Big Brother is also being watched: Measuring fiscal credibility

Fiscal policy is less credible than monetary policy, due to political economy issues. This paper provides an explicit measure of fiscal credibility, based on the anchoring of private expectations onto official targets. It documents how credibility varied among a sample of 27 European countries over 1995–2019. Credibility behaves like a stock of trust that is affected by fiscal policy, past performance, and institutions (fiscal rules and councils). This paper highlights how regular government communication – budgets and fiscal plans – is crucial to anchor expectations and buttress credibility. Last, it shows that credibility is associated with better sovereign financing conditions. Governments should thus strive to maintain their credibility.     

Do independent fiscal institutions cause better fiscal outcomes in the European Union?

This paper explores the budgetary implications of the independent fiscal institutions (IFIs) in the European Union (EU). We employ a dynamic panel model for the period 2000–2019 and find that these fiscal watchdogs have a positive and significant influence not only on government budget balance for the EU member states, resulting in smaller government budget deficits, but also on countries’ compliance with fiscal rules, results that hold across alternative fiscal balances. IFIs appear to have a beneficial impact on fiscal performance and compliance with numerical targets in countries with poorly designed fiscal responsibility norms but weaker influence when fiscal rules are less binding (well-designed fiscal rules). The findings remain significant regardless the year of accession to the EU (old vs. new members) or euro-area status (euro-area vs. non-euro-area members). However, we document that IFIs play a larger role in countries that established these monitoring bodies before 2013, indicating that experience matters in IFI performance. Also, our findings show that the influence of IFIs remains if we take into account institutional reforms in which their mandates were extended with different powers and tasks, which has a positive and significant effect on fiscal balances. Moreover, we find that, under the circumstance of systemic and banking crises, these institutions are associated with improved fiscal outcomes, reflecting their increased concern about the path of public finances and their role in reducing budgetary forecasting biases. Our results are robust to a variety of specifications and models, including alternative measures of the government budget balance and after controlling for a set of institutional characteristics and for potential endogeneity in the estimations.     

Coordination and non-coordination risks of monetary and macroprudential authorities: A robust welfare analysis

This study compares a central bank’s leaning against the wind approach with a mix of monetary and macroprudential policies under parameter uncertainty in an estimated DSGE model with two financial frictions. We show that uncertainty of the economic environment is an essential constituent in properly designing macroprudential policy. Although coordination between monetary and macroprudential policies minimizes the policymakers’ Bayesian risk, coordination and non-coordination risks threaten the goals of both authorities. The former describes the situation where the authorities partly resign from implementing the monetary policy objectives to stabilize macroprudential risk. The latter is when conducting a non-coordinated macroprudential policy induces higher total Bayesian risk than when only the central bank minimizes the expected total welfare loss. The robust Bayesian macroeconomic rules show that when financial shocks shrink the banks’ or entrepreneurial net worth, a contractionary macroprudential policy should be combined with an expansionary monetary policy. However, if capital adequacy ratio or risk shocks strike the economy, such a conflict in macroeconomics policy instruments disappears, thus synchronizing both policies.     

“数字丝绸之路”国际规则体系逻辑架构——以实体化“一带一路”实践为鉴

“数字丝绸之路”是数字经济赋能下“一带一路”国际合作领域的延伸和拓展。在“一带一路”建设由项目导向到规则导向的转变下，进一步健全国际规则体系已成为“数字丝绸 之路”建设的主要目标。对此，以守正思维和创新思维回溯实体化“一带一路”法治实践经验将具有重要的理论价值和现实意义。一方面,承继实体化“一带一路”的法治价值、治理原则、路径选 择；另一方面，更新适应数字贸易模式、维护网络空间安全、处理数字经济纠纷的规则。鉴于实体 化“一带一路”规则法治实践经验，“数字丝绸之路”国际规则体系可以从三个方面建立架构：完善以自由贸易协定和数字经济专项协定为主要载体的数字经济合作体系；加强打击网络犯罪和 网络恐怖主义、ICT 供应链风险管理、跨境数据保护等安全保障体系；构建适应数字纠纷特点的权利保障和争端解决机制。     

A copula-based time series model for global horizontal irradiation

The increasing importance of solar power for electricity generation leads to increasing demand for probabilistic forecasting of local and aggregated photovoltaic (PV) yields. Based on publicly available irradiation data, this paper uses an indirect modeling approach for hourly medium to long-term local PV yields. We suggest a time series model for global horizontal irradiation that allows for multivariate probabilistic forecasts for arbitrary time horizons. It features several important stylized facts. Sharp time-dependent lower and upper bounds of global horizontal irradiations are estimated. The parameters of the beta distributed marginals of the transformed data are allowed to be time-dependent. A copula-based time series model is introduced for the hourly and daily dependence structure based on simple vine copulas with so-called tail dependence. Evaluation methods based on scoring rules are used to compare the model’s power for multivariate probabilistic forecasting with other models used in the literature showing that our model outperforms other models in many respects.     

False dichotomy alert: Improving subjective-probability estimates vs. raising awareness of systemic risk

Taleb et al. (2022) portray the superforecasting research program as a masquerade that purports to build “survival functions for tail assessments via sports-like tournaments.” But that never was the goal. The program was designed to help intelligence analysts make better probability judgments, which required posing rapidly resolvable questions. From a signal detection theory perspective, the superforecasting and Taleb et al. programs are complementary, not contradictory (a point Taleb and Tetlock (2013) recognized). The superforecasting program aims at achieving high hit rates at low cost in false-positives, whereas Taleb et al. prioritize alerting us to systemic risk, even if that entails a high false-positive rate. Proponents of each program should, however, acknowledge weaknesses in their cases. It is unclear: (a) how Taleb et al. (2022) can justify extreme error-avoidance trade-offs, without tacit probability judgments of rare, high-impact events; (b) how much superforecasting interventions can improve probability judgments of such events.