Working Papers
2022
June 3, 2022
Tracking Economic and Financial Policies During COVID-19: An Announcement-Level Database
Description: We introduce a new comprehensive announcement-level database tracking the extraordinary fiscal, monetary, prudential, and other policies that countries adopted in response to Covid-19. The database provides detailed information, including sizes where available, for 28 granular policies adopted by 74 countries during 2020. About 5,500 policy measures were announced during this period. Importantly, the database is organized and presented in a format easy for researchers to use in empirical analyses. Announcements were highly correlated across the broad fiscal, monetary, and prudential categories and at more granular levels. Advanced economies (AEs) introduced larger fiscal measures than emerging and developing economies (EMDEs) and relied primarily on large unconventional monetary policies. Bank capital requirements were relaxed widely in both AEs and EMs, while relaxation of provisioning requirements was more common among EMs. Supervisory expectations and reporting requirements were widely relaxed.
June 3, 2022
Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Dynamics in a Behavioral Open Economy Model
Description: We develop an extension of the open economy New Keynesian model in which agents are boundedly rational à la Gabaix (2020). Our setup nests rational expectations (RE) as a special case and it can successfully mitigate many “puzzling” aspects of the relationship between exchange rates and interest rates. Since the model implies an uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) condition featuring behavioral expectations, our results are also consistent with recent empirical evidence showing that several UIP puzzles vanish when actual exchange rate expectations are used (instead of realizations implicitly coupled with the RE assumption). We find that cognitive discounting dampens the effects of current monetary shocks and lowers the efficacy of forward guidance (FG), but its relative importance in mitigating the so-called FG puzzle is decreasing in openness. Finally, we show that accounting for myopia exacerbates the small open economy unit-root problem, makes positive monetary spillovers more likely, and increases the persistence of net foreign assets and the real exchange rate.
June 3, 2022
Fintech, Female Employment, and Gender Inequality
Description: Fintech, which delivers financial services digitally, promises to promote financial inclusion and close the gender gap. Using a novel fintech dataset for 114 economies worldwide, this paper shows that fintech adoption significantly improves female employment and reduces gender inequality, the effect being more pronounced in firms without traditional financial access. Fintech not only increases the number and ratio of female employees in the workforce, but also mitigates financial constraints of female-headed firms. Digital divide and poor institutions weaken such benefits. Endogeneity is accounted for by a fixed effects identification strategy. We conclude by providing policy recommendations and outlining avenues for future research.
June 1, 2022
The Great Carbon Arbitrage
Description: We measure the gains from phasing out coal as the average social cost of carbon times the quantity of avoided emissions. By comparing the present value of benefits from avoided emissions against the present value of costs of ending coal and replacing it with renewables, our conservative baseline estimate is that the world can realize a net gain of $85 trillion. This global net social benefit can be attained through an international agreement to phase out coal. We also explore how this net benefit is distributed across countries and find that most countries would benefit from a global coal phase-out even without any compensatory cross-country transfers. Finally, we estimate the size of public funds that must be committed under a blended finance arrangement to finance the cost of replacing coal with renewables.
May 27, 2022
Voting Right Rotation, Behavior of Committee Members and Financial Market Reactions: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee
Description: Which Federal Reserve Bank presidents vote on the U.S. monetary policy committee depends on a mechanical, yearly rotation scheme. Rotation is without exclusion: nonvoting presidents do attend and participate in the meetings of the committee. We test two hypotheses about the dependence of presidents' behavior on voting status. (i) Loss compensation: presidents compensate the loss of the right to vote with an increased use of speeches and contributions. (ii) Motivation: presidents complement the right to vote with an increased use of speeches and contributions. The evidence favors the motivation hypothesis. Also, in years that presidents vote, their speeches move financial markets less than in years they do not vote. We argue that this vote discount is consistent with presidents’ communication behavior.
May 27, 2022
Macroeconomic Effects of Market Structure Distortions: Evidence from French Cartels
Description: We provide systematic evidence on cartels’ characteristics, using novel data on cases investigated by the French Competition Authority. These practices are widely spread across sectors and cartel members are typically among the top firms in their industries. In a model with heterogeneous firms and collusion, cartels amplify misallocation by charging supracompetitive markups. Breaking down French cartels would increase aggregate productivity by 2%, welfare by 3.5%, bringing the economy 37% closer to the efficient frontier. These numbers shed light on the aggregate importance of collusion.
May 27, 2022
For Whom the Bell Tolls: Climate Change and Inequality
Description: Climate change is the defining challenge of our time with complex and evolving dynamics. The effects of climate change on economic output and financial stability have received considerable attention, but there has been much less focus on the relationship between climate change and income inequality. In this paper, we provide new evidence on the association between climate change and income inequality, using a large panel of 158 countries during the period 1955–2019. We find that an increase in climate change vulnerability is positively associated with rising income inequality. More interestingly, splitting the sample into country groups reveals a considerable contrast in the impact of climate change on income inequality. While climate change vulnerability has no statistically significant effect on income distribution in advanced economies, the coefficient on climate change vulnerability is seven times greater and statistically highly significant in the case of developing countries due largely to weaker capacity for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
May 27, 2022
Rogue Waves: Climate Change and Firm Performance
Description: Climate change is an existential threat to the global economy and financial markets. There is a large body of literature documenting potential macroeconomic consequences of climate change, but firm-level empirical research on how climate change affects the performance of firms remains scarce. This paper aims to close this gap by empirically investigating the impact of climate change vulnerability on corporate performance using a large panel dataset of more than 3.3 million nonfinancial firms from 24 developing countries over the period 1997–2019. We find that nonfinancial firms operating in countries with greater vulnerability to climate change tend to experience difficulty in access to debt financing even at higher interest rates, while being less productive and profitable relative to firms in countries with lower vulnerability to climate change. We confirm these findings with alternative measures of climate change vulnerability. Furthermore, partitioning the sample reveals that these effects are significantly greater for smaller firms, especially in high-risk sectors and countries and countries with weaker capacity to adapt to and mitigate the consequences of climate change.
May 27, 2022
Jobs Impact of Green Energy
Description: This brief paper accompanies the Green Energy and Jobs tool, which is a simple excel-based tool to estimate the job-creation potential of greening the electricity sector. Specifically, it calculates the net job gains or losses from increasing the level of energy efficiency, and from increasing the share of clean and renewable electricity generation in the total electricity output mix. The tool relies on estimates of job multipliers in the literature, and adds evidence from firm-level data on the job-intensity of different energy sources. The paper illustrates applications of the tool using data from the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario compared to business-as-usual. This tool is intended to help country teams engage further on climate change issues in bilateral surveillance.
May 27, 2022
Strengthening Public Expenditure Efficiency: Investment and Social Spending in Bulgaria
Description: The scope for increasing public spending to meet Bulgaria’s development needs is limited by low revenue. Increasing the efficiency of spending is, therefore, crucial. This paper discusses how this can be achieved in four areas (public investment, social protection, health, and education). The methodology is based on a triple benchmarking. First, the level of public expenditure in each category is compared to other European countries. Second, the impact of spending is assessed against other European countries. Third, the input mix is analyzed to understand what components are responsible for the level of spending and for the quality of outcomes. Based on these results, the paper provides policy options for expenditure reform.