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Working Paper
The S-curve: Understanding the Dynamics of Worldwide Financial Liberalization
Using a novel database of domestic financial reforms in 90 countries from 1973 to 2014, we document that global financial liberalization followed an S-curve path: reforms were slow and gradual in early periods, accelerated during the 1990s, and slowed down after 2000. We estimate a learning model that explains these dynamics. Policymakers updated their beliefs about the growth effects of financial reforms by learning from their own and other countries' experiences. Positive growth surprises in advanced economies helped accelerate belief updating worldwide, leading to the global wave of ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Effects of Government Spending in China
Government spending plays an important role in determining economic performances in China. Its macroeconomic effects are analyzed in this paper. We show that government spending in China (i) Granger-causes output, consumption and investment booms as well as inflation and (ii) has a multiplier larger than 1. The large multiplier effects are found not only in aggregate time-series data but also in panel data at the provincial level. We also provide a theoretical model and Monte Carlo analysis to rationalize our empirical findings. Our theoretical and Monte Carlo analyses support the large ...
Working Paper
The great housing boom of China
China's housing prices have been growing nearly twice as fast as national income in the past decade despite (1) a phenomenal rate of return to capital and (2) an alarmingly high vacancy rate. This paper interprets such a prolonged paradoxical housing boom as a rational bubble that emerges naturally from China's large-scale economic transition, featuring an exceptionally high rate of return to capital driven by massive resource reallocation. Because such primarily resource-reallocation-driven high capital returns are not sustainable in the long run, expectations of high future demand for ...
Working Paper
Risk, Financial Development and Firm Dynamics
I document that the average productivity of firms tends to increase, and its variance to decrease, as they age. These two facts combined suggest that managers learn to reduce their mistakes as they operate. I develop a quantitative framework mimicking these dynamics and find that young firms have substantially higher financing costs due to lower and riskier returns. In this scenario, a reduction in the financial development of an economy raises disproportionately the cost of credit of young-productive firms increasing the input misallocation within this subgroup. To test the validity of the ...
Working Paper
Capital Goods Trade, Relative Prices, and Economic Development
International trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through capital formation and TFP. Capital goods trade enables poor countries to access more efficient technologies, leading to lower relative prices of capital goods and higher capital-output ratios. Moreover, poor countries can use their comparative advantage and allocate their resources more efficiently, and increase their TFP. We quantify these channels using a multisector, multicountry, Ricardian model of trade with capital accumulation. The model matches several trade and development facts ...
Working Paper
A Tale of Two Sectors : Why is Misallocation Higher in Services than in Manufacturing?
Recent empirical studies document that the level of resource misallocation in the service sector is significantly higher than in the manufacturing sector. We quantify the importance of this difference and study its sources. Conservative estimates for Portugal (2008) show that closing this gap, by reducing misallocation in the service sector to manufacturing levels, would boost aggregate gross output by around 12 percent and aggregate value added by around 31 percent. Differences in the effect and size of productivity shocks explain most of the gap in misallocation between manufacturing and ...
Working Paper
Natural Resources and Global Misallocation
We explore the efficiency in the allocation of physical capital and human capital across countries. The observed marginal products can differ across countries because of differences in technology (i.e. production functions) and in distortions (i.e. differences in use of factors) across countries. To identify differences in technology, we use new data and propose a simple method to estimate output shares of natural resources, and thus adjust the estimated marginal products of physical and human capital. With a sample of 79 countries from 1970 to 2005, we find that the world has decidedly moved ...
Working Paper
Emerging Markets and the New Geography of Trade: The Effects of Rising Trade Barriers
Protectionist sentiments have been rising globally in recent years. The consequences of a surge in protectionist measures present policy challenges for emerging markets (EMs), which have become increasingly exposed to global trade. This paper serves two main purposes. First, we collect several stylized facts that characterize EMs' role in the new geography of trade. We focus on differences between advanced economies (AEs) and EMs in trade linkages, production structures, and factor supplies. Second, we build a dynamic, general equilibrium, quantitative trade model featuring multiple ...
Journal Article
Relative Income Traps
Despite economic growth in the post-World War II period, few developing countries have been able to catch up to the income levels in the United States or other advanced economies. Such countries remain trapped at a relative low- or middle-income level. In this article, the authors redefine the concept of income traps as situations in which income levels relative to the United States remain constantly low and with no clear sign of convergence. This approach allows them to study the issue of economic convergence (or lack of it) directly. The authors describe evidence pointing to the existence ...
Working Paper
Capital Accumulation and Dynamic Gains from Trade
We compute welfare gains from trade in a dynamic, multicountry model with capital accumulation. We examine transition paths for 93 countries following a permanent, uniform, unanticipated trade liberalization. Both the relative price of investment and the investment rate respond to changes in trade frictions. Relative to a static model, the dynamic welfare gains in a model with balanced trade are three times as large. The gains including transition are 60 percent of those computed by comparing only steady states. Trade imbalances have negligible effects on the cross-country distribution of ...