credit constraints and international financial crises abstract a version of the kiyotaki and moore j political econom 105 1997 211 model of credit cycles is used to examine the extent to which a crisis in a country can spread to another seemingly unrelated country the model features two small open economies that face credit constraints and produce a differentiated commodity which they export to a large country a productivity shock to one of the small open economies triggers an adverse terms of trade shock to the other which is then amplified by credit constraints the paper provides a new perspective on the relationship between terms of trade shocks and the balance of payments that differs from existing models which focus on risk sharing and consumption smoothing in particular it is shown that if financial frictions are present a temporary terms of trade shock can trigger capital outflows and a rapid deterioration in the current account

a statistical approach to identifying poorly performing countries abstract this paper asks whether it is possible to identify using purely statistical criteria on widely available quantitative data a set of developing countries that can be classified as poor performers we restrict attention to two performance indicators economic growth and infant mortality over two periods 1980 90 and 1990 2000 and use four different statistical criteria to identify poor performance the main finding is that very few countries consistently appear as poor performers those that perform poorly on one indicator or in one period typically do not perform poorly on in the other a similar result is obtained in the context of identifying on statistical grounds good performers the research cautions against labelling countries as poor performers without careful qualification

contingent values as implicit contracts estimating minimum legal willingness to pay for conservation of large carnivores in sweden mean willingness to pay wtp based on multiple bounded discrete choice responses from contingent valuation surveys are normally obtained using some kind of parametric estimator this paper instead exploits the possibility to interpret the response to the discrete choice question as an implicit contract between the researcher and the respondent resulting in a minimum legal wtp mlw estimator never previously used in valuation literature it is used in this paper to estimate the wtp for the preservation of large carnivores in sweden based on a large scale national survey results show that mlw estimates only were 12 19 of the comparable parametric estimates in keeping with other results in contingent valuation literature we find that the mlw estimates are positively related to the educational level income and the fraction of urban population while negatively related to age among the advantages of the mlw estimator is its transparency as well as the fact that it rests on a contractual notion of wtp

international financial integration and crisis contagion international financial integration helps to diversify risk but also may spread crises across countries we provide a quantitative analysis of this trade off in a two country general equilibrium model with collateral constrained borrowing using a global solution method borrowing constraints bind occasionally depending upon the state of the economy and levels of inherited debt we examine different degrees of international financial integration moving from financial autarky to bond and equity market integration financial integration leads to a significant increase in global leverage substantially escalates the probability of crises for any one country and dramatically increases the degree of contagion across countries outside of crises the impact of financial integration on macroeconomic aggregates is relatively small but the impact of a crisis with integrated international financial markets is much less severe than that under financial market autarky thus a trade off emerges between the probability of crises and the severity of crises using a large cross country database of financial crises in developing and developed economies over a forty year period we find evidence in support of the model

investor protection and equity markets we present a simple model of an entrepreneur going public in an environment with poor legal protection of outside shareholders the model incorporates elements of becker s j political econ 106 1968 172 crime and punishment framework into a corporate finance environment of jensen and meckling j financial econ 3 1976 305 we examine the entrepreneur s decision and the market equilibrium the model is consistent with a number of empirical regularities concerning the relation between investor protection and corporate finance it also sheds light on the patterns of capital flows between rich and poor countries and on the politics of reform of investor protection r 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

the big push natural resource booms and growth a simple application of big push reasoning suggests that natural resource booms can be important catalysts for development in poorer countries in this paper we present evidence from seven latin american countries that natural resource booms are sometimes accompa nied by declining per capita gdp we present a model with natural resources increasing returns in the spirit of big push models and expectations to clarify some of the reasons this may happen q 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

financial globalization financial crises and contagion abstract two observations suggest that financial globalization played an important role in the recent financial crisis first more than half of the rise in net borrowing of the u s non financial sectors since the mid 1980s has been financed by foreign lending second the collapse of the u s housing and mortgage backed securities markets had worldwide effects on financial institutions and asset markets using an open economy model where financial intermediaries play a central role we show that financial integration leads to a sharp rise in net credit in the most financially developed country and to large asset price spillovers of country specific shocks to bank capital the impacts of these shocks on asset prices are amplified by bank capital requirements based on mark to market

valuing option existence and bequest demands for wilderness to assess the relative importance of current costs and future benefits of nuclear waste storage we develop a simple model of bequest value the basic model of nonparternalistic altruism is extended to account for the uncertain nature of the externality

financial intermediation and endogenous growth an endogenous growth model with multiple assets is developed agents who face random future liquidity needs accumulate capital and a liquid but unproductive asset the effects of introducing financial intermediation into this environment are considered conditions are provided under which the introduction of intermediaries shifts the composition of savings toward capital causing intermediation to be growth promoting in addition intermediaries generally reduce socially unnecessary capital liquidation again tending to promote growth

