A law issued to combat political corruption and Mafia infiltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using ...these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output multiplier of spending cuts at provincial level—controlling for national monetary and fiscal policy, and holding the tax burden of local residents constant—to be 1.5. Assuming that lagged spending is exogenous to current output brings the estimate of the overall multiplier up to 1.9. These results suggest that local spending adjustment may be quite consequential for local activity.
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BFBNIB, CEKLJ, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
This paper shows that standard international business cycle models can be reconciled with the empirical evidence on the lack of consumption risk sharing. First, we show analytically that with ...incomplete asset markets productivity disturbances can have large uninsurable effects on wealth, depending on the value of the trade elasticity and shock persistence. Second, we investigate these findings quantitatively in a model calibrated to the U.S. economy. With the low trade elasticity estimated via a method of moments procedure, the consumption risk of productivity shocks is magnified by high terms of trade and real exchange rate (RER) volatility. Strong wealth effects in response to shocks raise the demand for domestic goods above supply, crowding out external demand and appreciating the terms of trade and the RER. Building upon the literature on incomplete markets, we then show that similar results are obtained when productivity shocks are nearly permanent, provided the trade elasticity is set equal to the high values consistent with micro-estimates. Under both approaches the model accounts for the low and negative correlation between the RER and relative (domestic to foreign) consumption in the data--the "Backus-Smith puzzle".
Beyond Competitive Devaluations Bergin, Paul R.; Corsetti, Giancarlo
American economic journal. Macroeconomics,
10/2020, Volume:
12, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Motivated by the long-standing debate on competitive devaluation, we propose a new perspective on how monetary and exchange rate policies can contribute to a country’s international competitiveness. ...We refocus the analysis on the implications of monetary stabilization for a country’s comparative advantage. We develop a two-country New Keynesian model with two tradable sectors in each country: one perfectly competitive, the other producing differentiated goods under monopolistic competition subject to sunk entry costs and nominal rigidities and hence more sensitive to macroeconomic uncertainty. Monetary policy can disproportionately foster competitiveness of differentiated goods firms, ultimately affecting the composition of domestic output and exports.
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In response to the euro area crisis, policymakers took a gradual, incremental approach to official lending, at first relying on the blueprint followed by the International Monetary Fund, then ...developing their own crisis resolution framework. We describe this process of institutional development, marked by a substantial divergence in the terms of official loans offered to. We use a unique dataset of the characteristics of the various official loans to provide key stylised facts, and use regression and event analysis techniques to study the effect of different lending terms on market borrowing costs and fiscal performance. Euro area loans, when in longer maturities and lower rates, go hand in hand with improved market access. Instead, the terms of IMF loans appear to have no significant effect on market access, but primary balances are larger when IMF maturities are longer. We discuss arguments for refocusing debt sustainability analysis and embed debt management techniques in programme design, while considering the trade-off between adjustment incentives and official lending.
Why was recovery from the euro area crisis delayed for a decade? The explanation lies in the absence of credible and timely policies to backstop financial intermediaries and sovereign debt markets. ...In this paper we add light and color to this analysis, contrasting recent experience with the 1992–3 crisis in the European Monetary System, when national central banks and treasuries more successfully provided this backstop. In the more recent episode, the incomplete development of the euro area constrained the ability of the ECB and other European institutions to do likewise.
We study the conditions under which unconventional (balance sheet) monetary policy can rule out self-fulfilling sovereign default in a model with optimizing but discretionary fiscal and monetary ...policymakers. When purchasing sovereign debt, the central bank effectively swaps risky government paper for monetary liabilities only exposed to inflation risk, thus yielding a lower interest rate. As central bank purchases reduce the (ex ante) costs of debt, we characterize a critical threshold beyond which, absent fundamental fiscal stress, the government strictly prefers primary surplus adjustment to default. Because default may still occur for fundamental reasons, however, the central bank faces the risk of losses on sovereign debt holdings, which may generate inefficient inflation. We show that these losses do not necessarily undermine the credibility of a backstop, nor the monetary authorities' ability to pursue its inflation objectives. Backstops are credible if either the central bank enjoys fiscal backing or fiscal authorities are sufficiently averse to inflation.
This paper analyzes the international transmission and welfare implications of productivity gains and changes in market size when macroeconomic adjustment occurs both along the intensive margin of ...trade (changes in the relative price of existing varieties of tradable goods) and the extensive margin (creation and destruction of varieties). We draw a distinction between productivity gains that enhance manufacturing efficiency and gains that lower the cost of firms' entry and of product differentiation. Countries with lower manufacturing costs have higher GDP but supply their products at lower international prices. Instead, countries with lower entry costs supply a larger array of goods at improved terms of trade. Output growth driven by demographic expansions, as well as government spending, is associated with an improvement in international relative prices and firms' entry. While trade liberalization may result in a smaller array of goods available to consumers, efficiency gains from deeper economic integration benefit consumers
via lower goods prices. The international transmission mechanism and the welfare spillovers vary under different asset market structures, depending on trade costs, the elasticity of labor supply, and consumers' taste for varieties.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
9.
Debt Crises, Fast and Slow Corsetti, Giancarlo; Maeng, Fred Seunghyun
Journal of the European Economic Association,
12/2023
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
We build a dynamic model where the economy is vulnerable to belief-driven slow-moving debt crises at intermediate debt levels, and rollover crises at both low and high debt levels. Vis-à-vis ...the threat of slow-moving crises, countercyclical deficits generally welfare-dominate debt reduction policies. In a recession, optimizing governments only deleverage if debt is close to the threshold below which belief-driven slow-moving crises can no longer occur. The welfare benefits from deleveraging instead dominate if governments are concerned with losing market access even at low debt levels. Long bond maturities may fully eliminate belief-driven rollover crises but not slow-moving ones.
Abstract The gains from monetary policy cooperation depend on real and financial distortions in the economy and evolve dynamically with prevailing economic conditions. We show that, with ...international trade in assets, these gains are driven by asymmetric cross-border developments in productivity and savings, and can reach multiples of the cost of economic fluctuations. When financial flows are restricted to nonstate-contingent bonds, the gains from cooperation grow with the size of global imbalances, i.e. net-foreign-asset positions.
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