Are High Interest Rates Effective for Stopping High Inflation? Some Skeptical Notes

High interest rates are considered an effective tool for stoppinghigh inflation. The case for a policy of high interest ratesis developed in terms of a conventional IS-LM model. However,among other things, the model ignores some central aspects ofmodern credit markets. In particular high interest rates maygive rise to nonperforming bank loans, thus seriously jeopardizingthe effectiveness of the policy. Examples are developed in whichit would be optimal to aim for equilibriums of low, rather thanhigh, interest rates. One of these examples hinges on the existenceof nonindexed domestic debt.     

What Can the Developed World Learn from the Latin American Debt and Mexican Peso Crisis?

The global financial crisis of 2007–08 resulted from massive institutional failure and proved that a robust regulatory and supervisory frameworks are necessary. Such frameworks are not yet in place. This paper recounts the legacy of the financial crisis in the sovereign debt crisis in Greece as of September 2011. It then turns to comparing the current situation to those of Latin America, and especially Mexico, in the 1980s. It describes what was done to recover in Latin America and what lessons can and cannot be learned from those experiences in acting to assist the countries of the European Union threatened with sovereign debt default.     

Assessing Supermarket Product-Line Decisions: The Impact of Slotting Fees

In this paper, I estimate a structural demand model for a product category in a supermarket chain. I use the model to infer manufacturers' side payments to obtain shelf access in the supermarket and I estimate the impact of these fees on product assortment. The results suggest that the supermarket carries some unprofitable products. Instead of eliminating them, it charges slotting fees to the manufacturers of those products. Since the absence of slotting fees would lead the retailer to discontinue some products, this paper argues that forbidding slotting fees would harm consumers. Welfare calculations reveal that product assortment in this market is close to socially optimal.     

Análisis de contagio en el sistema financiero mexicano combinando el modelo de Merton y redes aleatorias

The control of systematic risk and the contagion effect are very important on the regulation and Basilea context. This paper presents a two phase model (Merton Model on the first part and Random networks Erdös-Rényi in the second part) in order to analyze the contagion effect on the Mexican bank system. The conclusions are that the Banks could not be infected or fall into default depending of the behavior of liabilities, the structure of the network and (external asset/interbank asset) ratio and (capital/asset) ratio. The results are consistent with the regulation politics in order to avoid the contagion in Mexico Financial System.     

Are emerging market indicators of vulnerability to financial crises decoupling from global factors?

This paper assesses the extent to which common factors underlie indicators of vulnerability to financial crises in emerging market economies (EMEs) and whether this link is changing over time. We use a Bayesian dynamic common factor model to estimate their common component in a sample of up to 41 countries including both developed as well as emerging economies. This permits us to interpret the component in common to both of them as a global factor. We introduce time variation into the model to investigate whether indicators are decoupling from global factors over time. While decoupling can be observed in a few cases, the exposure to global factors in most countries tends to fluctuate around the mean. Broadly speaking then, the answer is no.     

Regulatory design and technical efficiency: public transport in France

The provision of local public transport in France involves private and public firms and the use of incentive contracts to regulate them. We study the effect of these institutional features on the sector’s efficiency using a long panel data of firms, with a two-stage estimation procedure. First, we use nonparametric data envelopment analysis techniques to estimate input usage efficiency, following a conditional approach that controls for differences in the environments in which the firms operate. Second, we estimate semiparametric censored regressions, using fixed effects to control for unobserved sources of heterogeneity. Our results point to a differential effect of private and mixed public-private companies. In particular, having the performance of public operators as the benchmark, efficiency is relatively higher for private firms, but lower when the service is delegated to a mixed public-private firm. In the latter case, the effects diverge by contract type: when the contract is of the cost reimbursement type, performance is lower than the public firm benchmark, while for other contract types, there are no statistically significant differences.     

Managing Government Exposure to Private Infrastructure Risks

The privatization of infrastructure should lead to the developmentof new infrastructure, improvements in the operation of existinginfrastructure, and a reduction in budgetary subsidies. Whethercountries reap the full benefits of privatization, however,depends on how risks are allocated. If, as is often the casein developing countries, governments assume risks that shouldbe borne by investors, they may reduce incentives for efficiencyand incur significant liabilities. To solve these problems,governments need to improve their policies and restrict theirrisk bearing to certain political and regulatory risks overwhich they have direct control. When a government provides guarantees,it should attempt to measure their cost and improve the waythey are handled in the accounts and budgets. Measurement andbudgeting are critical to improving decisions about the provisionof guarantees, to improving project selection and contract design,and to protecting governments from unknowingly entering intocommitments that might jeopardize future budgets.      

Monetary policy in a dual currency environment

We develop a small open economy general equilibrium model with sticky prices and partial dollarization – a situation where both domestic and foreign currencies coexist. We derive a tractable representation of the model in terms of domestic inflation and the output gap in which a trade-off, which depends on the degree of dollarization, arises endogenously due to the presence of foreign interest rate shocks. We use this framework to show analytically how higher degrees of dollarization induce larger volatilities of the output gap and inflation, thus hampering a central bank’s effectiveness to stabilize the economy. Our impulse response functions show that the transmission of such shocks has a positive (negative) effect on inflation and negative (positive) effect on the output gap when money aggregates and consumption are complements (substitutes).     

Reputation from nested activities

Principals usually try to elicit the quality and behavior of agents from their performance. While sometimes success or failure in production does not provide accurate information about the agents, there may be activities not directly related to production that constitute a more precise signal. I show that, when agents face reputation concerns, introducing these activities after a success improves efficiency, while introducing them after a failure reduces efficiency. Hence, nesting activities in the right way may offer a cheap toolbox to provide incentives. As an illustration, I consider a model where reputation concerns drive the hiring decisions of managers in a firm and I show how scapegoating, an activity “nested” after failures in production, generates inefficiencies. While hiring efficient workers increases the probability of success, hiring less efficient workers provides a buffer against reputation loses from failures, since managers can blame them more easily.