why doesn t technology flow from rich to poor countries what determines the technology that a country adopts while there could be many factors the e ciency of the country s nancial system may play a signi cant role to address this question a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive intermediation the ability of an intermediary to monitor and control the cash ows of a rm plays an important role in a rm s decision to adopt a technology can such a theory help to explain the

what makes growth sustained abstract we identify structural breaks in economic growth in 140 countries and use these to define growth spells periods of high growth preceded by an upbreak and ending either with a downbreak or with the end of the sample growth spells tend to be shorter in african and latin american countries than elsewhere we find evidence that growth duration is positively related to the degree of equality of the income distribution democratic institutions export orientation with higher propensities to export manufactures greater openness to fdi and avoidance of exchange rate overvaluation favorable for duration and macroeconomic stability

cyclical dynamics in idiosyncratic labor market risk is individual labor income more risky in recessions this is a difficult question to answer because existing panel data sets are so short to address this problem we develop a generalized method of moments estimator that conditions on the macroeconomic history that each member of the panel has experienced variation in the cross sectional variance between households with differing macroeconomic histories allows us to incorporate business cycle information dating back to 1930 even though our data do not begin until 1968 we implement this estimator using household level labor earnings data from the panel study of income dynamics we estimate that idiosyncratic risk is i highly persistent with an annual autocorrelation coefficient of 0 95 and ii strongly countercyclical with a conditional standard deviation that increases by 75 percent from 0 12 to 0 21 as the macroeconomy moves from peak to trough

modelling the non market environmental costs and benefits of biodiversity projects using contingent valuation data cv studies rarely ask willingness to accept wta questions yet there are a range of environmentalprojects where there are likely to be potential losersas well as gainers this paper presents evidence fromsix biodiversity projects that the inclusion ofcontingent compensation payments from thoserespondents who preferred the status quo cansubstantially reduce net project benefits even whenthe proportion of losers is relatively small astatistical model for estimating the mean welfaremeasure from dichotomous choice data which allows forboth positive wtp zero wtp and wta is described asmany environmental projects are likely to create bothgainers and losers we recommend that cv analysts giveserious consideration to the collection and analysisof wta data otherwise they risk generating biasedestimates of project benefits

what explains the industrial revolution in east asia evidence from the factor markets this paper presents dual estimates of total factor productivity growth tfpg for east asian countries while the dual estimates of tfpg for korea and hong kong are similar to the primal estimates they exceed the primal estimates by 1 percent a year for taiwan and by more than 2 percent for singapore the reason for the large discrepancy for singapore is because the return to capital has remained constant despite the high rate of capital accumulation indicated by singapore s national accounts this discrepancy is not explained by financial market controls capital income taxes risk premium changes and public investment subsidies jel o11 o16 o47 o53

contagion and risk sharing on the inter bank market abstract increasing inter bank lending has an ambiguous impact on financial stability using a computational model with endogenous bank behavior and interest rates we identify the conditions under which inter bank lending promotes stability through risk sharing or provides a channel through which failures may spread in response to large economy wide shocks more inter bank lending relationships worsen systemic events for smaller shocks the opposite effect is observed as such no inter bank market structure maximizes stability under all conditions in contrast deposit insurance costs are always reduced under greater numbers of inter bank lending relationships a range of regulations are considered to increase system stability

the pecking order of segmentation and liquidity injection policies in a model of contagious crises we study a two country setting in which leveraged investors generate fire sale externalities leading to financial crises and contagion governments can affect the incidence of financial crisis and the degree of contagion by injecting public liquidity and additionally by segmenting the countries liquidity markets we show that segmentation allows a country to avoid contagion and fend off mild financial crises caused by a small shock to its liquidity demand at the cost of exposing it to more severe financial crises caused by a large shock we derive a pecking order result whereby segmentation is a second best measure that coordinated governments should use only when tax capacity constrains them from injecting liquidity even when segmentation is welfare enhancing it should be applied to public liquidity alone never restricting the free flow of private liquidity across countries uncoordinated governments tend to use segmentation excessively

valuing the mortality risk of wildlife reintroduction heterogeneous risk preferences abstract this study is the first to value the mortality risk incurred from wildlife reintroduction we conducted choice experiments on wolf reintroduction in hokkaido japan in order to value the resulting mortality risk this process involves three unique factors the mortality risk is zero before the reintroduction the increment of the risk caused by the reintroduction is substantially small and the risk largely depends on citizens individual characteristics concerning reintroduction because of these factors the heterogeneity of risk preference is expected to be large in order to examine these heterogeneous risk preferences we use a random parameter logit model the estimation results confirm that considerable heterogeneous risk preferences exist finally the mean marginal willingness to pay to prevent the loss of one person per one billion people because of wolf reintroduction is several hundred yen

financial innovation the discovery of risk and the u s credit crisis abstract financial innovation and overconfidence about the risk of new financial products were key factors behind the 2008 u s credit crisis we show that a model with a collateral constraint in which learning about the risk of a new financial environment interacts with fisherian amplification produces a boom bust cycle in debt asset prices and consumption early realizations of a high borrowing ability regime turn agents optimistic about the persistence probability of this regime conversely the first realization of a low borrowing ability regime turns agents unduly pessimistic the model predicts large increases in household debt land prices and excess returns during 1998 2006 followed by a collapse

