Working Papers
2023
November 10, 2023
FINEX - A New Workhorse Model for Macroeconomic Forecasting and Policy Analysis
Description: This paper presents a semi-structural macroeconomic model aimed at facilitating policy analysis and forecasting, primarily in countries with imperfect capital mobility and hybrid monetary policy regimes. Compared to earlier gap-trend projection models, the Forecasting Model of Internal and External Balance (FINEX) contains three main innovations: it accentuates external and internal balances; explicitly incorporates fiscal policy; and partly endogenizes the main trends. FINEX thus covers a broad set of policy instruments, including foreign exchange interventions (FXI), capital flow management measures (CFM), as well as common fiscal policy instruments. The model incorporates insights from the recent DSGE literature, while maintaining a more accessible gap-trend structure that lends itself to practical policy applications. While the paper refrains from drawing broad policy lessons, it emphasizes the model's ability to interpret recent data in terms of structural shocks and policy responses, thereby aiding policymakers in constructing coherent economic narratives and considering alternative scenarios.
November 10, 2023
Trade Diversion Effects from Global Tensions—Higher Than We Think
Description: The paper builds a unique industry-level dataset by combining Mexico’s nationally sourced inputoutput data (INEGI) with cross-country sources (WIOD, UN Comtrade). Using this dataset to exploit higher supply linkages across a larger number of industries than what is available in cross-country sources, the paper estimates the trade diversion effect on Mexico’s exports to the U.S. from two episodes, with a focus on the first: the U.S.-China trade tension in 2018 and the U.S. sanctions on Russia in 2014. Difference-in-differences, local projections and few other empirical methodologies are used. For the first episode, the paper finds higher trade diversion effects than estimates in literature. Output tariff plays an important role, and there is some evidence of a positive impact through downstream tariffs. The effects are stronger when nationally sourced input-output data is used compared to those derived from cross-country sources. Importantly, the magnitude of trade diversion across industries does not depend on Mexico’s industry-level trade exposure to the U.S., but rather on the U.S. tariff changes on Chinese goods, the decrease in imports from China, product substitutability with Chinese products, and (weakly) on Mexico’s GVC integration. Similarly, for the second episode, the paper finds positive trade diversion effects. Overall, the findings suggest that trade diversion effect might be higher than previously thought and the proper accounting of dataset and supply linkages makes a difference.
November 10, 2023
The Pass-through of Wages to Consumer Prices in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Sectoral Data in the U.S.
Description: We study the pass-through of labor costs to prices using a novel data-set that links industry-level wages to sectoral consumer prices through input-output tables. Pass-through increased during the COVID-19 pandemic recovery, temporarily in goods and persistently in services. Our analysis suggests that the elevated pass-through contributed at least 0.8 percentage points to goods inflation in 2021 and 0.7 percentage points and 0.5 percentage points to services inflation in 2021 and 2022, respectively. We find that the increase in pass-through reflects elevated demand in goods sectors and firms' difficulty in absorbing high wage growth in services sectors. The analysis suggests it will take a reduction in wage growth to bring PCE inflation back to target. Fiscal and monetary policies that help to re-balance the labor markets can facilitate this process.
November 10, 2023
The Economic Consequences of Social Unrest: Evidence from Initial Public Offerings
Description: Prior research attributes negative stock market performance following episodes of social unrest to elevated uncertainty. However, social unrest does not solely increase uncertainty, but separately acts to decrease investor sentiment. To determine which effect dominates, we study initial public offering (IPO) underpricing, which responds differently to changes to uncertainty and investor sentiment. Consistent with the notion that social unrest dampens investor sentiment, we find robust evidence that IPO first-day returns are lower during times of greater social unrest. Limits to arbitrage intensify the negative relation between social unrest and underpricing. Notably, strong institutional frameworks mitigate the impact of social unrest on underpricing, suggesting that quality institutions weaken the link between investor sentiment and returns.
November 10, 2023
Quantifying the Revenue Yields from Tax Administration Reforms
Description: Despite the criticality of tax administration (TA) reforms in enhancing domestic revenue mobilization, few studies have attempted to quantify the revenue impact of such reforms. This paper fills this gap by estimating the revenue yields associated with various tax administration capabilities, based on the International Survey on Tax Administration (ISORA), the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool (TADAT), and TA reform episodes datasets (identified by Akitoby et al., 2020). It uses a Hausman-Taylor cross-country panel regression and an event study for specific TA reform episodes. Our results (using the ISORA data) show that an increase in the overall strength of TA from the 40th percentile to the 60th percentile is associated with an increase in tax revenue by 1.8 pp. of GDP (with a 95 percent confidence range of 0.5‒2.6 pp. of GDP). Similarly, the event-study assessment shows that sustained TA reforms led to an increase in tax revenues between 2 to 3 pp. of GDP, in line with the experience in three country cases (Jamaica, Rwanda, and Senegal). Also, the revenue yields are increasing over time to more than 3 pp. of GDP after the 6th year following a comprehensive reform. The analysis also highlights the significant impact of specific measures including: i) strengthening compliance risks management, ii) enhancing public accountability, iii) establishing Large Taxpayer Offices (LTO), iv) strengthening accountability and transparency, and v) enhancing timely filing of tax declarations.
