-stage model, it moves in the right direction.     

Can a real business cycle model without price and wage stickiness explain UK real exchange rate behaviour?

This paper establishes the ability of a Real Business Cycle model to account for UK real exchange rate behaviour. The model is tested by the method of indirect inference, bootstrapping the errors to generate 95% confidence limits for a time-series representation of the real exchange rate, as well as for various key data moments. The results suggest RBC models can explain real exchange rate movements.     

Are stationarity and cointegration restrictions really necessary for the intertemporal budget constraint?

Time series related to fiscal and external deficits are commonly subjected to stationarity and cointegration tests to assess if the deficits are sustainable. Such tests are incapable of rejecting sustainability. The intertemporal budget constraint proves to be satisfied if either the debt series or the revenue and with-interest spending series are integrated of arbitrarily high order, i.e., stationary after differencing arbitrarily often. Revenues and spending do not have to be cointegrated. Rejections of low-order difference-stationarity and of cointegration are thus consistent with the intertemporal budget constraint. Error-correction-type policy reaction functions are suggested as more promising for understanding deficit problems.     

Financial development and the instability of open economies

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing the role of financial factors as a source of instability in small open economies. Our basic model is a dynamic open economy model with a tradeable good produced with capital and a country-specific factor. We also assume that firms face credit constraints, with the constraint being tighter at a lower level of financial development. A basic implication of this model is that economies at an intermediate level of financial development are more unstable than either very developed or very underdeveloped economies. This is true both in the sense that temporary shocks have large and persistent effects and also in the sense that these economies can exhibit cycles. Thus, countries that are going through a phase of financial development may become more unstable in the short run. Similarly, full capital account liberalization may destabilize the economy in economies at an intermediate level of financial development: phases of growth with capital inflows are followed by collapse with capital outflows. On the other hand, foreign direct investment does not destabilize.     

Chronicle of currency collapses: Re examining the effects on output

The impact of currency collapses (i.e. large nominal depreciations or devaluations) on real output remains unsettled in the empirical macroeconomic literature. This paper provides new empirical evidence on this relationship using a dataset for 108 emerging and developing economies over the period 1960–2006. We provide estimates of how these episodes affect growth and output trend. Our main finding is that currency collapses are associated with a permanent output loss relative to trend, which is estimated to range between 2% and 6% of GDP. However, we show that such losses tend to materialize before the drop in the value of the currency, which suggests that the costs of a currency crash largely stem from the factors leading to it. Taken on its own (i.e. ceteris paribus), we find that currency collapses tend to have a positive effect on output. More generally, we also find that the likelihood of a positive growth rate in the year of the collapse is over two times more likely than a contraction, and that positive growth rates in the years that follow such episodes are the norm. Finally, we show that the persistence of the crash matters, i.e. one-time events induce exchange rate and output dynamics that differ from consecutive episodes.