has the euro mediterranean partnership affected mediterranean business cycles summary we date turning points of the reference cycle for 19 mediterranean countries and analyze their structure and interdependencies fluctuations are volatile and not highly correlated across countries recessions are deep but asynchronous the distribution of output losses in recessions spread out heterogeneities across countries and regions are substantial cyclical fluctuations are poorly related to trade and financial linkages mediterranean cycles are time varying but their evolution is not linked with the euro mediterranean partnership process copyright 2013 john wiley sons ltd

capital mobility and international sharing of cyclical risk this paper investigates whether the international globalization of financial markets allows for significant cross country risk sharing at the business cycle frequency we find that cross country risk sharing is still limited and this is unlikely to be the result of financial frictions that limit state contingent contracts part of the limited international risk sharing could be the consequence of frictions that de facto reduce the short term mobility of financial capital but even with these frictions we find significant divergence between model predictions and the data

credit constraints equity market liberalization and growth rate asymmetry abstract this paper provides evidence that financial openness is an important determinant of growth rate asymmetry in emerging markets i exploit exogenous shocks to financial flows and examine the impact of equity market liberalization on the skewness of output growth for 93 countries during the 1973 2009 period i show that opening the economy to foreign portfolio investment results in a substantially higher negative skewness of output growth this result obtains with equal strength in the aggregate data and in the sectoral data and it is disproportionately stronger in sectors that require more external finance the skewness effect of financial openness is stronger in countries which experienced a banking crisis after liberalization

the welfare cost of bank capital requirements abstract capital requirements are the cornerstone of modern bank regulation yet little is known about their welfare cost this paper measures this cost and finds that it is surprisingly large i present a simple framework which embeds the role of liquidity creating banks in an otherwise standard general equilibrium growth model a capital requirement limits the moral hazard on the part of banks that arises due to deposit insurance however this capital requirement is also costly because it reduces the ability of banks to create liquidity the key insight is that equilibrium asset returns reveal the strength of households preferences for liquidity and this allows for the derivation of a simple formula for the welfare cost of capital requirements that is a function of observable variables only using us data the welfare cost of current capital adequacy regulation is found to be equivalent to a permanent loss in consumption of between 0 1 and 1

cross sectoral variation in the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks we estimate the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks in u s manufacturing we measure the variation in revenue total factor productivity not explained by either industry or economy wide factors or by establishments characteristics we find that idiosyncratic shocks are much larger than aggregate shocks accounting for about 80 of the overall uncertainty faced by plants plants in the most volatile sector are subject to about six times as much idiosyncratic uncertainty as plants in the least volatile we provide evidence suggesting that idiosyncratic risk is higher in industries where the extent of creative destruction is likely to be greater

are there cultural effects on saving some cross sectional evidence why are there such large differences in saving rates across countries conventional economic analyses have not been successful in explaining international saving differences so economists have sometimes suggested that national saving differences may be explained by cultural differences this paper tests the hypothesis that cultural factors influence saving by comparing saving patterns of immigrants to canada from different cultures using data from the canadian survey of family expenditures we find no evidence of cultural effects on saving

quantitative implications of a debt deflation theory of sudden stops and asset prices abstract this paper shows that the quantitative predictions of an equilibrium asset pricing model with financial frictions are consistent with key features of the sudden stop phenomenon foreign traders incur costs in trading assets with domestic agents and a collateral constraint limits external debt to a fraction of the market value of domestic equity holdings when this constraint does not bind standard productivity shocks cause typical real business cycle effects when it binds the same shocks cause strikingly different effects depending on the leverage ratio and asset market liquidity with high leverage and a liquid market the shocks force fire sales of assets and fisher s debt deflation mechanism amplifies the responses of asset prices consumption and the current account precautionary saving makes these sudden stops infrequent in the long run

creditor protection laws debt financing and corporate investment over the business cycle we examine how legal creditor rights are related to debt financing and corporate investment over the business cycle using firm level data from 40 countries we find that creditor rights are associated with greater debt financing and investment during economic downturns but creditor rights have a significantly smaller effect during expansions the beneficial effects of creditor rights during recessions are stronger for firms that are more likely to have severe shareholder bondholder agency problems we also find that during recessions relative to expansions strong creditor rights are associated with a smaller decline in net capital flows our findings are consistent with credit market frictions increasing during recessions and with stronger creditor rights decreasing the negative effects of these frictions overall the results suggest that better creditor protection laws help moderate the decline in debt financing and investment during recessions

drivers of systemic risk do national and european perspectives differ abstract with the establishment of the banking union the european central bank has been granted the power to impose stricter regulations than the national regulator if systemic risks are not adequately addressed at the national level we ask whether there is a cross border externality in the sense that a bank s systemic risk differs when applying a national versus a european perspective on average banks contribution to systemic risk is similar at the two regional levels and so is the ranking of banks generally larger banks and banks with a lower share of loans are more systemically important the effects of these variables are qualitatively but not quantitatively similar at the national versus the european level

