Labor-Market Search, Financial Market Integration, and the Fiscal Multiplier

We used a two-country optimizing "new-open-economy macroeconomics" model to analyze the implications of financial market integration for the fiscal multiplier. The fiscal multiplier measures the accumulated effect of fiscal policy on output. Our model features a labor-market friction in the form of labor-market search. The conventional wisdom derived from the basic textbook version of the classic Mundell–Fleming model has been that financial market integration diminishes the fiscal multiplier. We show that labor-market search implies that financial market integration should increase rather than decrease the fiscal multiplier.     

Can fiscal rules improve financial market access for developing countries?

A number of countries have introduced fiscal rules to deter fiscal profligacy, enhance the credibility of fiscal policy, and reduce borrowing costs. In this paper, we examine the outcome of fiscal rules in terms of improving financial market access for developing countries. We use entropy balancing and various propensity score matching. We find that the adoption of fiscal rules reduces sovereign bond spreads and increases sovereign debt ratings for a sample of 36 developing countries, which are part of the JP Morgan Emerging Markets Bond Index Global (EMBIG), for the period 1993-2014. We explain this finding by the effect of fiscal rules on the credibility of a country's fiscal policy: more credible governments are rewarded in the international financial markets by low sovereign bond spreads and high sovereign debt ratings. These results are robust to a wide set of alternative specifications. We also show that this favorable effect is sensitive to several country structural characteristics. Our findings confirm that the adoption and sound implementation of fiscal rules is an instrument for policy makers to improve developing countries’ financial market access.     

Can a comparative capitalism approach explain fiscal policy activism?

This study investigates the implications of models of capitalism for the responsiveness of countries’ fiscal policies during business cycles using new data for member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and China. We expand the literature by adding the category of East Asian nonliberal capitalism to the established distinction of liberal market economies and nonliberal coordinated market economies. These three differ substantially not just in their fiscal policies, but also in monetary policies, degree of financial market orientation, exchange rate regime, and labor market organization. As in previous studies, we find that governments of liberal economies adopt more countercyclical fiscal policies. Departing from existing studies, however, among the nonliberal models of capitalism, (East Asian) state-led models have more countercyclical fiscal policies than (European) coordinated market economies, perhaps as countercyclical as liberal economies, both historically and during the 2007–9 crisis. This is due to less independent central banks, managed float of exchange rates, and limited financial market orientation and financial openness in East Asia, which allow for more active fiscal policy. Among political factors, left-of-center governments, fractionalized party systems, and election years are associated weakly with countercyclical fiscal policy, as expected. Labor market coordination and welfare generosity have unclear roles in regard to fiscal policy, a topic for future research.     

Financial distress and fiscal inflation

Is inflation ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ or is it fundamentally a fiscal phenomenon? The answer hinges crucially on the underlying monetary–fiscal policy regime. Scant attention has been directed to the role of credit market frictions in discerning the policy regime, despite its growing importance in empirical macroeconomics. We augment a standard monetary model to incorporate fiscal details and credit market imperfections. These ingredients allow for both interpretations of the inflation process in a financially constrained environment. We find that introducing financial frictions to the model and adding financial variables to the dataset generate important identifying restrictions on the observed pattern between inflation and measures of financial and fiscal stress, to the extent that it overturns existing findings about which monetary–fiscal policy regime produced the U.S. data. To confront policy regime uncertainty, we propose the use of dynamic prediction pools and find strong cyclical patterns in the estimated historical regime weights.     

