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.     

Business cycles in emerging economies: the role of interest rates

We find that in a sample of emerging economies business cycles are more volatile than in developed ones, real interest rates are countercyclical and lead the cycle, consumption is more volatile than output and net exports are strongly countercyclical. We present a model of a small open economy, where the real interest rate is decomposed in an international rate and a country risk component. Country risk is affected by fundamental shocks but, through the presence of working capital, also amplifies the effects of those shocks. The model generates business cycles consistent with Argentine data. Eliminating country risk lowers Argentine output volatility by 27% while stabilizing international rates lowers it by less than 3%.     

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.     

The Output Effect of a Transition to Price Stability When Velocity Is Time Varying

This paper explores the effect of time‐varying velocity on output responses to policies for reducing/stopping inflation. We study a dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices in which we introduce time‐varying velocity. Specifically, we endogenize time‐varying velocity into the model developed by Ireland (1997) for analyzing optimal disinflation. The nonlinear solution method reveals that, depending on velocity, the “disinflationary boom” found by Ball (1994) may disappear even under perfect credibility and that early output losses may be much larger than previously thought. Indeed, we find that a gradual disinflation from a low inflation may even be undesirable.     

International business cycles: What are the facts?

Modern business cycle theory involves developing models that explain stylized facts. For this strategy to be successful, these facts should be well established. In this paper, we focus on the stylized facts of international business cycles. We use the generalized method of moments and quarterly data from twenty industrialized countries to estimate and test hypotheses concerning pairwise cross-country correlations of macroeconomic aggregates. A remarkable common feature emerges: these correlations are mostly positive, not very high and of a similar order of magnitude. The most important discrepancy with the theory is the low cross-country correlation of consumption.     

Implications of habit formation for optimal monetary policy

We study the implications for optimal monetary policy of introducing habit formation in consumption into a general equilibrium model with sticky prices. Habit formation affects the model's endogenous dynamics through its effects on both aggregate demand and households’ supply of output. We show that the objective of monetary policy consistent with welfare maximization includes output stabilization, as well as inflation and output gap stabilization. We find that the variance of output increases under optimal policy, even though it acquires a higher implicit weight in the welfare function. We also find that a simple interest rate rule nearly achieves the welfare-optimal allocation, regardless of the degree of habit formation. In this rule, the optimal responses to inflation and the lagged interest rate are both declining in the size of the habit, although super-inertial policies remain optimal.     

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.     

Optimal reserve composition in the presence of sudden stops

We analytically derive optimal central bank portfolios in a minimum variance framework with two assets and transaction demands caused by sudden stops in capital inflows. In this model, transaction demands become less important relative to traditional portfolio objectives as debt to reserve ratios decrease. We empirically estimate optimal dollar and euro shares for 23 emerging market countries and find that optimal reserve portfolios are dominated by anchor currencies and, at current debt-to-reserve ratios, introducing transaction demand has a relatively modest effect for most countries. We find that, in general, the dollar acts as a safe haven currency during sudden stops for country specific and global sudden stops, increasing the optimal share of dollar bonds in central bank portfolios. Correspondingly, our model predicts that dollar shares should decline as debt-to-reserve ratios fall, as observed in recent data. We also find that the denomination of foreign currency debt has little importance for optimal reserve portfolios.     

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.     

The Response of Hours to a Technology Shock: A Two-Step Structural VAR Approach

The response of hours to a technology shock is a controversial issue in macroeconomics. Part of the difficulty lies in that the estimated response is sensitive to the specification of hours in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs). This paper uses a simple two-step approach to consistently estimate the response of hours. The first step considers a SVAR model with a relevant stationary variable, but excluding hours. Given a consistent estimate of technology shocks in the first step, the response of hours to this shock is estimated in a second step. Simulation experiments from an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model show that this approach outperforms standard SVARs. When applied to U.S. data, the two-step approach predicts a short-run decrease followed by a hump-shaped positive response. This result is robust to other specifications and data.     

Does the ECB act as a lender of last resort during the subprime lending crisis?: Evidence from monetary policy reaction models

We investigate whether the ECB aligns its monetary policy with financial crisis risk in EMU member countries. We find that since the outbreak of the subprime crisis the ECB has significantly increased net lending and reduced interest rates when banking and sovereign debt crisis risk in vulnerable EMU countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) increases, while no significant effect is identified for the pre-crisis period and relatively tranquil EMU countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands). These findings suggest that the ECB acts as a Lender of Last Resort for vulnerable EMU countries.     