financial intermediation resource allocation and macroeconomic interdependence abstract during the first decade of the euro southern countries experienced a boom bust cycle in bank lending non tradable sector growth and capital inflows i develop a quantitative open economy model of banking that is consistent with the banks behavior in credit allocation and foreign borrowing observed in spanish data i illustrate how movements in the frictions of cross border deposits generate an endogenous asymmetric allocation of bank credit toward non traded sectors while producing a persistent and climbing current account deficit a common central bank s unconventional policies in response to sudden stops are successful at ameliorating the downturn

sudden spikes in global risk abstract recent episodes october 2008 may 2010 august 2011 have witnessed huge spikes in equity price risk implied volatility apart from their large size several features characterize these risk panics they are global phenomena shared among a broad set of countries there is substantial variation though in the extent to which individual countries are impacted while the impact bears little relation to financial linkages with the epicenter of the crisis in addition there is usually not a large shock to fundamentals that sets off these panics we provide an explanation for these risk panic features in the context of a two country model that allows for self fulfilling shifts in risk

foreign entry and bank competition abstract foreign entry and bank competition are modeled as the interaction between asymmetrically informed principals the entrant uses collateral as a screening device to contest the incumbent s informational advantage both better information ex ante and stronger legal protection ex post are shown to facilitate the entry of low cost outside competitors into credit markets the entrant s success in gaining borrowers of higher quality by offering cheaper loans increases with its efficiency cost advantage this paper accounts for evidence suggesting that foreign banks tend to lend more to large firms thereby neglecting small and medium enterprises the results also explain why this observed bias is stronger in emerging markets

empirics of hills plateaus mountains and plains a markov switching approach to growth abstract most economic growth research has been aimed at explaining cross country differences in average growth rates however it is well known that growth experiences differ over time within a country almost as much as they differ among countries this paper builds on pritchett s 2000 pritchett lant understanding patterns of economic growth searching for hills among plateaus mountains and plains world bank economic review may 2000 14 2 221 250 observation that the growth process can be thought of as transitions between different growth regimes and proposes a framework for systematic analysis of such regimes and the dynamics of the transitions i estimate a markov switching regression to characterize four distinct growth regimes and transitions between them the results show that countries switch among regimes of stable growth miracle catch up stagnation and crisis with the transition probabilities determined by the quality of institutions better institutions appear to improve long run growth by making episodes of fast growth more persistent low average growth rates in countries with weak institutions are a result of these countries spending more time in stagnation regimes rather then being incapable of fast growth at all weak institutions do not rule out growth takeoffs but limit their sustainability the approach directs attention to shifts in growth performance and highlights the fact that identical average growth rates can mask very distinct growth paths

the long run relationship between trade and population health evidence from five decades in recent years the increase in international trade has sparked a debate about the impact of international trade on population health to date however there has been very little econometric research on the relationship between these two variables this paper examines the long run relationship between trade openness and population health for a sample of 74 countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010 using panel time series techniques it is shown that international trade in general has a robust positive long run effect on health as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality this effect tends to be greater in countries with lower development levels higher taxes on income profits and capital gains and less restrictive business and labour market regulations

capital liberalization and the us external imbalance abstract differences in financial systems are often named as a prime candidate for the current state of global imbalances this paper focuses on cross country heterogeneity in access to international financial markets that derives from the presence of capital controls and argues that the process of capital liberalization over the past decades can explain a substantial fraction of us net external liabilities we present a simple two country model with an internationally traded bond in which capital controls are reflected in the presence of borrowing and lending constraints on that bond in a us versus the rest of the world row scenario we perform experiments that are largely consistent with countries liberalization experiences a reduction in the row s controls on capital outflows and or a tightening in the row s borrowing constraint enable the us economy to better insure against consumption risk relative to the rest of the world and therefore decrease its motives for precautionary asset holdings relative to the rest of the world as a result of these asymmetric shifts in countries barriers to capital mobility the us runs a long run external deficit

the voracity effect abstract we analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock in equilibrium this leads to slow economic growth and a voracity effect by which a shock such as a terms of trade windfall perversely generates a more than proportionate increase in fiscal redistribution and reduces growth we also show that a dilution in the concentration of power leads to faster growth and a less procyclical response to shocks jel f43 o10 o23 o40

nonresponse in contingent valuation reducing uncertainty in value inference this paper focuses on problems associated with nonresponse in contingent valuation surveys the results from a telephone follow up survey show that value inference can be considerably improved by information on nonrespondents attitudes

what factors drive systemic risk during international financial crises abstract we analyze the determinants of the contribution of international banks to both global and local systemic risk during prominent financial crises we find no empirical evidence supporting conjectures that bank size leverage non interest income or the quality of the bank s credit portfolio are persistent determinants of systemic risk across financial crises in contrast our results show that global systemic risk in particular is predominantly driven by characteristics of the regulatory regime we also confirm for the subprime crisis that the banks contribution to moderately bad tail events in the past predicts the financial sector s crash risk