Fiscal policy rules,budget deficits,and forecasting biases

In this paper, we analyze the impact fiscal policy rules have on budget deficits and forecasting biases in official budget outlooks. Persistent budget deficits and over-optimistic budget forecasts have been observed in many countries in the past, especially in the euro area. To prevent such developments from happening in the future, fiscal rules have been revised or implemented with the aim to strengthen both preventive (ex-ante) and corrective (ex-post) elements of fiscal rules frameworks. Do such ex-ante and ex-post rules differ in their effects? In an attempt to answer this question, we build a two-period model and distinguish between ex-ante rules that apply to budget forecasts and ex-post rules that apply to realized budget deficits. Our model indicates that effectively enforced ex-post rules are more effective than ex-ante rules at reducing budget deficits. Interestingly, ex-ante rules differ from ex-post rules in their effects on forecasting biases. Only ex-post sanctions reduce forecasting biases, while ex-ante rules have no impact on such biases. In addition, we show that political stability and the size of government increase the effectiveness of fiscal rules. If, however, financial markets have a disciplining effect on governments, the effectiveness of fiscal rules is reduced. Our results imply that if fiscal policy rules cannot be effectively enforced, reforming other areas such as electoral rules or financial market regulations might be a more promising approach to ensuring sound public finances than fiscal policy rules.     

Municipal Finance in Poland,the Slovak Republic,the Czech Republic and Hungary: Institutional Framework and Recent Development

The recent process of political and economic transition in eastern European countries has not only contributed to the decentralisation of political structure but also significantly enhanced the fiscal autonomy of municipalities in these countries. In this context many similar types of public activities have recently been assigned to local governments, and some taxes were also declared to be local taxes. To be sure, this type of fiscal decentralisation has caused some additional problems, particularly for safeguarding the quality of publicly provided goods and services and for co-ordinating intergovernmental fiscal transfers between the central and local governments. For instance, some criticise that many small-sized municipalities in the transition economies have suffered from financial bottlenecks and have not been able to receive sufficient financial support from the central government. However, such a fiscal devolution trend appears to continue. This study primarily deals with issues surrounding the impact of national fiscal policy and the regulatory framework on local governments' expenditure behaviour and their ability to mobilise necessary revenues under the particular consideration of the institutional and administrative co-operation with the central government and of the less well-developed financial market in Poland, the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic and Hungary.     

Fiscal expansion, monetary policy, interest rate risk premia, and wage reactions

We examine the macroeconomic implications of fiscal policy in a small open economy, with emphasis on the interactions between fiscal, monetary and labour market policies. The paper uses the NBNZ-DEMONZ macroeconometric model. Novel features of the model are that it includes an endogenous interest rate risk premium (IRRP), and forward-looking monetary and fiscal policy reaction functions which capture the essence of New Zealand's Reserve Bank and Fiscal Responsibility Acts. The most important empirical result is that the postulated IRRP, proxying financial market mechanisms, can contribute at least as much as the monetary policy reaction function to maintaining price stability. Also of significance are that an income tax cuts package shows more damped real GDP and underlying inflation paths than does an expenditure increases equivalent; and that the inflationary and real sector impacts of a personal income tax cut package depend heavily on how the cut is `shared' between firms and workers. The nature and interdependence of monetary and fiscal policies and labour market conditions are therefore crucial to the macroeconomic outcomes.     

When does financial integration matter for fiscal policy in a currency union? A welfare-based approach

We use a two-country new open economy macroeconomics model describing a currency union with imperfect financial integration. We assume that household preferences are biased towards the goods produced within the country. We use this setup to show how the degree of financial integration and the home bias affect the welfare efficiency of fiscal policy. This is particularly important for the implications of a fiscal policy launched by a member of the euro zone where the home bias is in a decreasing trend due to higher goods market integration and where there are explicit efforts to enhance financial integration. The results show in particular how the effects of an increasing financial integration on the impact of a fiscal policy can be mitigated or amplified by a decreasing home-product bias. Moreover, under certain conditions, the degree of financial integration has no effect on the welfare efficiency of fiscal policy despite its non-negligible effects on the components of welfare.     

The effects of financial crisis on fiscal positions

The recent financial crisis was characterized by the sizeable fiscal cost of banking sector bail out operations and the significant automatic and discretionary fiscal policy response to shrinking output, which have put increased pressure on public finances in many industrialized countries. This paper tries to evaluate the impact of financial crisis episodes on debt developments. The findings indicate that severe financial crisis episodes increase the stock of debt by 2.7%–4.0% of GDP, on average in the 20 OECD countries examined. Ιn countries with big financial sectors it ranges from 4.2%–5.3% of GDP and in countries with smaller financial sectors it is about 1.4%–1.7% of GDP. The primary balance and the cyclically adjusted fiscal policy stance ease by about 2.6% of GDP and 1.6% of potential GDP, respectively, in the event of a severe financial market crash. Expansionary fiscal interventions are more pronounced in countries with sizable financial sectors. I find significant evidence that a financial market collapse paves the way for a subsequent deterioration in debt ratios.     

