Working Papers
2023
August 4, 2023
The Crypto Cycle and US Monetary Policy
Description: We examine fluctuations in crypto markets and their relationships to global equity markets and US monetary policy. We identify a single price component—which we label the “crypto factor”—that explains 80% of variation in crypto prices, and show that its increasing correlation with equity markets coincided with the entry of institutional investors into crypto markets. We also document that, as for equities, US Fed tightening reduces the crypto factor through the risk-taking channel—in contrast to claims that crypto assets provide a hedge against market risk. Finally, we show that a stylized heterogeneous-agent model with time-varying aggregate risk aversion can explain our empirical findings, and highlights possible spillovers from crypto to equity markets if the participation of institutional investors ever became large.
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
Household Savings in Selected Southern European Countries Evidence from Cross-Country Micro-Level Data
Description: The paper looks into the puzzle of low household savings in three Southern European (SE3) countries – Cyprus, Greece, and Portugal. Building on the household saving drivers literature, we employ cross-country micro-level data and investigate the key saving patterns, examining their heterogeneity across households in SE3 countries relative to the EA average. The results confirm the prominent role of income, along with interest rate, inflation, fiscal balance, and debt in shaping household savings in SE3 countries. Quantile regressions employed to analyze saving behavior across the distribution of households suggest that households with lower savings tend to see their savings dip (or dissavings rise) more-than-proportionately with shocks to income, interest rate, inflation, and government balance. Our policy simulations across the distribution of households suggest that targeted rather than universal policy intervention could improve household savings, especially of the most vulnerable ones.
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.