the role of bank capital in the propagation of shocks abstract the recent financial turmoil has underlined the importance of analyzing the link between banks balance sheets and economic activity we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which bank capital mitigates an agency problem between banks and their creditors as a result the capital position of banks affects their ability to attract loanable funds and therefore influences the business cycle through a bank capital channel of transmission we find that the bank capital channel greatly amplifies and propagates the effects of technology shocks on output investment and inflation moreover bank capital shocks create sizeable declines in output and investment

growth and risk sharing with private information abstract we examine the impact of incomplete risk sharing on growth and welfare the source of market incompleteness in our economy is private information a household s idiosyncratic productivity shock is not observable by others risk sharing between households occurs through long term contracts with intermediaries we find that incomplete risk sharing tends to reduce the rate of growth relative to the complete risk sharing benchmark numerical examples indicate that the welfare cost and the growth effect of private information are small

tax on name abstract how to tax the name we answer this question by introducing a name market in the sense of tadelis 1999 into an endogenous growth model in which an informational asymmetry exists between capital producing borrowers and lenders we show a name market endogenously arises to screen the borrowers but at the cost of crowding out investment we derive the optimal name price that trades off the screening effect and the crowding out effect and show this optimal price decreases with the investor protection level an optimal tax scheme should tax the name to this optimal price and reimburse the tax revenue to the name buyer when the investor protection level is low the net worth could be lower than the optimal name price so capital income tax shall be allowed to subsidy the name purchase to activate the name market overall we show the optimal tax scheme in the presence of a name market depends crucially on the country s investor protection level

law finance and firm growth we investigate how differences in legal and financial systems affect firms use of external financing to fund growth we show that in countries whose legal systems score high on an efficiency index a greater proportion of firms use long term external financing an active though not necessarily large stock market and a large banking sector are also associated with externally financed firm growth the increased reliance on external financing occurs in part because established firms in countries with well functioning institutions have lower profit rates government subsidies to industry do not increase the proportion of firms relying on external financing the corporate finance literature suggests that market imperfections caused by conflicts of interest and informational asymmetries between corporate insiders and investors constrain firms in their ability to fund investment projects the magnitude of these imperfections depends in part on the effectiveness of the legal and financial systems because these systems differ across countries the literature implies that there should exist systematic cross country differences in firms ability to obtain external capital to finance investment in this paper we examine whether the underdevelopment of legal and financial systems does prevent firms in some countries from investing in potentially profitable growth opportunities in particular we focus on the use of long term debt or external equity to fund growth see our earlier work demirgut kunt and maksimovic 1996a which compares firms financial structures in developed and developing countries and finds the greatest difference to be in the provision of long term credit we estimate a financial planning model to obtain the maximum growth rate that each firm in our thirty country sample could attain without access to long term financing we then compare these predicted growth rates to growth rates realized by firms in countries with differing degrees of development in their legal and financial systems our approach enables us to identify specific characteristics of the legal and financial systems that are associated with long term financing of firm growth thus we provide a micro level test of the hypoth

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

the high price of dematerialization a dynamic panel data analysis of material use and economic recession abstract dematerialization at the national level occurs almost exclusively during periods of economic recession or low growth while recession is not a sustainable strategy to curb environmental impact such periods may offer important insights on the possibilities of reducing material use economic recession research has focused on the interactions between macroeconomic and financial variables with little systematic research dedicated to uncovering how resource use develops during periods of recession using a dynamic panel model we investigate whether and to what extent material use in a sample of 150 economies between 1970 and 2010 was affected by recession and low growth recession occurred most frequently and in more than two thirds of all countries during the 1980s and the 1990s in the 2000s more than half of the recessions occurred during the financial crisis of 2008 periods of recession were significantly and negatively correlated with material use they tended to coincide with dematerialization material use decreased in recession years but the significant correlations with growth in material use became weaker as growth rates increased construction minerals and metals used to build stocks of manufactured capital reacted more strongly to economic fluctuations than the throughput dominated flows of biomass and fossil fuels we conclude that the systematic link between recession and dematerialization can become policy relevant if the mechanisms causing reductions in material use during these periods are identified

business cycle synchronization during us recessions since the beginning of the 1870s this paper examines the synchronization of business cycles across the g7 countries during us recessions since the 1870 s using a dynamic measure of business cycle synchronization results depend on the globalisation period under consideration on average us recessions have significantly positive effects on business cycle co movements only in the period following the breakdown of the bretton woods system of fixed exchange rates while strongly decoupling effects among the g7 economies are documented during recessions that occurred under the classical gold standard during the 2007 2009 recession business cycles co movements increased to unprecedented levels

