Working Papers
2020
June 12, 2020
Improving Crop Yields in Sub-Saharan Africa - What Does the East African Data Say
Description: Recent micro level data from East Africa is used to benchmark aggregate data and assess the role of agricultural inputs in explaining variation in crop yields on smallholding plots. Fertilizer, improved seeds, protection against erosion and pesticides improve crop yields in Rwanda and Ethiopia, but not Uganda, possibly associated with lack of use there. With all positive yield determinants in place, wheat and maize yields could increase fourfold. The data hints at the negative effect of climate change on yields and the benefits of accompanying measures to mitigate its adverse impact (access to finance and protection against erosion). The adverse effect of crop damage on yields varies between 12/13 percent (Rwanda, Uganda) to 36 percent (Ethiopia). Protection against erosion and investment financing mitigate these effects considerably.
June 12, 2020
Fiscal Resilience Building: Insights from a New Tax Revenue Diversification Index
Description: Does the reliance on diversified tax structure enhance resilience to fiscal risks? This paper gives an answer to this question by proposing a new cross-country tax revenue diversification index (RDI). The RDI builds on the Theil index, and unlike the few existing tax diversification indices, which are constructed only at the state level for the US, is computed at the national level, covering a broad panel of 127 countries over the period 2000-15. We find suggestive evidence that tax revenue diversification reduces tax revenue volatility, thus bringing to the data long-held views about the prominence of tax revenue diversification for fiscal resilience strengthening. While exploring the drivers of the RDI, we find that tax revenue diversification is not just a reflection of economic diversification, but also an outcome of macroeconomic, political and institutional factors. Interestingly, a non-monotone relationship is also at play between the RDI and economic development, with countries’ portfolio of tax sources getting more diversified as their economy develops, until a tipping point, where richer countries start finding it harder to diversify further their tax revenue sources.
June 12, 2020
Government Spending Effects in a Policy Constrained Environment
Description: The theoretical literature generally finds that government spending multipliers are bigger than unity in a low interest rate environment. Using a fully nonlinear New Keynesian model, we show that such big multipliers can decrease when 1) an initial debt-to-GDP ratio is higher, 2) tax burden is higher, 3) debt maturity is longer, and 4) monetary policy is more responsive to inflation. When monetary and fiscal policy regimes can switch, policy uncertainty also reduces spending multipliers. In particular, when higher inflation induces a rising probability to switch to a regime in which monetary policy actively controls inflation and fiscal policy raises future taxes to stabilize government debt, the multipliers can fall much below unity, especially with an initial high debt ratio. Our findings help reconcile the mixed empirical evidence on government spending effects with low interest rates.
June 12, 2020
FX Intervention to Stabilize or Manipulate the Exchange Rate? Inference from Profitability
Description: We analyze the profitability of FX swaps used by the central bank of Brazil to shed light on the rationale for FX intervention. We find that swaps are profitable in expectation, suggesting that FX intervention is used to stabilize the exchange rate in the face of temporary excessive movements rather than to manipulate it away from fundamental values. In line with this interpretation, we find that the scale of FX intervention responds to the degree of exchange rate misalignment relative to UIP conditions. We also document that intervention is more aggressive when there is less uncertainty about the medium-term level of the exchange rate and when the exchange rate is overvalued rather than undervalued.
June 12, 2020
Who will Bear the Brunt of Lockdown Policies? Evidence from Tele-workability Measures Across Countries
Description: Lockdowns imposed around the world to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic are having a differential impact on economic activity and jobs. This paper presents a new index of the feasibility to work from home to investigate what types of jobs are most at risk. We estimate that over 97.3 million workers, equivalent to about 15 percent of the workforce, are at high risk of layoffs and furlough across the 35 advanced and emerging countries in our sample. Workers least likely to work remotely tend to be young, without a college education, working for non-standard contracts, employed in smaller firms, and those at the bottom of the earnings distribution, suggesting that the pandemic could exacerbate inequality. Crosscountry heterogeneity in the ability to work remotely reflects differential access to and use of technology, sectoral mix, and labor market selection. Policies should account for demographic and distributional considerations both during the crisis and in its aftermath.