The global dimension to fiscal sustainability

This paper provides a new perspective of fiscal sustainability and financial globalization in emerging and industrial countries. We highlight the importance of global capital market shocks for fiscal sustainability, a relationship which has hitherto been ignored in the empirical literature. Using a factor model we demonstrate that the relationship between deficit and debt is conditional upon a global factor and we suggest that this global factor is related to world-wide liquidity. We also demonstrate that this acts as a constraint on emerging market economies’ fiscal policy.     

财政资金市场化配置问题研究

建立市场经济体制要求部分财政资金市场化配置。财政资金市场化是指部分财政资金通过金融市场筹集和运用的改革过程。改革的目的在于提高财政资金的使用效益,促进市场主体的发育及市场体系的形成,合理配置社会资源,促进国民经济有效增长。本文论述了财政资金市场化配置的基本原理及动因,分析了财政资金市场化过程中存在的问题及原因,在此基础上提出了相应的政策措施     

COVID-19, asset markets and capital flows

This paper empirically examines the reaction of global financial markets across 38 economies to the COVID-19 outbreak, with special focus on the dynamics of capital flows across 14 emerging market economies. The effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy responses to COVID-19 is also tested. Using daily data over the period January 4, 2010 to August 31, 2020, and controlling for a host of domestic and global macroeconomic and financial factors, we use a fixed effects panel approach and a structural VAR framework to show that emerging markets have been more heavily affected than advanced economies. In particular, emerging economies in Asia and Europe have experienced the sharpest impacts on stock, bond and exchange rates due to COVID-19, as well as abrupt and substantial capital outflows. Quantitative easing and fiscal stimulus packages mainly helped to boost stock prices, notably for advanced and emerging economies in Asia. Our findings also highlight the role that global factors and developments in the world's leading financial centers have on financial conditions in EMEs. Importantly, the impact of COVID-19 related quantitative easing measures by central banks in advanced countries extended to EMEs, with significant positive spillovers to EME stock markets in Asia, Europe and Latin America. Going forward, while the ultimate resolution of COVID-19 may be expected to lead to a market correction as uncertainty declines, our impulse response analysis suggests that there may be persistent effects on bond markets in emerging Europe and on EME capital flows.     

推动中国农村金融发展的财政政策梳理与评价

农村经济自身特点、国家产业政策和金融政策对农村金融发展的影响在相当程度上与财政政策有关,因为农村经济特点是客观存在的,在市场经济条件下这些问题的解决需要通过财政分配来缓解;而国家产业政策与金融政策是以全局需要为出发点,其对农村金融发展带来的不利影响往往也需要通过财政政策的运用来缓解,因此认真分析研究影响农村金融发展的财政政策制度因素,梳理、评价现行的促进农村金融发展的财政政策体系就显得尤为重要。     

Impact of Market‐based Policies and External Fiscal Discipline on Ghana's Inflation

This study investigates the impact of liberalization of the forex exchange and financial sectors and external prudent fiscal management in Côte d'Ivoire on Ghana's inflation. We find that, in the financial sector, there is a case for liberalization, in terms of lowering inflation. However, a quasi‐liberalized system in the sector proves to have a greater potential to reduce inflation in Ghana. In the exchange market, non‐liberalization has the edge over liberalization in reducing inflation in Ghana. However, a quasi‐liberalized system in the sector has a greater potential to lower inflation. There is evidence of a strong intra‐continental transfer of inflation from Côte d'Ivoire to Ghana, but this transmission has been significantly moderated downwards by the implementation of prudent fiscal management in Côte d'Ivoire. We also find that monetary targeting and inflation targeting have deflationary effects, but we cannot claim that this has significantly reduced inflation. The implication of the result is that; a system that achieves the correct balance between the market mechanism and command system in the exchange and financial sectors has a greater potential to lower inflation in Ghana. Also, domestic monetary policies should not only be anchored on internal factors.     