November 3, 2023
A New Fiscal Framework for Resource-Rich Countries
Description: This paper revisits the debate on the design of fiscal rules in resource-rich countries. Its main objective is to assess alternative systems of rules against their policy objectives, while taking into account country characteristics. One of the contributions of the paper is to propose fiscal frameworks that are centered around the principle of insurance against shocks and less reliant on estimating precisely resource wealth, which tends to be highly volatile.
November 3, 2023
A Comprehensive Macroeconomic Uncertainty Measure for the Euro Area and its Implications to COVID-19
Description: This paper develops a new data-driven metric to capture MacroEconomic Uncertainty (MEU) in the euro area. The measure is constructed as the conditional volatility of the unforecastable components of a large set of time series, accounting for the monetary union as well as cross-country heterogeneity. MEU exhibits the largest spike at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak and is noticeably different from other more financial-oriented and policy-driven uncertainty measures. It also reveals a significant increase in inflation uncertainty in 2021-2022. Our BVAR-based analysis shows that an unexpected increase in the MEU has a negative and persistent impact on euro area's industrial production, accounting for 80 percent of its reduction during the first wave of COVID-19, therefore supporting the interpretation of COVID-19 shock as a macroeconomic uncertainty shock. Public debt increases in response to this uncertainty shock. Finally, an increase in MEU negatively affects Emerging Europe countries, contributing the most to the decline in their economic activity during this COVID-19 period.
October 27, 2023
Inclusive GovTech: Enhancing Efficiency and Equity Through Public Service Digitalization
Description: How could the GovTech improve budget processes and execution efficiency? Could the GovTech strengthen redistributive function of public expenditure? Based on an event-study method, this paper finds that the introduction of digital budget payments and e-procurement could significantly enhance budget transparency and help expand the coverage of social assistance to reach the most vulnerable population. Exploiting staggered adoption of digital budget payments, a synthetic control regression identifies meaningful increase in pre-tax income shares among the bottom 50th percentile and female workers, especially for emerging market and developing countries, with effects materializing gradually over 10-year period. The paper delves into the potential mechanism driving these equity benefits, highlighting the reduction in business informality as a primary channel. However, the paper emphasizes that the mere adoption of GovTech strategies or digital technologies is insufficient to unlock its full potential. The outcomes are intricately linked to supporting policies, regulations, organizational and system integration, and robust digital connectivity. The paper underscores that inter-agency coordination facilitated by a dedicated GovTech institution emerges as a critical factor for reaping both efficiency and equity gains from GovTech initiatives.
October 27, 2023
Long Live Globalization: Geopolitical Shocks and International Trade
Description: Are we really witnessing the death of globalization? A multitude of shocks over the past three years has unsettled the conventional wisdom on economic integration and fueled widespread calls for protectionist and nationalist policies. Using an extensive dataset with more than 4 million observations, I develop an augmented gravity model of bilateral trade flows among 59,049 country-pairs over the period 1948–2021 and find that the much-debated geopolitical alignment between countries has contradictory and statistically insignificant effects on trade, depending on the level of economic development. Moreover, the economic magnitude of this effect is not as important as income or geographic distance and it diminishes significantly when extreme outliers are removed from the sample. The empirical analysis presented in this paper also confirms that the level of income in both origin and destination countries has a positive impact on trade, while the greater the distance between countries, the smaller the flow of bilateral trade due to higher trade costs. Cultural similarities and historical ties are also important in shaping trade flows, just like trade agreements that tend to lead to higher level of international trade.
October 27, 2023
Public Support for Climate Change Mitigation Policies: A Cross Country Survey
Description: Building public support for climate mitigation is a key prerequisite to making meaningful strides toward decarbonization and achieving net-zero emissions. Using nationally representative, individual-level surveys for 28 countries, this paper identifies the current levels and drivers of support for climate mitigation policies. Controlling for individual characteristics, we find that pre-existing beliefs about policy efficacy, perceived costs and co-benefits (e.g., cleaner air), and the degree of policy progressivity are important drivers of support for carbon pricing policies. The knowledge gap about climate mitigation policies can be large, but randomized information experiments show that support increases (decreases) after individuals are introduced to new information on the benefits (potential costs) of such policies.