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Discussion Paper
Capital Flight inside the Euro Area: Cooling Off a Fire Sale
Countries in the euro area periphery such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain saw large-scale capital flight in 2011 and the first half of 2012. While events unfolded much like a balance of payments crisis, the contraction in domestic credit was less severe than would ordinarily be caused by capital flight of this scale. Why was that? An important reason is that much of the capital flight was financed by credits to deficit countries? central banks, with those credits extended collectively by other central banks in the euro area. This balance of payments financing was paired with policies to ...
Discussion Paper
Who Pays the Tax on Imports from China?
Tariffs are a form of taxation. Indeed, before the 1920s, tariffs (or customs duties) were typically the largest source of funding for the U.S. government. Of little interest for decades, tariffs are again becoming relevant, given the substantial increase in the rates charged on imports from China. U.S. businesses and consumers are shielded from the higher tariffs to the extent that Chinese firms lower the dollar prices they charge. U.S. import price data, however, indicate that prices on goods from China have so far not fallen. As a result, U.S. wholesalers, retailers, manufacturers, and ...
Working Paper
Purchasing power parity: three stakes through the heart of the unit root null
We provide a comprehensive analysis of the purchasing power parity hypothesis, relying on a linear panel data framework. First, we consider two panel unit root tests, based on transformations of country-specific statistics, which allow for parameter heterogeneity across countries. Using GLS techniques, we modify the two tests to eliminate the upward size distortion induced by cross-sectional dependence among contemporaneous real exchange rate innovations. Second, we consider two tests based on a fixed-effects specification: these tests allow for cross-sectional dependence but impose parameter ...
Report
Asset market hangovers and economic growth
During the early 1990s, asset prices and investment were unusually weak throughout the industrial world. This paper highlights this stylized fact, and connects it with another: in most of the industrial world, asset markets boomed for several years before collapsing around 1989. The paper suggests that the sluggish asset markets and investment growth of the early 1990s may represent, in part, symptoms of an "asset market hangover," that is, the lingering effects on real activity of collapsing speculative bubbles. The analysis relies on cross-country data for equity and real estate markets ...
Journal Article
Recycling petrodollars
In recent years, oil-exporting countries have experienced windfall gains with the rise in the price of oil. A look at how oil exporters "recycle" their revenues reveals that roughly half of the petrodollar windfall has gone to purchase foreign goods, especially from Europe and China, while the remainder has been invested in foreign assets. Although it is difficult to determine where the funds are first invested, the evidence suggests that the bulk are ending up, directly or indirectly, in the United States.
Journal Article
Reserve accumulation: implications for global capital flows and financial markets
Many central banks-particularly those in Japan and the emerging Asian nations-have been building up their holdings of foreign currency assets. These holdings, known as foreign exchange reserves, may help countries stabilize their currencies, but they can also lead to investment losses for the central banks. The large share of dollar assets among reserve holdings has made foreign central banks important players in U.S. financial markets.
Journal Article
Saving imbalances and the euro area sovereign debt crisis
For several years prior to 2010, countries in the euro area periphery engaged in heavy borrowing from foreign private investors, allowing domestic spending to outpace incomes. Now these countries face debt crises reflecting a loss of investor confidence in the sustainability of their finances. The result has been an abrupt halt in private foreign lending to these economies. This study explains how the periphery countries became dependent on foreign borrowing and considers the challenges they face reigniting growth while adjusting to greatly reduced access to foreign capital.
Report
Explaining inequality the world round: cohort size, Kuznets curves, and openness
Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire have recently produced an inequality data base for a panel of countries from the 1960s to the 1990s. We use these data to decompose the sources of inequality into three central parts: the demographic or cohort size effect; the so-called Kuznets Curve or demand effects; and the commitment to globalization or policy effects. We also control for education supply, the so-called natural resource curse and other variables suggested by the literature. While the Kuznets Curve comes out of hiding when the inequality relationship is conditioned by the other two, cohort ...
Discussion Paper
Euro Area Spending Imbalances and the Sovereign Debt Crisis
Euro area periphery countries borrowed heavily from abroad in the run-up to the sovereign debt crisis. How were these funds used? In this post, we recap our recent Current Issues study, showing that pre-crisis borrowing by the periphery countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) went mainly to finance private consumption or housing booms rather than productivity-enhancing investments. Most analysis of the crisis has focused on the need for fiscal adjustment in the periphery. A look at the drivers of the run-up in foreign borrowing, however, suggests that private spending in the ...
Discussion Paper
Foreign Borrowing in the Euro Area Periphery: The End Is Near
Current account deficits in euro area periphery countries have now largely disappeared. This represents a substantial adjustment. Only two years ago, deficits stood at nearly 10 percent of GDP in Greece and Portugal and 5 percent in Spain and Italy (see chart below). This sharp narrowing means that spending has been brought in line with income, largely righting an imbalance that had left these countries dependent on heavy foreign borrowing. However, adjustment has come at a sizable cost to growth, with lower domestic spending only partly offset by higher export sales. Downward pressure on ...