Working Papers
2024
January 19, 2024
The Leisure Gains from International Trade
Description: The average number of hours worked has been declining in many countries. This can be explained if workers have preferences with income effects outweighing substitution effects. Then, an optimal response to rising income is to reduce labor supply to enjoy more leisure. In this paper, I develop a novel structural link between trade and aggregate labor supply. Using a multi-country Ricardian trade model, I show that reducing trade barriers leads to fewer hours worked while being compatible with an increase in welfare. In addition, I derive an hours-to-trade elasticity and estimate it by exploiting exogenous income variation generated by aggregate trade. On average, I quantify that the rise in trade openness between 1950 and 2014 explains 7 percent of the total decline in hours per worker in high-income countries.
January 19, 2024
Fueling or Following Growth? Causal Effects of Capital Inflows on Recipient Economies
Description: Identifying the causal impact of capital inflows on growth and development has been a perennial challenge. This paper proposes a new way to investigate the effect of capital flows on recipient emerging and developing economies, using shift-share instruments and correcting for indirect flows. It finds a significantly beneficial effect of loan and bond inflows on economic performance, which materializes after a few years. It also finds some confirmation that the absorptive capacity of recipient economies depends on their fundamentals.
January 19, 2024
U.S. Monetary Policy Spillovers to Middle East and Central Asia: Shocks, Fundamentals, and Propagations
Description: We empirically examine U.S. monetary policy spillovers to the Middle East and Central Asia (ME & CA) region by decomposing U.S. interest rates changes into two orthogonal shocks: the pure monetary policy shock and the information news shock. Using a sample of 16 ME & CA countries, we find that when interest rates increase, the two shocks have opposite spillovers on the region. Tightening driven by contractionary monetary policy shocks hinders growth, while tightening driven by positive information news shocks boosts growth despite higher interest rates. Countries with weaker fundamentals face more negative spillovers from contractionary monetary policy shocks but may sometimes benefit more from positive information news shocks. Moreover, high oil prices mitigate both spillovers for oil exporters while global risk appetite amplifies both spillovers. Finally, we estimate a large degree of heterogeneity in the impact of the 2022 U.S. tightening cycle on ME & CA countries, with oil exporters with stronger fundamentals withstanding well the shock and oil importers with weaker fundamentals being hit the most.
January 12, 2024
Costly Increases in Public Debt when r < g
Description:
This paper quantifies the costs of a permanent increase in debt to GDP. We employ a deterministic, overlapping generations model with two assets and no risk of default. The two assets are public debt and private (productive) capital. We assume that the return on private capital equals the interest rate on public debt plus an exogenously given spread. Employing a analytical version of the model we show an example in which a permanent rise in the public debt ratio leads to a significant reduction in steady-state GDP even as r
January 12, 2024
Monetary Policy Pass-Through to Interest Rates: Stylized Facts from 30 European Countries
Description: The extent to which changes in monetary policy rates lead to changes in loan and deposit rates for households and firms, referred to as ‘pass-through’, is an important ingredient of monetary policy transmission to output and prices. Using data on seven different bank interest rates in 30 European countries, different approaches, and the full sample as well as a subsample of euro area countries, we show that a) the pass-through in the post-pandemic hiking cycle has been heterogenous across countries and types of interest rates; b) the pass-through has generally been weaker and slower, except for rates of non-financial corporation loans and time deposits in euro area countries; c) differences in pass-through over time and across countries for most deposit rates are correlated with financial sector concentration, liquidity, and loan opportunities, and d) the effects of pass-through to outstanding mortgage rates on monetary transmission on prices and output are heterogenous across countries.
January 12, 2024
The Shifting and Steepening of Phillips Curves During the Pandemic Recovery: International Evidence and Some Theory
Description: We study the global inflation surge during the pandemic recovery and the implications for aggregate and sectoral Phillips curves. We provide evidence that Phillips curves shifted up and steepened across advanced economies, and that differences in the inflation response across sectors imply the relative price of goods has been pro-cyclical this time around rather than a-cyclical as during previous cycles. We show analytically that these three features emerge endogenously in a two-sector new-Keynesian model when we introduce unbalanced recoveries that run against a supply constraint in the goods sector. A calibrated exercise shows that the resulting changes to the output-inflation relation are quantitatively important and improve the model's ability to replicate the inflation surge during this period.
January 12, 2024
Did the U.S. Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt?
Description: The fall in the U.S. public debt/GDP ratio from 106% in 1946 to 23% in 1974 is often attributed to high rates of economic growth. This paper examines the roles of three other factors: primary budget surpluses, surprise inflation, and pegged interest rates before the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951. Our central result is a simulation of the path that the debt/GDP ratio would have followed with primary budget balance and without the distortions in real interest rates caused by surprise inflation and the pre-Accord peg. In this counterfactual, debt/GDP declines only to 74% in 1974, not 23% as in actual history. Moreover, the ratio starts rising again in 1980 and in 2022 it is 84%. These findings imply that, over the last 76 years, only a small amount of debt reduction has been achieved through growth rates that exceed undistorted interest rates.
January 12, 2024
Fraying Threads: Exclusion and Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa
Description: This study investigates the factors leading to exclusion and their detrimental impacts in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It employs two-levels of analysis: a macro-level estimation of the influence of exclusion and marginalization on violent conflict, and a micro-level investigation identifying the triggers of exclusion sentiments. We construct statistical summaries from multiple measures of exclusion, producing an overall exclusion index as well as social, economic, and political exclusion sub-indices. Our results show the importance of mitigating exclusion and marginalization within SSA nations, and pinpoint the most effective policy levers that governments may use to minimize destabilizing feelings of exclusion.
January 12, 2024
Searching for Wage Growth: Policy Responses to the “New Machine Age”
Description: The current wave of technological revolution is changing the way policies work. This paper examines the growth and distributional implications of three policies when “robot'' capital (a broad definition of robots, Artificial Intelligence, computers, big data, digitalization, networks, sensors and servos) is introduced in a neoclassical growth model. 1) cuts to the corporate tax rate; 2) increases in education spending; and 3) increases in infrastructure investment. We find that incorporating “robot'' capital into the model does make a big difference to policy outcomes: the trickle-down effects of corporate tax cuts on unskilled wages are attenuated, and the advantages of investment in infrastructure, and especially in education, are bigger. Based on our calibrations grounded on new empirical estimates, infrastructure investment and corporate tax cuts dominate investment in education in a "traditional" economy. However, in an economy with “robots” the infrastructure investment dominates corporate tax cuts, while investment in education tends to produce the highest welfare gains of all. The specific results, of course, may depend on the exact modeling of the technological change, but our main results remain valid and can provide more accurate welfare rankings.
January 12, 2024
Dissecting the Decline in Average Hours Worked in Europe
Description: Three years after the COVID-19 crisis, employment and total hours worked in Europe fully recovered, but average hours per worker did not. We analyze the decline in average hours worked across European countries and find that (i) it is not cyclical but predominantly structural, extending a long-term trend that predates COVID-19, (ii) it mainly reflects reduced hours within worker groups, not a compositional shift towards lower-hours jobs and workers, (iii) men—particularly those with young children—and youth drive this drop, (iv) declines in actual hours match declines in desired hours. Policy reforms could help involuntary parttimers and women with young children raise their actual hours towards desired levels, but the aggregate impact on average hours would be limited to 0.5 to 1.5 percent. Overall, there is scant evidence of slack at the intensive margin in European labor markets, and the trend fall in average hours worked seems unlikely to reverse.