what can explain the apparent lack of international consumption risk sharing recent research in international business cycles finds that international consumption comovements do not match the risk sharing predictions of standard complete markets models in this paper i ask whether two different types of explanations can help explain this result 1 nonseparabilities between tradables and nontradable leisure or goods and 2 the effects of capital market restrictions on consumption risk sharing i find that risk sharing cannot be resolved by either explanation alone however when i allow for both nonseparabilities and certain market restrictions risk sharing among unrestricted countries cannot be rejected this evidence suggests that a combination of these two effects may be necessary to explain consumption risk sharing across countries

competition human capital and income inequality with limited commitment we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with two sided limited commitment to study how barriers to competition such as re strictions to business start up aect the incentive to accumulate hu man capital we show that a lack of contract enforceability ampli es the eect of barriers to competition on human capital accumulation high barriers reduce the incentive to accumulate human capital by lowering the outside value of skilled workers while low barriers can result in over accumulation of human capital this over accumulation can be socially optimal if there are positive knowledge spillovers a calibration exercise shows that this mechanism can account for signif icant cross country income inequality

financial development growth and the distribution of income a paradigm is presented in which both the extent of financial intermediation and the rate of economic growth are endogenously determined financial intermediation promotes growth because it allows a higher rate of return to be earned on capital and growth in turn provides the means to implement costly financial structures thus financial intermediation and economic growth are inextricably linked in accord with the goldsmith mckinnon shaw view on economic development the model also generates a development cycle reminiscent of the kuznet hypothesis in particular in the transition from a primitive slow growing economy to a developed fast growing one a nation passes through a stage in which the distribution of wealth across the rich and poor widens

optimal time consistent macroprudential policy collateral constraints widely used in models of financial crises feature a pecuniary externality agents do not internalize how borrowing decisions made in good times affect collateral prices during a crisis we show that under commitment the optimal financial regulator s plans are time inconsistent and study time consistent policy quantitatively this policy reduces sharply the frequency and magnitude of crises removes fat tails from the distribution of asset returns and increases social welfare in contrast constant debt taxes are ineffective and can be welfare reducing while an optimized macroprudential taylor rule is effective but less so than the optimal time consistent policy

international risk sharing and economic growth international risk sharing which diversifies away income risk will reduce saving with constant relative risk aversion if growth arises from the external effects of human capital accumulation then reducing saving will reduce growth welfare also may fall with risk sharing because endogenous growth with external effects of capital accumulation typically implies a competitive equilibrium growth rate already less than the optimal growth rate we demonstrate these results in a standard representative agent economy diversifying away rate of return risk also will reduce saving and growth rates if relative risk aversion exceeds one but this diversification always increases welfare this paper studies the effects of international risk sharing portfolio diversification in a world economy in which growth rates of income are endogenous growth is based upon the spillover effects of human capital accumulation as in lucas 1988 and romer 1986 there are positive economy wide spillovers of human capital intensity on individual labour productivity in section 2 we construct a multi country growth model with an infinitely lived representative agent in each country each country faces income risk but there is no aggregate uncertainty at the world level we focus on two market structures in the first structure there are no markets which allow for international diversification of country specific income risk in the second structure there are complete international markets for risksharing with no aggregate world uncertainty this completeness allows full diversification of country specific risk the paper has two central results first growth rates in all countries are lower in the equilibrium with full diversification second in this same structure welfare of each country may be lower than in an equilibrium without risk sharing the reasoning is as follows with external effects of capital accumulation the compet

are developing countries catching up this paper reviews catch up growth in various parts of the world especially in the twentieth century with a particular focus on what this implies for the global south in 1950 us per capita national income adjusted for purchasing power was nearly five times the world average since then western europe and japan have closed their per capita income gaps with the usa east asia south asia and some other developing countries have also started to close their gaps with the west in recent decades thus after well over a century of growing international economic disparities or divergence the world has witnessed an era of uneven catching up with the north in parts of the south since the mid twentieth century

communication commitment and growth abstract we study the effect on the growth of an economy of alternative financing opportunities in a stochastic growth model with incentive constraints efficient accumulation mechanisms are designed and computed for economies that differ in their incentive structure we show that when borrowing is subject to information constraints there is a computable efficient transfer mechanism that does not affect capital accumulation and investment patterns even though consumption patterns and the distribution of wealth are affected in contrast enforcement constraints can severely reduce the outside financing opportunities and affect investment patters and economic growth we adapt numerical algorithms for obtaining numerical solutions of these models

international capital flows and credit market imperfections a tale of two frictions the nancial crisis of 2007 08 has underscored the importance of adverse selection in nancial markets this friction has been mostly neglected by macroeconomic models of nancial imperfections however which have focused almost exclusively on the eects of limited pledgeability in this paper we ll this gap by developing a standard growth model with adverse selection our main results are that by fostering unproductive investment adverse selection i leads to an increase in the economy s equilibrium interest rate and ii it generates a negative wedge between the marginal return to investment and the equilibrium interest rate under nancial integration we show how this translates into excessive capital inows and endogenous cycles we also extend our model to the more general case in which adverse selection and limited pledgeability coexist we conclude that both frictions complement one another and show that limited pledgeability exacerbates the eects of adverse selection

