Working Papers
2023
August 4, 2023
Panel Nowcasting for Countries Whose Quarterly GDPs are Unavailable
Description: Quarterly GDP statistics facilitate timely economic assessment, but the availability of such data are limited for more than 60 developing economies, including about 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa as well as more than two-thirds of fragile and conflict-affected states. To address this limited data availablity, this paper proposes a panel approach that utilizes a statistical relationship estimated from countries where data are available, to estimate quarterly GDP statistics for countries that do not publish such statistics by leveraging the indicators readily available for many countries. This framework demonstrates potential, especially when applied for similar country groups, and could provide valuable real-time insights into economic conditions supported by empirical evidence.
August 4, 2023
Predicting Financial Crises: The Role of Asset Prices
Description: We explore the early warning properties of a composite indicator which summarizes signals from a range of asset price growth and asset price volatility indicators to capture mispricing of risk in asset markets. Using a quarterly panel of 108 advanced and emerging economies over 1995-2017, we show that the combination of rapid asset price growth and low asset price volatility is a good predictor of future financial crises. Elevated levels of our indicator significantly increase the probability of entering a crisis within the next three years relative to normal times when the indicator is not elevated. The indicator outperforms credit-based early warning metrics, a result robust to prediction horizons, methodological choices, and income groups. Our results are consistent with the idea that measures based on asset prices can offer critical information about systemic risk levels to policymakers.
August 4, 2023
Do Corporate Bond Shocks Affect Commercial Bank Lending?
Description: Understanding how corporate bond market disruptions are transmitted to the rest of the financial system is essential to gauge systemic financial risk and design policy responses. In this study, we extend the vector autoregression model of Gilchrist and Zakrajšek (2012) to explicitly account for the role of commercial banks in the transmission of corporate bond credit spread shocks. We find that corporate bond market shocks can reduce commercial bank lending activity by tightening loan supply. Policies designed to contain stress in the corporate bond market can thus mitigate systemic risk by limiting contagion to the commercial banking sector.
August 4, 2023
Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Capital-Skill Complementarity
Description: I examine the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on labor market outcomes for skilled and unskilled workers and propose a new channel to improve our understanding of the underlying propagation mechanisms. I find that uncertainty shocks are recessionary with the unskilled experiencing a steeper fall in employment. To rationalize these findings, I build a New Keynesian DSGE model with skill heterogeneity and wage rigidities, which, coupled with precautionary labor supply, significantly amplify contractionary effects of uncertainty on the real economy.
August 4, 2023
Fiscal Policy and the Government Balance Sheet in China
Description: In this paper, we present the most comprehensive estimates of China’s government balance sheet to date. Based on these estimates, we show how major shifts in fiscal policy over the last two decades have shaped the health of the public sector prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. We find that, at US$12.5 trillion, China has the largest stock of financial assets in the world. However, its net financial worth as a percent of GDP—though still higher than the large majority of countries—has declined over the last decade. This trend can be traced back to the turn of the century when China undertook a major restructuring of its state-owned enterprises but left important shortcomings in the intergovernmental fiscal system unaddressed. Compounding these risks, reform momentum stalled in the aftermath of the global financial crisis leading to high leverage and falling profitability among state-owned enterprises.
July 28, 2023
Assessing the Impact of Policy Changes on a Nowcast
Description: Nowcasting enables policymakers to obtain forecasts of key macroeconomic indicators using higher frequency data, resulting in more timely information to guide proposed policy changes. A significant shortcoming of nowcasting estimators is their “reduced-form” nature, which means they cannot be used to assess the impact of policy changes, for example, on the baseline nowcast of real GDP. This paper outlines two separate methodologies to address this problem. The first is a partial equilibrium approach that uses an existing baseline nowcasting regression and single-equation forecasting models for the high-frequency data in that regression. The second approach uses a non-parametric structural VAR estimator recently introduced in Ouliaris and Pagan (2022) that imposes minimal identifying restrictions on the data to estimate the impact of structural shocks. Each approach is illustrated using a country-specific example.
July 28, 2023
Constructing a Positive Shock: Growth Through the Lens of Option Pricing
Description: Low-income economies face negative shocks whose frequency and disproportionate impact overcome growth trajectories, producing a negative drift. COVID-19 was the latest such episode. To escape this negative drift, and build a durable recovery, there is a need for a counter-balancing force: to construct a positive shock. Growth is realized through decisions that fall under two categories, routine and non-linear. While routine decisions modify existing economic behavior along the same path, non-linear decisions describe riskier options that involve transformation. Option pricing theory can be useful to describe the latter, and construct the positive shock required to escape the negative drift.
July 28, 2023
Digital Tokens: A Legal Perspective
Description: Tokens are units digitally represented in a distributed ledger or blockchain. The various uses of this technology have the potential to transform a wide array of economic activities, from traditional commercial transactions to sophisticated financial undertakings. This paper explores the similarities and differences of tokens with traditional legal instruments in commercial law and how tokens could offer superior solutions, provided that proper legal foundations are established for their operation, including aspects of the law of securities and consumer protection law.
July 21, 2023
Shared Problem, Shared Solution: Benefits from Fiscal-Monetary Interactions in the Euro Area
Description: This paper employs two established macroeconomic models to show that fiscal policy in the euro area can help monetary policy in reducing inflation. Specifically, a fiscal consolidation of 1 percent of GDP for two years and 0.5 percent in the third year across the euro area would ease the policy interest rate by 30-50 basis points relative to the baseline scenario, while lowering inflation. It would also put the public debt-to-GDP ratio on a downward path, with the output costs reversing after the second year. Additionally, a stronger fiscal contribution to the policy mix could mitigate financial fragmentation risks. In the current context of elevated inflation in all euro area economies, the findings suggest two key takeaways: first, synchronized fiscal and monetary policies offer gains even when monetary policy is unconstrained and, second, sharing the burden of lowering inflation through fiscal consolidation among euro area members is beneficial for union-wide inflation reduction, improving debt sustainability and inducing a lower policy rate path.
July 21, 2023
Evolution of National Accounts Statistics Compilation Practices Over the Period 2018 to 2021 in 189 Economies
Description: This paper analyzes the evolution of national accounts statistics compilation practices over the period of 2018 to 2021 for 189 economies. This is useful information for monitoring the quality of national accounts statistics and supporting identification of areas for improvement. Economies can use this data to benchmark their practices to the region and the world. Many economies have made strides in implementing 2008 SNA to better reflect the size and structure of the economy however, there hasn’t been an assessment on how quick the migration is. With the new 2025 SNA vintage on the horizon, it was imperative to check how many economies are using the 2008 SNA vintage as it will provide a clue to how fast authorities will migrate to the new framework. We found that 31 economies have moved to the 2008 SNA between 2018 and 2021. The paper also examined how many economies started compiling quarterly GDP during the period 2018 and 2021.