Working Papers
2024
December 6, 2024
The Heterogeneous Impacts of Firm Upgrading on Energy Intensity
Description: This paper examines how export activity impacts a firm's energy intensity, emphasizing the upgrading process. We introduce a firm-level complexity index incorporating two dimensions: the complexity of the traded goods and market destinations. We show that growth in external demand incentivizes firms to undertake upgrading activities, resulting in lower energy intensity. However, financial constraints diminish the energy efficiency gains from upgrading, especially for small firms. Additionally, upgraded firms can leverage higher markups, but this is effective only for larger firms. The findings suggest targeted support for small firms and underscore the necessity of open trade in a fragmented global landscape.
December 6, 2024
Effects of IMF-Supported Programs on Gender Inequality
Description: Crises often require economic consolidations that may unevenly affect different segments of the population. Some crisis countries enter financial arrangements with the IMF and adopt adjustment programs, and studies have associated program conditionality with negative impacts on gender inequality. Proper evaluations of the impacts of IMF-supported programs on gender inequality require, however, credible control groups that address the counterfactual: do post-crisis gender disparities evolve differently without an IMF-supported program? We examine over 150 IMF-supported programs (1994-2022) using custom-tailored control groups that match each IMF-supported program country’s gender and economic trends and find overwhelming evidence against systematic impacts of IMF-supported programs on gender equality.
December 6, 2024
Riding Unicorns: Startups and Venture Capital in Japan
Description: The startup ecosystem in Japan has seen gradual growth, supported by the government’s recent "Startup Development Five-Year Plan" and a significant interest from overseas venture capital. This paper lays out the startup financing ecosystem in Japan, with comparison to international peers, and studies potential drivers of startup financing and their relevance for startups’ performance. The results, based on country-level aggregate analysis, underscore the critical role of firm dynamism and entrepreneurship in supporting capital investment and firm valuations. Further analyses at the firm level suggest that equity funding helps startups innovate, grow, and successfully exit. Moreover, the impact of funding on the likelihood of a successful exit appears to be higher in cultures that seem to reward risk taking.
November 22, 2024
The Role of Corporate Cash Holdings in the Transmission of Monetary Policy Tightening
Description: The U.S. economy has been exceeding expectations amid one of the most aggressive monetary policy tightening cycles. This paper provides firm-level evidence showing that abundant cash holdings enable firms to benefit from higher interest rates, thereby reducing net interest payments and mitigate the adverse impact from interest rate hikes to firms' investment and employment.
November 22, 2024
Remittances in Times of Uncertainty: Understanding the Dynamics and Implications
Description: This paper delves into the intricate relationship between uncertainty and remittance flows. The prevailing focus has been on tangible risk factors like exchange rate volatility and economic downturn, overshadowing the potential impact of uncertainty on remittance dynamics. Leveraging a new dataset of quarterly remittances combined with uncertainty indicators across 77 developing countries from 1999Q1 to 2019Q4, the analysis highlights that uncertainty in remittance-sending countries negatively affects remittance flows. In contrast, uncertainty in remittance receiving-countries has a more complex, dual effect. In countries with high private investment ratios, rising domestic uncertainty leads to a decline in remittances. Conversely, in countries with low public spending on education and health, remittances increase in response to uncertainy, serving as a social safety net. The paper underscores the heterogeneous and non-linear effects of domestic uncertainty on remittance flows.
November 22, 2024
Global Contagion of Financial Reforms
Description: We construct an extensive database of domestic financial reforms spanning 90 countries from 1973 to 2014. Utilizing this dataset, we estimate a structural model that incorporates various factors identified in the existing literature to explain the global contagion of financial reforms. Our findings reveal that (1) geopolitical influence and cross-country learning were the primary drivers behind the marked increase in financial reforms globally during the 1990s, and (2) the observed reversals of financial reforms in developing countries after the global financial crisis were driven by shifts in beliefs about the impact of these reforms on growth.
November 22, 2024
Bilateral Trade in Services and Exchange Rates: Evidence of Dominant Currency Pricing
Description: This paper estimates, for the first time, the exchange rate elasticity of bilateral trade in services, providing indirect evidence of both producer currency pricing and dominant currency pricing in services trade. We developed a novel dataset of bilateral trade flows in services, covering twelve broad service sectors across 245 countries from 1985 to 2022. We find that, similar to manufacturing trade, the value of services trade is more closely associated with US dollar exchange rates than with bilateral exchange rates, although this relationship varies by service category. Zeroing in on tourism, where proxies for trade volume (such as tourist arrivals and hotel stays) are available, we find that bilateral exchange rates play a larger role on tourism volume compared to the dollar exchange rates. In addition, in the context of global supply chain, we find that downstream dollar exchange rate movements, rather than downstream bilateral exchange rates, affect the demand for service imports via forward linkages.
November 22, 2024
New Evidence on the US Excess Return on Foreign Portfolios
Description: We provide new estimates of the return on US external claims and liabilities using confidential, high-quality, security-level data. The excess return is positive on average, since claims are tilted toward higher return equities. The excess return is large and positive in normal times but large and negative during global crises, reflecting the global insurance role of the US external balance sheet. Controlling for issuer’s nationality, we find that US investors have a larger exposure to equity issued by Asia-headquartered corporations than reported in the aggregate statistics. Finally, equity portfolios are concentrated in ’superstar’ firms, but for US liabilities foreign holdings are less concentrated than the overall market.
November 22, 2024
Implementing Risk-Based Solvency for Insurers—Lessons from Kenya, Mexico, and South Africa
Description: International standards and best practice supports the implementation of a risk-based solvency regime in the regulation and supervision of insurers. Several emerging market and developing economies are transitioning to such a solvency regime or planning to do so. This paper discusses Kenya, Mexico, and South Africa’s journey to putting in place a risk-based solvency regime which had several common elements notwithstanding significantly different insurance sectors. The transition was a multi-year project requiring dedicated additional resources; restructuring of the regulator, including redesigning supervisory processes and tools and upgrading information technology systems; and significantly greater coordination between the regulator and the insurance industry.
November 22, 2024
Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Economic Empowerment: Evidence from Indian States
Description: Domestic violence is a global phenomenon. We study the interplay of determinants of a woman’s risk of facing intimate partner violence (IPV) for the case of India—using information from up to 235 thousand female survey respondents and exploiting state-level variation in institutions, law enforcement and attitudes. Unless in paid and formal employment, a woman’s economic activity is associated with a higher risk of IPV. However, household and other characteristics, such as higher agency within the household, higher education of the husband, lower social acceptance of IPV, and normalization of reporting incidences of violence counter this association. At the state level, the presence of more female leaders, better reporting infrastructure for victims of IPV, and higher charge-sheeting rates are associated with a lower risk of IPV.