global implications of national unconventional policies abstract financial integration in the markets for banks assets and liabilities makes balance sheet constraints highly correlated across countries resulting in a high degree of financial and macroeconomic interdependence likewise under financial integration unconventional policies aimed at stabilizing domestic financial and credit conditions could entail large international spillovers therefore stabilization by one country will also benefit other countries reducing incentives to implement credit policies in a classic free riding problem especially when these policies entail domestic costs we show that this outcome can emerge in an open economy model featuring financial intermediaries that face endogenously determined balance sheet constraints

banks and liquidity crises in emerging market economies abstract this paper presents and analyzes a simple banking model in which banks have access to international capital markets and domestic asset markets the model generates two types of equilibria a no default equilibrium and a mixed equilibrium in the no default equilibrium all banks are symmetric and always solvent while in the mixed equilibrium some banks can be internationally illiquid and default simultaneously the latter equilibrium captures the basic features of banking crises after financial liberalization in emerging market economies in this case a large capital inflow leads to high asset price volatility and magnifies a banking crisis

international and domestic collateral constraints in a model of emerging market crises abstract we build a model of emerging markets crises which features two types of collateral constraints firms in a domestic economy have limited borrowing capacity from international investors they also have limited borrowing capacity with respect to each other we study how the presence and changes in these collateral constraints affect financial and real variables a binding international constraint in the aggregate leads to a sharp rise in interest rates and fire sales of domestic assets while limited domestic collateral can lead to wasted international collateral these two collateral constraints can interact in important ways the first is disintermediation a fire sale of domestic assets causes banks to fail in their function of reallocating resources across the economy leading to wasted international collateral the second is a dynamic effect we show that firms in an economy with limited domestic collateral and a binding international collateral constraint will not adequately precaution against adverse shocks increasing the severity of these shocks

on efficient distribution with private information this paper is a study of the dynamics of the efficient distribution of consumption in an exchange economy with many consumers each of whom is subject to private idiosyncratic taste shocks we propose a recursive method for finding feasible allocations that are incentivecompatible and that are pareto optimal within this set the method is applied to several parametric examples we find that in an efficient allocation the degree of inequality continually increases with a diminishing fraction of the population receiving an increasing fraction of the resources we discuss the extent to which these allocations can be decentralized via market arrangements this paper is a study of the dynamics of the efficient distribution of consumption in an exchange economy with private information the economy we study has a constant endowment flow of a single non storable consumption good which is to be allocated each period among a large number of consumers each period these consumers experience unpredictable idiosyncratic privately observed taste shocks affecting their marginal utility of current consumption efficiency dictates that more resources be allocated to those consumers who in any given period have a high marginal utility of current consumption

global banks and crisis transmission abstract we study the effect of financial integration through banks on the transmission of international business cycles in a sample of 18 20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009 we find that in periods without financial crises increases in bilateral banking linkages are associated with more divergent output cycles this relation is significantly weaker during financial turmoil periods suggesting that financial crises induce co movement among more financially integrated countries we also show that countries with stronger direct and indirect financial ties to the u s experienced more synchronized cycles with the u s during the recent 2007 2009 crisis we then interpret these findings using a simple general equilibrium model of international business cycles with banks and shocks to banking activity the model suggests that the relation between integration and synchronization depends on the type of shocks hitting the world economy and that shocks to global banks played an important role in triggering and spreading the 2007 2009 crisis

do weak institutions prolong crises on the identification characteristics and duration of declines during economic slumps this paper studies periods of prolonged contractions in output per capita in a sample of 145 countries from 1950 to 2014 economic slumps are defined as abrupt interruptions of a period of growth by several regime switches slumps start with a sharp contraction along with a trend break which is followed by another switch when growth stabilizes again the paper then analyzes the correlates of these slumps focusing on the length and depth of the contraction from the beginning of the slump to its trough the results establish three new stylized facts i weak political institutions predate crises whereas political reforms tend to follow them ii the length and depth of economic declines are robustly correlated with executive constraints and ethnic heterogeneity and iii there is a robust interaction between these two variables suggesting that institutions constraining leaders are important for stabilizing growth this is particularly relevant for sub saharan africa where politics are often ethnic and decision makers are comparatively unconstrained

optimal contracts under costly state falsification we examine an exchange economy with two agents one risk neutral with a certain endowment and a second risk averse with a random endowment the realization of the endowment is public but can be falsified by the second agent at a cost for a broad class of falsification cost functions the optimal no falsification contract is noncontingent on a left hand interval and strictly increasing with a slope strictly less than one on a right hand interval under a mild further restriction optimal no falsification contracts are in addition piece wise linear optimal contracts may in general require falsifying the state but for a set of the highest endowment realizations there is no falsification we find simple conditions under which the optimal contract is a no falsification contract the model has applications that include financial insurance and employment contracts and tax policy