The effectiveness of fiscal institutions: International financial flogging or domestic constraint?

Many have argued that financial markets are crucial in ensuring that governments maintain sustainable fiscal balances - the so called ‘market discipline hypothesis’. A recent version of this theory holds that both fiscal rules and fiscal transparency are necessary to enable markets to discipline overspending governments. I argue, however, that while these fiscal institutions are effective at improving governments fiscal balances, financial markets are likely not the causal mechanism which discipline governments’ fiscal policies. Instead, I propose that fiscal rules and transparency promote better budget balances because domestic political actors use fiscal institutions to constrain executive policymaking. I test these competing hypotheses of why these fiscal institutions are effective – financial markets vs political competition – and find that country budget balances are increased not as a consequence of financial markets, but when the level of political competition and civil society engagement is sufficiently high. These results are robust to accounting for the possible selection bias of who adopts fiscal institutions.     

The dynamic linkages of fiscal and current account deficits: New evidence from five highly indebted European countries accounting for regime shifts and asymmetries

This article provides new empirical evidence on the long-term relationship between the fiscal and current account imbalances, of five European economies under financial market pressure and insolvency; Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. We attempt to re-evaluate the dynamic linkages between the twin-deficits allowing for the presence of structural breaks and asymmetries. The evidence is in favor of the “twin deficits hypothesis”. More insight is further provided through the magnitude and significance of the asymmetric linkages between the twin deficits in the long-run time horizon. Our findings indicate that fiscal deficit decreases have a greater impact on the current account deficit rather than the opposite.     

The transmission of business cyclesImplications for EMU enlargement1

We show that countries characterized by large bilateral trade and financial flows tend to have more correlated business cycles. However, we also find that countries with divergent fiscal policies and highly regulated labour markets are subject to idiosyncratic cycles. Applying these results to the new member states of the EU weakens the optimistic view towards the monetary integration of these countries into the euro area, which is frequently found in the literature. Although our results suggest that extensive trade and financial linkages are likely to result in further increases in business cycle correlation, an increase in labour market regulation and the pursuit of national fiscal policies may result in a counteracting effect.     

Money,output and income velocity

This paper attempts to assess empirically the contribution of three structural shocks – monetary, institutional (financial and fiscal), and technological – to output and velocity fluctuations in the national bank era and the post-1973 period. To identify these shocks we impose only long–run restrictions, derived from a monetary growth model. We find that higher money growth increases (decreases) velocity in the first (second) period, depending crucially on the resulting changes in the transactions frequency. Credit–enhancing financial or expansionary fiscal shocks have a permanent positive effect on velocity and a himp–shaped effect on output, whereas technological shocks cause velocity to decrease in the short run and output to move to a permanently higher level.     

我国财政宏观调控政策及其转型取向--兼论以农村教育为重点的财政调控

经济周期波动及其政府宏观调节是与市场经济共生的现象.经典理论形成了低谷和顶峰两极时期的财政对策,但忽视转型期的调控政策.我国新一轮增长拐点时期,将过去实施的积极财政政策转型为稳健的财政政策,财政调控的目标、手段、方式都需要发生改变.稳健的财政政策目标应该由单纯追求增长率转变为扩大就业,由类行政的直接调控转变为利用市场对企业施行间接调控,当前财政重点发展农村教育有助于实现经济由短期波动到长期增长的平稳过渡,并由此延长经济增长期.     

EMU-related news and financial markets in the Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland

We analyse the impact of news on five financial markets in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland using a newly constructed data set in a Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (GARCH) framework. Macroeconomic shocks (on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), inflation rate, current account and trade balance) are constructed as deviations from expected values. Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)-related political and fiscal news is captured as news dummies. Macroeconomic shocks significantly affect short-term interest rates and, to a lesser extent, other financial variables. Political and fiscal news has an impact on long-term bond yields and exchange rates. News displayed prominently in our media sources has a greater impact on financial markets than other news and, in addition, the sources of news themselves matter. We also discover asymmetric effects of news within markets. Finally, using a pooled GARCH model we find that macroeconomic shocks have the strongest impact on financial markets in Hungary, while political news has the largest influence in both Hungary and Poland.