Recessions and Potential Output: Disentangling Measurement Errors,Supply Shocks,and Hysteresis Effects*

This paper investigates expert revisions of potential output (PO) estimates following recessions. Using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we show that downward revisions are substantial, permanent, and mostly driven by supply shocks. In contrast, PO estimates do not significantly react to demand shocks. Revisions are also partly caused by mismeasurement of PO before recessions. In particular, we show that the length of the preceding boom and pre-recession values of the current account balance and credit volumes are correlated with post-recession PO revisions. Our results call for improved methods for estimating PO and provide evidence against the existence of substantial hysteresis following demand shocks.     

Innovation Dynamics in OECD Countries: Challenges for German Enterprises

This paper considers the innovation dynamics in OECD countries since the beginning of the 1990s. Special attention is given to German firms that had the exceptional opportunity and burden to develop an innovative regime in the former GDR. The economic slump in the new decade had everywhere a negative impact on the propensity of companies to invest in new innovative products and processes. Among the OECD countries leading in innovation, Europe is loosing strength, although R&D has doubtlessly become more important in the innovation process of the manufacturing sector, but in particular in the service sector. The EU and some member countries have recognized this and formulated an ambitious objective: R&D expenditure is to be increased to 3% of GDP by 2010. Despite this joint target, countries differ in many respects. Export-oriented countries in high technology products suffer less from a weak economic momentum in their domestic markets. A further distinction needs to be made between the industry and the service sector. Industrial innovators focus more on the world market. After the trade diversion of West German high technology from international markets to the absorbing East German markets was over, in the second half of the 1990s, Germany has managed to get slightly ahead of Japan as an exporter of R&D-intensive goods and in international patent activities. However, the foreign trade success that the German technology sector enjoyed is mainly based on the automobile sector. Increasing problems in the long term are the decline in the number of qualified manpower entering the labour market. It will exacerbate the shortage of qualified staff in innovating companies.This is an updated and completely revised version of an earlier contribution to the Symposium on Entrepreneurship – Innovation – Marketing, Benchmarking the Technological Competitiveness of German Enterprises in Times of low Growth, Karlsruhe, October 2003.     

Globalisation, capital mobility and tax competition: theory and evidence for OECD countries

Are the predictions of tax competition theory wrong? While the tax competition literature predicts that taxes on income from capital decrease with increasing globalisation, past empirical studies on various data find contradicting evidence. By using different data and additional elements of economic theory, this paper aims to challenge the empirical contributions. For a panel of 14 OECD countries and for the period 1967–1996, we find that globalisation has indeed a negative and significant impact on corporate taxes. Furthermore, globalisation tends to raise labour taxes and social expenditures. As a consequence, the so-called “efficiency” and “compensation” hypotheses of globalisation are not competing, but rather, both appear to apply at the same time. Efficiency has an impact on the tax-mix, whereas compensation is provided through increased social expenditures.     

Comprehending the outward FDI from Latin America and OCED: A comparative perspective

This study examines the determinants of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from Latin American countries and compares it with their OECD counterparts. Our analysis is based on a sample of 45 countries, 13 from Latin America and 32 from the OECD, over the period 2001–2012. We find that the outward FDI from Latin America is more likely to be located in geographically proximate countries and in countries with similar culture and language than that from their OECD counterparts. We also show that Latin American outward FDI is less likely to be resource seeking. This presumably reflects the rich natural resource endowments and agricultural potential in major Latin American countries. Further, outward FDI from Latin America is more likely to be concentrated in countries with a similar corruption environment than that from their OECD counterparts. This might indicate a broadly similar nature of corruption across Latin America due to shared cultural, political and economic legacies.     

Evidences of maturity mismatching of loans in OECD housing markets between 1995 and 2008

The article focuses on maturity mismatching of loans in OECD economies during the last housing boom (which ended with the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007). Our model gives rise to an indicator measuring how strong the incentives for speculation were. The indicator is also used to estimate the influence of transaction costs and demand-side subsidies on leverage. According to the model, the influence of subsidies is likely to be limited compared to transaction costs, which may play a significant role in containing incentives for maturity mismatching. Some distinctive patterns can be deduced from a country by country analysis.     

Cross-country evidence on the relation between stock prices and the current account

This article explores the relation between stock prices and the current account for 17 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in 1980–2007. A panel Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model is used to compare the effects of stock price shocks to those originating from monetary policy and exchange rates. While monetary policy shocks have little effects, shocks to stock prices and exchange rates have sizeable effects. A 10% contraction in stock prices improves the current account by 0.3% after 2 years. Hence a channel – in addition to the traditional exchange rate channel – is found through which external balance for an OECD country with a current account imbalance can be restored.     

The management function of entrepreneurs and countries’ productivity growth

This article examines the determinants of the equilibrium number of entrepreneurs and the level of productivity in economies where individuals make occupational choices between being self-employed or working as an employee. The results of the theoretical model explain some observed empirical regularities, such as the negative association between productivity and self-employment rates in cross-country data. The article also derives and empirically tests an unexplored relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth, in the form of a positive association between productivity growth in t and the proportion of the self-employed in t???1, providing a new perspective on cross-country productivity convergence over time.     

Robust determinants of health care expenditure growth

Our aim is to disclose robust explanatory variables for health care expenditure (HCE) growth by introducing to this field of research a method that is especially well suited for situations of ‘model uncertainty’: the Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA). We analyse data for 33 OECD countries over the period 1970–2010 and include – as far as it is statistically feasible – all macroeconomic and institutional determinants of HCE growth in the EBA that have been suggested in the literature. Furthermore, we analyse to what extent outliers in the data influence the results. Our results confirm earlier findings that GDP growth and a variable representing Baumol’s ‘cost disease’ theory emerge as robust and statistically significant determinants of HCE growth. Depending on whether or not outliers are excluded, we find up to six additional robust drivers: the growth in expenditure on health administration, the change in the share of inpatient expenditure in total health expenditure, the (lagged) government share in GDP, the change in the insurance coverage ratio, the growth in land traffic fatalities and the growth in the population share undergoing renal dialysis.     

Wage Rigidity,Inflation, and Institutions

We study the possible existence of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) at wage growth rates different from zero in aggregate data. Even if DNWR prevails at zero for individual workers, compositional effects might lead to falling aggregate wages, while changes in relative wages combined with DNWR might lead to positive aggregate wage growth. We explore industry data for 19 OECD countries, over the 1971–2006 period. We find evidence for a floor on nominal wage growth at 6 percent in the 1970s and 1980s, at 1 percent in the 1990s, and at 0.5 percent in the 2000s. Furthermore, we find that DNWR is stronger in country‐years with strict employment protection legislation, high union density, centralized wage setting, and high inflation.