the synchronization of credit cycles abstract this paper proposes a simple econometric procedure to test for the synchronization of credit cycles using a century of data for 14 advanced economies we find that credit cycle synchronization dropped in the early 1920s from initially relatively high levels between the 1920s and the 1970s synchronization was overall low and concentrated within five predominantly regional clusters however synchronization has significantly increased in the post bretton woods era and has become less associated with geographic proximity australia denmark france italy japan norway spain switzerland the uk and the us form a single major credit cycle cluster since the 1970s a smaller cluster is formed by canada the netherlands and sweden while the german credit cycle follows a distinct path using logistic regressions we find that the synchronization of credit and business cycles go hand in hand our findings are especially relevant for the international coordination of macroprudential policy as well as to spur and inform further analysis on credit cycle dynamics

repeated principal agent relationships with lending and borrowing abstract it is shown optimal long term contracts are strictly better than a series of unrelated short term contracts for two reasons long term contracts allow risk to be spread over time and the agent s intertemporal choices provide information about the unobservable random variable

business cycle fluctuations large macroeconomic shocks and development aid abstract we examine the cyclical properties of development aid using bilateral data for 22 donors and 113 recipients during 1970 2005 we find that bilateral aid flows are on average procyclical with respect to the business cycle in both donor and recipient countries while aid outlays contract sharply during severe downturns in donor countries they rise steeply when aid receiving countries experience large adverse shocks our findings suggest that development aid may play an important cushioning role in developing countries but only during times of severe macroeconomic stress our results are robust to alternate definitions of aid flows specifications and estimation techniques

cross sectoral variation in the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks we estimate the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks in u s manufacturing we measure the variation in revenue total factor productivity not explained by either industry or economy wide factors or by establishments characteristics we find that idiosyncratic shocks are much larger than aggregate shocks accounting for about 80 of the overall uncertainty faced by plants plants in the most volatile sector are subject to about six times as much idiosyncratic uncertainty as plants in the least volatile we provide evidence suggesting that idiosyncratic risk is higher in industries where the extent of creative destruction is likely to be greater

investor protection optimal incentives and economic growth does investor protection foster economic growth to assess the widely held affirmative view we introduce investor protection into a standard overlapping generations model of capital accumulation better investor protection implies better risk sharing because of entrepreneurs risk aversion this results in a larger demand for capital this is the demand effect a second effect the supply effect follows from general equilibrium restrictions better protection i e higher demand increases the interest rate and lowers the income of entrepreneurs decreasing current savings and next period s supply of capital the supply effect is stronger the tighter are the restrictions on capital flows our model thus predicts that the positive effect of investor protection on growth is stronger for countries with lower restrictions cross country data provide support for this prediction as does the detailed examination of the growth experiences of south korea and india

finance and the sources of growth the authors evaluate whether the level of development in the banking sector exerts a causal impact on economic growth and its sources total factor productivity growth physical capital accumulation and private saving they use 1 a pure cross country instrumental variable estimator to extract the exogenous component of banking development and 2 a new panel technique that controls for country specific effects and endogeneity they find that banks do exert a large causal impact on total factor productivity growth which feeds through to overall gdp gross domestic product growth the long run links between banking development and both capital growth and private savings are more tenuous

should business groups be dismantled the equilibrium costs of efficient internal capital markets abstract we analyze the relationship between conglomerates internal capital markets and the efficiency of economy wide capital allocation and we identify a novel cost of conglomeration that arises from an equilibrium framework because of financial market imperfections engendered by imperfect investor protection conglomerates that engage in winner picking stein 1997 internal capital markets and the competition for corporate resources journal of finance 52 111 133 find it optimal to allocate scarce capital internally to mediocre projects even when other firms in the economy have higher productivity projects that are in need of additional capital this bias for internal capital allocation can decrease allocative efficiency even when conglomerates have efficient internal capital markets because a substantial presence of conglomerates might make it harder for other firms in the economy to raise capital we also argue that the negative externality associated with conglomeration is particularly costly for countries that are at intermediary levels of financial development in such countries a high degree of conglomeration generated for example by the control of the corporate sector by family business groups could decrease the efficiency of the capital market our theory generates novel empirical predictions that cannot be derived in models that ignore the equilibrium effects of conglomerates these predictions are consistent with anecdotal evidence that the presence of business groups in developing countries inhibits the growth of new independent firms because of a lack of finance

real income stagnation of countries 1960 2001 abstract this paper examines the phenomenon of real income stagnation in which real income growth is uninterruptedly negligible or negative for a sizable sequence of years we analyse data for four decades from a large cross section of countries real income stagnation is a conceptually distinct phenomenon from low average growth and other features of the growth sequence that have been previously considered we find that real income stagnation has affected a significant number of countries 103 out of 168 and resulted in substantial income loss countries that suffered spells of real income stagnation were more likely to be poor in latin america or sub saharan africa conflict ridden and dependent on primary commodity exports stagnation is also very likely to persist over time countries that were afflicted with stagnation in the 1960s had a likelihood of 75 per cent of also being afflicted with stagnation in the 1990s