Working Papers
2025
January 24, 2025
Carbon Pricing at Export Markets: Trade-Related Implications in Trinidad and Tobago
Description: This paper examines the potential impact of border carbon adjustments on Trinidad and Tobago’s exports. Despite its marginal contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, the country’s high carbon intensity exposes the economy to global low-carbon transition risks. The paper aims to raise awareness and encourage discussions on critical actions needed to maintain export competitiveness, enhance diversification, support balance of payments stability, and finance a green transition. The analysis recommends building on existing policies to integrate transition risks into development strategies, promote carbon intensity reduction, accumulate relevant data, and explore innovative emissions reduction approaches, including carbon pricing.
January 24, 2025
Spillovers from Large Emerging Economies: How Dominant Is China?
Description: This paper investigates the global economic spillovers emanating from G20 emerging markets (G20-EMs), with a particular emphasis on the comparative influence of China. Employing a Bayesian Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model, we assess the impacts of both demand-side and supply-side shocks across 63 countries, capturing the nuanced dynamics of global economic interactions. Our findings reveal that China's contribution to global economic spillovers significantly overshadows that of other G20-EMs. Specifically, China's domestic shocks have significantly larger and more pervasive spillover effects on global GDP, inflation and commodity prices compared to shocks from other G20-EMs. In contrast, spillovers from other G20-EMs are more regionally contained with modest global impacts. The study underscores China's outsized role in shaping global economic dynamics and the limited capacity of other G20-EMs to mitigate any potential negative implications from China's economic slowdown in the near term.
January 24, 2025
The Economic Costs of Temperature Uncertainty
Description: Beyond its environmental damage, climate change is predicted to produce significant economic costs. Combining novel high-frequency geospatial temperature data from satellites with measures of economic activity for the universe of US listed firms, this article examines a potentially important channel through which global warming can lead to economic costs: temperature uncertainty. The results show that temperature uncertainty—by increasing power outages, reducing labor productivity, and increasing the degree of exposure of firms to environmental and non-political risks, as well as economic uncertainty at the firm-level—persistently reduce firms’ investment and sales. This effect varies across firms, with those characterized by tighter financial constraints being disproportionally more affected.
January 24, 2025
Inattentiveness and the Investment Channel of Monetary Policy
Description: How does rational inattention interact with financial frictions? I provide new empirical evidence from survey data suggesting that this interaction likely plays a critical role in understanding macroeconomic dynamics. In a simple model, I demonstrate that financially constrained firms tend to be more attentive to economic conditions, consistent with my empirical findings. Embedding this mechanism into a DSGE model, I show that the aggregate investment response to a monetary policy shock depends on this interaction. The model further predicts that credit-constrained firms reduce their investment after an expansionary shock due to tighter borrowing constraints and higher production costs, a prediction I empirically confirm.
January 24, 2025
Long-Term Debt and Short-Term Rates: Fixed-Rate Mortgages and Monetary Transmission
Description: We study the two-way relationship between fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) and monetary policy in a panel of up to 35 countries over the last two decades. The dataset includes quarterly information on the composition of mortgage flows and stock by type of rate-fixation and monetary policy shocks cleaned of information effects. Using instrumental-variablel local projections, we find both path- and state-dependency in monetary transmission. Monetary policy shapes mortgage choice, increasing (decreasing) the share of FRMs during easing (tightening) cycles. Over time, this mechanism alters the composition of the outstanding mortgage stock which, in turn, affects the central bank's ability to stabilize the economy ex-post. A greater (lower) prevalence of FRMs weakens (strengthens) monetary policy transmission to key macro-variables.
January 24, 2025
Designing Expenditure Policy Conditionality in IMF-Supported Programs
Description: This gap-filling paper provides granular advice on how to design quantitative and structural conditionality of IMF-supported programs in six expenditure policy areas: social assistance, energy subsidies, pension spending, health spending, education spending, and wage bill management. Such granular advice is based on a stocktaking exercise: an analysis of 105 programs approved between 2002 and July 2021 containing a ca. 1400 conditions. Conditions are key to identify outcomes or actions seen as critical for program success or monitoring, and so are essential for financial support countries can receive from the Fund.
January 17, 2025
State Capacity and Growth Regimes
Description: Can high levels of state capacity protect countries from slow growth and deepening output collapses? Using data for 108 developing countries, we classify five-year periods using a two- dimensional state space based on growth regimes and levels of state capacity. We model transitions between them using a finite state Markov chain, and then extend this to take political institutions into account. We find that high state capacity helps to sustain growth and limit output collapses, but these effects are sometimes less striking than the benefits of democracy.
January 17, 2025
The Macroeconomic and Welfare Benefits of Building Resilience in Disaster-Prone Developing Countries
Description: Natural disasters often have high economic costs, setting back years of investment in developing countries. This paper develops a multi-sector DSGE model to study the macroeconomic and welfare implications of financing resilience-building using different fiscal instruments. The model includes developing countries’ macroeconomic and distributional features, such as a large unproductive rural sector, an incomplete credit market, and an informal sector. The results indicate that investing in resilience capital in a disaster-prone country improves welfare despite its high economic cost, but the financial instrument used to mobilize revenue matters.
January 17, 2025
Portfolio Inertia and Expected Excess Returns in Currency Markets: Evidence from Advanced Economies
Description: The economic literature has long attributed non-zero expected excess returns in currency markets to time-varying risk premiums demanded by risk-averse investors. This paper, building on Bacchetta and van Wincoop's (2021) portfolio balance framework, shows that such returns can also arise when investors are risk-neutral but face portfolio adjustment costs. Models with adjustment costs but no risk aversion predict a negative correlation between exchange rate levels and expected excess returns, while models with risk aversion but no adjustment costs predict a positive one. Using data from nine inflation targeting economies with floating exchange rates (2000–2024), we find strong empirical support for the adjustment costs framework. The negative correlation persists even during periods of low market stress, further evidence that portfolio adjustment costs, not risk premium shocks, drive the link between exchange rates and excess returns. Our model predicts that one-year expected excess returns should have predictive power for multi-year returns, with longer-term expected returns as increasing multiples of short-term expectations, and the predictive power strengthening with the horizon. We confirm these findings empirically. We also examine scenarios combining risk aversion and adjustment costs, showing that sufficiently high adjustment costs are essential to generate the observed negative relationship.These findings provide a simpler, testable alternative to literature relying on assumptions about unobservable factors like time-varying risk premiums, intermediary constraints, or noise trader activity.
January 17, 2025
Understanding Agricultural Output in Mozambique: Using remote sensing to initiate a discussion on development
Description: This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the agricultural land coverage in Mozambique by harnessing advanced remote sensing technologies and draws on successful agricultural development examples to propose strategic pathways for Mozambique. The study leverages Sentinel-2 satellite imagery coupled with a machine learning algorithm to accurately map and assess the country's agricultural land, revealing that agriculture accounts for only 12 percent of Mozambique's land area. By examining the agricultural transformation or “green revolution” that some countries have experienced, it is possible to distill regularities and necessary conditions, which can then be compared to the state-of-affairs in Mozambique. This study not only offers a model of how emerging technologies like remote sensing can inform agricultural state of affairs, it also provides important insights into which concrete bottlenecks are likely to be holding back Mozambique’s agricultural development.