Working Papers
2019
November 1, 2019
Tariff Passthrough at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy
Description: We use micro data collected at the border and at retailers to characterize the effects brought by recent changes in US trade policy - particularly the tariffs placed on imports from China - on importers, consumers, and exporters. We start by documenting that the tariffs were almost fully passed through to total prices paid by importers, suggesting the tariffs' incidence has fallen largely on the United States. Since we estimate the response of prices to exchange rates to be far more muted, the recent depreciation of the Chinese renminbi is unlikely to alter this conclusion. Next, using product-level data from several large multi-national retailers, we demonstrate that the impact of the tariffs on retail prices is more mixed. Some affected product categories have seen sharp price increases, but the difference between affected and unaffected products is generally quite modest, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. These retailers' imports increased after the initial announcement of possible tariffs, but before their full implementation, so the intermediate passthrough of tariffs to their prices may not persist. Finally, in contrast to the case of foreign exporters facing US tariffs, we show that US exporters lowered their prices on goods subjected to foreign retaliatory tariffs compared to exports of non-targeted goods.
November 1, 2019
Granger Predictability of Oil Prices After the Great Recession
Description: Real oil prices surged from 2009 through 2014, comparable to the 1970’s oil shock period. Standard explanations based on monopoly markup fall short since inflation remained low after 2009. This paper contributes strong evidence of Granger (1969) predictability of nominal factors to oil prices, using one adjustment to monetary aggregates. This adjustment is the subtraction from the monetary aggregates of the 2008-2009 Federal Reserve borrowing of reserves from other Central Banks (Swaps), made after US reserves turned negative. This adjustment is key in that Granger predictability from standard monetary aggregates is found only with the Swaps subtracted.
November 1, 2019
Doing More with Less: How Can Brazil Foster Development While Pursuing Fiscal Consolidation?
Description: Following a benchmarking exercise, we estimate the spending required to reach satisfactory progress in the Sustainable Development Goals in the health, education, and infrastructure sectors in Brazil. We find that there is room for savings in education (up to 1.5 percentage point of GDP) and health (up to 2.5 percentage points of GDP) without compromising the quality of services but additional investments for over 3 percent of GDP per year are needed to close large infrastructure gaps in roads, water, and electricity by 2030. Brazil can do more with less, but increasing efficiency of public spending will require substantial reforms.
November 1, 2019
German Bond Yields and Debt Supply: Is There a “Bund Premium”?
Description: Are Bunds special? This paper estimates the “Bund premium” as the difference in convenience yields between other sovereign safe assets and German government bonds adjusted for sovereign credit risk, liquidity and swap market frictions. A higher premium suggests less substitutability of sovereign bonds. We document a rise in the “Bund premium” in the post-crisis period. We show that there is a negative relationship of the premium with the relative supply of German sovereign bonds, which is more pronounced for higher maturities and when risk aversion proxied by bond market volatility is high. Going forward, we expect German government debt supply to remain scarce, with important implications for the ECB’s monetary policy strategy.
November 1, 2019
International Bank Lending Channel of Monetary Policy
Description: How does domestic monetary policy in systemic countries spillover to the rest of the world? This paper examines the transmission channel of domestic monetary policy in the cross-border context. We use exogenous shocks to monetary policy in systemically important economies, including the U.S., and local projections to estimate the dynamic effect of monetary policy shocks on bilateral cross-border bank lending. We find robust evidence that an increase in funding costs following an exogenous monetary tightening leads to a statistically and economically significant decline in cross-border bank lending. The effect is weakened during periods of high uncertainty. In contrast, the effect is found to not vary according to the degree of borrower country riskiness, further weakening support for the international portfolio rebalancing channel.
November 1, 2019
Digitalization to Improve Tax Compliance: Evidence from VAT e-Invoicing in Peru
Description: This paper examines the impact of e-invoicing on firm tax compliance and performance using administrative tax data and quasi-experimental variation in the rollout of VAT electronic invoicing in Peru. We find that e-invoicing increases reported firm sales, purchases and value-added by over 5 percent in the first year after adoption. The impact is concentrated among smaller firms and sectors with higher rates of non-compliance, suggesting that e-invoicing enhances compliance by lowering compliance costs and strengthening deterrence. The reform’s positive effects on tax collection are hindered by shortcomings in the VAT refund mechanism in Peru, suggesting that digital tools such as e-invoicing should be complemented by other reforms to improve revenue mobilization.
November 1, 2019
In Search of Lost Time: Examining the Duration of Sudden Stops in Capital Flows
Description: This paper investigates what factors affect the duration of sudden stops in capital flows using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. We find that countries with floating exchange rate regimes tend to experience shorter sudden stop episodes and that fixed exchange rate regimes are associated with longer periods of low output growth following sudden stops. These effects are quantitatively large: having a flexible exchange rate regime increases the probability of exiting the sudden stop state by between 50 to 80 percent. Flexible exchange rate regimes significantly shorten the duration of output decelerations following sudden stops by over 30 percent. Positive variations in terms of trade also abbreviate the duration of sudden stops. In terms of policies, identification is trickier, but the evidence suggests that monetary policy tightening shortens the duration of sudden stops. Changes in capital account restrictions do not seem to matter.
November 1, 2019
Achieving the Bank of Japan’s Inflation Target
Description: The Bank of Japan has introduced various unconventional monetary policy tools since the launch of Abenomics in 2013, to achieve the price stability target of 2 percent inflation. In this paper, a forward-looking open-economy general equilibrium model with endogenously determined policy credibility and an effective lower bound is developed for forecasting and policy analysis (FPAS) for Japan. In the model’s baseline scenario, the likelihood of the Bank of Japan reaching its 2 percent inflation target over the medium term is below 40 percent, assuming the absence of other policy reactions aside from monetary policy. The likelihood of achieving the inflation target is even lower under alternative risk scenarios. A positive shock to central bank credibility increases this likelihood, and would require less accommodative macroeconomic policies.
November 1, 2019
Machine Learning and Causality: The Impact of Financial Crises on Growth
Description: Machine learning tools are well known for their success in prediction. But prediction is not causation, and causal discovery is at the core of most questions concerning economic policy. Recently, however, the literature has focused more on issues of causality. This paper gently introduces some leading work in this area, using a concrete example—assessing the impact of a hypothetical banking crisis on a country’s growth. By enabling consideration of a rich set of potential nonlinearities, and by allowing individually-tailored policy assessments, machine learning can provide an invaluable complement to the skill set of economists within the Fund and beyond.
November 1, 2019
Swing Pricing and Fragility in Open-end Mutual Funds
Description: How to prevent runs on open-end mutual funds? In recent years, markets have observed an innovation that changed the way open-end funds are priced. Alternative pricing rules (known as swing pricing) adjust funds’ net asset values to pass on funds’ trading costs to transacting shareholders. Using unique data on investor transactions in U.K. corporate bond funds, we show that swing pricing eliminates the first-mover advantage arising from the traditional pricing rule and significantly reduces redemptions during stress periods. The positive impact of alternative pricing rules on fund flows reverses in calm periods when costs associated with higher tracking error dominate the pricing effect.