The International Dimension of Inflation: Evidence from Disaggregated Consumer Price Data

We estimate the contribution of international common factors to the dynamics of price inflation rates of a cross-section of 948 CPI products in four OECD countries: United States, Germany, France, and United Kingdom. We find two main results. First, on average, and at least in the sample 1991–2004, one international common factor explains between 15% and 30% of the variance of consumer prices (depending on the transformation applied to the data). Given the high level of disaggregation of our panel, this estimate is best viewed as a lower bound for the contribution of international factors to inflation dynamics. Second, we find a strongly positive and statistically significant relationship between exposure of consumer inflation to international shocks and trade openness at the sectoral level. The latter result holds regardless of whether the original data are expressed in local as opposed to common currency.     

The response of the external finance premium in Asian corporate bond markets to financial characteristics,financial constraints and two financial crises

Empirical investigation of the external finance premium has been conducted on the margin between internal finance and bank borrowing or equities but little attention has been given to corporate bonds, especially for the emerging Asian market. In this paper, we hypothesize that balance sheet indicators of creditworthiness could affect the external finance premium for bonds as they do for premia in other markets. Using bond-specific and firm-specific data for China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand during 1995–2009 we find that firms with better financial health face lower external finance premia in all countries. When we introduce firm-level heterogeneity, we show that financial variables appear to be both statistically and quantitatively more important for financially constrained firms. Finally, when we examine the effects of the 1997–1998 Asian crisis and the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, we find that the sensitivity of the premium is greater for constrained firms during the Asian crisis compared to other times.     

The effect of a common currency on the volatility of the extensive margin of trade

This paper studies the effects of the European monetary unification on the volatility of the extensive margin of trade. First, we highlight empirical novel facts about the effects of monetary unification. We build country-level measures of the extensive margin of intra-EMU exports and describe how their volatilities evolved over time. We show that the adoption of a common currency has been associated with an increase of the volatility of the extensive margin of exports for most countries, and a decrease in the volatility of the extensive margin of exports for Germany. Second, we address this question theoretically and build a two-country version of the model of Ghironi and Melitz (2005) with endogenous entry, heterogenous firms, endogenous tradability, endogenous labor supply and sticky prices. We compare the volatility of the extensive margin of trade under fixed exchange rates and in a monetary union. Monetary unification does imply an increase in the volatility of the extensive margin of trade for pre-EMU followers (such as France or the Netherlands) and a decrease in the volatility of the extensive margin of trade for the leader (Germany). This pattern is qualitatively consistent with the data but arises only if monetary policy responds moderately to output.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

United States current account deficits: A stochastic optimal control analysis

The “Pessimists” and the “Optimists” disagree whether the US external deficits and the associated buildup of US net foreign liabilities are problems that require urgent attention. A warning signal should be that the debt ratio deviates significantly from the optimal ratio. The optimal debt ratio or debt burden should take into account the vulnerability of consumption to shocks from the productivity of capital, the interest rate and exchange rate. The optimal debt ratio is derived from inter-temporal optimization using Dynamic Programming, because the shocks are unpredictable, and it is essential to have a feedback control mechanism. The optimal ratio depends upon the risk adjusted net return and risk aversion both at home and abroad. On the basis of alternative estimates, we conclude that the Pessimists’ fears are justified on the basis of trends. The trend of the actual debt ratio is higher than that of the optimal ratio. The Optimists are correct that the current debt ratio is not a menace, because the current level of the debt ratio is not above the corresponding level of the optimum ratio.     

Technology Shocks and Monetary Policy: Revisiting the Fed's Performance

Would the U.S. economy's dynamic response to permanent technology shocks have been different from the actual responses if monetary authorities' systematic response to these shocks had been optimal? To answer this question, we characterize the dynamic effects of permanent technology shocks and the way in which U.S. monetary authorities reacted to these shocks over the sample 1955(1)–2002(4) using a structural VAR. A sticky price–sticky wage model is developed and estimated to reproduce these responses. We then formally compare these responses with the outcome of the optimal monetary policy.