June 5, 2020
Synergies Between Monetary and Macroprudential Policies in Thailand
Description: A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model tailored to the Thai economy is used to explore the performance of alternative monetary and macroprudential policy rules when faced with shocks that directly impact the financial cycle. In this context, the model shows that a monetary policy focused on its traditional inflation and output objectives accompanied by a well targeted counter-cyclical macroprudential policy yields better macroeconomic outcomes than a lean-against-the-wind monetary policy rule under a wide range of assumptions.
June 5, 2020
Liquidity at Risk: Joint Stress Testing of Solvency and Liquidity
Description: The traditional approach to the stress testing of financial institutions focuses on capital adequacy and solvency. Liquidity stress tests have been applied in parallel to and independently from solvency stress tests, based on scenarios which may not be consistent with those used in solvency stress tests. We propose a structural framework for the joint stress testing of solvency and liquidity: our approach exploits the mechanisms underlying the solvency-liquidity nexus to derive relations between solvency shocks and liquidity shocks. These relations are then used to model liquidity and solvency risk in a coherent framework, involving external shocks to solvency and endogenous liquidity shocks arising from these solvency shocks. We define the concept of ‘Liquidity at Risk’, which quantifies the liquidity resources required for a financial institution facing a stress scenario. Finally, we show that the interaction of liquidity and solvency may lead to the amplification of equity losses due to funding costs which arise from liquidity needs. The approach described in this study provides in particular a clear methodology for quantifying the impact of economic shocks resulting from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis on the solvency and liquidity of financial institutions and may serve as a useful tool for calibrating policy responses.
June 5, 2020
Measuring the Impact of a Failing Participant in Payment Systems
Description: Banks and financial market infrastructures (FMIs) that are not able to fulfill their payment obligations can be a source of financial instability. This paper develops a composite risk indicator to evaluate the criticality of participants in a large value payment system network, combining liquidity risk and interconnections in one approach, and applying this to the TARGET2 payment system. Findings suggest that the most critical participants in TARGET2 are other payment systems, because of the size of underlying payment flows. Some banks may be critical, but this is mainly due to their interconnectedness with other TARGET2 participants. Central counterparties and central securities depositories are less critical. These findings can be used in financial stability analysis, and feed into central bank policies on payment system access, oversight, and crisis management.
June 5, 2020
Estimated Policy Rules for Capital Controls
Description: This paper borrows the tradition of estimating policy reaction functions from monetary policy literature to ask whether capital controls respond to macroprudential or mercantilist motivations. I explore this question using a novel, weekly dataset on capital control actions in 21 emerging economies from 2001 to 2015. I introduce a new proxy for mercantilist motivations: the weighted appreciation of an emerging-market currency against its top five trade competitors. This proxy Granger causes future net initiations of non-tariff barriers in most countries. Emerging markets systematically respond to both mercantilist and macroprudential motivations. Policymakers respond to trade competitiveness concerns by using both instruments—inflow tightening and outflow easing. They use only inflow tightening in response to macroprudential concerns. Policy is acyclical to foreign debt; however, high levels of this debt reduces countercyclicality to mercantilist concerns. Higher exchange rate pass-through to export prices, and having an inflation targeting regime with non-freely floating exchange rates, increase responsiveness to mercantilist concerns.
June 5, 2020
This Changes Everything: Climate Shocks and Sovereign Bonds
Description: Climate change is already a systemic risk to the global economy. While there is a large body of literature documenting potential economic consequences, there is scarce research on the link between climate change and sovereign risk. This paper therefore investigates the impact of climate change vulnerability and resilience on sovereign bond yields and spreads in 98 advanced and developing countries over the period 1995–2017. We find that the vulnerability and resilience to climate change have a significant impact on the cost government borrowing, after controlling for conventional determinants of sovereign risk. That is, countries that are more resilient to climate change have lower bond yields and spreads relative to countries with greater vulnerability to risks associated with climate change. Furthermore, partitioning the sample into country groups reveals that the magnitude and statistical significance of these effects are much greater in developing countries with weaker capacity to adapt to and mitigate the consequences of climate change.