Ensayos Sobre Politica Economica最新文献

The government is an agent that influences economic activity throughout the economic cycle, thereby affecting a country's real and nominal variables through income and spending policies. The purpose of this document is to construct a neo-Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) for Colombia in which the government plays a key role in the economy. The five main conclusions of the document show that inflation is relevant for both monetary and fiscal policies; shocks to fiscal policy are offset to a certain degree by monetary policy, while shocks to monetary policy are endorsed by fiscal policy; additionally, cuts to public investment impact economic cycles to a greater extent than government spending cuts, and the fiscal rule helps to stabilise government finances in the face of certain shocks.

This paper examines whether and how ownership structure affects the trade credit policies in small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs) using a sample obtained from a survey of Chinese enterprises. Specifically, we examine how ownership concentration affects SMEs’ use of trade credit through influencing the availability of bank credit. We also examine whether the ownership of the ultimate controller influences the effect of ownership structure on trade credit. The results show that there is a significant negative relation between bank credit and trade credit when most of the firms’ shares are controlled by a dominant shareholder, indicating that concentrated ownership may lower firms’ ability to access bank credit, and SMEs use trade credit as a substitute for unavailable bank credit. The results also show that the effect of ownership concentration on the aforementioned relation is significant in private and state-controlled SMEs but not in foreign-controlled SMEs. Overall, our results suggest that ownership structure plays an important role in determining SMEs’ trade credit policies.

The Caribbean Region of Colombia suffers from serious problems in terms of quality of life and violence. However, this situation isn’t uniform within the region. In this sense, this paper shows the internal heterogeneity of the region in terms of spatial distribution of both phenomena using spatial analysis techniques by means of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Although territories where the two phenomena coexist were identified, the results show that a poor area isn’t necessarily violent and vice versa. Also, it should be underlined that the priority areas for the implementation of public policy vary depending on the type of violence studied and the analysis method used.

The objective of this research is to analyze the Colombian labor market and to identify some frictions that affect the aggregate, departmental and agent's levels, through the estimation of a matching function, using monthly data from the Public Employment Service (SPE), from February to November 2014. This research is the first approach to estimating the matching fucntion of the Colombian labor market. Comparison between models concludes that: (i) frictions are higher for firms than for the unemployed; (ii) there is a bias in the estimation of the matching function; (iii) there is evidence of constant returns to scale; (iv) interactions between supply and demand for labor occur first in the regions and are less relevant because of the characteristics of the agents; (v) the stock-flow model does not adjust to several estimates, and (vi) the more robust model corresponds to the dynamic linear model.

The behavioral agent-based framework of De Grauwe and Gerba (2015) is extended to allow for a counterfactual exercise on the role of corporate finance arrangements for monetary transmission. Two alternative firm financial frictions are independently introduced: market-based and bank-based. We find convincing evidence that the overall monetary transmission channel is stronger in the bank-based system compared to the market-based. While the growth in credit is larger in the market-based system, uncertainty originated from imperfect beliefs produce impulse responses in macroeconomic variables that are, on average, half of those in the bank-based model. At the same time we find mixed results on the conditional effectiveness of monetary policy to offset contractions. Conditional on being in a recession, a monetary expansion in a market-based system creates higher successive booms. That said, a monetary easing in the bank-based system is more effective in smoothening the financial-and business cycles.

We evaluate the effectiveness of financial policy rules in a small open economy with production, liability dollarization and “unconventional shocks” (global liquidity shifts and news about future fundamentals). Tradable and nontradable final goods are produced with tradable inputs. Debt is denominated in units of tradables and cannot exceed a fraction of the market value of total income. Optimal policy has a macroprudential or ex-ante component (a debt tax levied at date t only when the credit constraint may bind at t + 1), and ex-post components (sectoral production taxes/subsidies used when the constraint binds). The optimal policy reduces sharply the frequency and severity of financial crises but is also very complex. Simple policies are less effective and can be welfare reducing.

We provide a measure of the output gap that filters out the impact of the commodity and net capital inflows booms for Latin American countries. These two factors temporarily boost output and so are likely to push up estimates of potential growth in the region to unrealistic levels, thereby resulting in an underestimation of the output gaps during the upswing of the commodity cycle. We also shed light on the interaction between the two components. The results show that commodity prices have been the dominant factor explaining deviation of activity from sustainable levels. A timely consideration of these factors could prevent a procyclical fiscal policy bias in the region.

This paper examines the measurement and identification of tax policy shocks using novel multi-country databases on tax rates. On the measurement front, we argue that there is no substitute for using tax rates, a true policy instrument, as opposed to the much more popular revenue-based measures, such as cyclically adjusted revenues.

On the identification front, we argue that the narrative approach (whereby changes in tax rates are classified into exogenous or endogenous to the business cycle based on contemporaneous economic records) is the most accurate method. When properly measured and identified, tax multipliers for both industrial and developing countries are, on average, about -2. Further, we find important non-linearities with multipliers becoming bigger (in absolute value) as both the level of initial taxes and the size of tax changes become larger.

Spells of uncertainty are argued to cause rapid drops in economic activity. Wait and see behavior and risk aversion in combination with other frictions can make periods of increased uncertainty an important driver of the business cycle. Emerging economies may endure even stronger and prolonged recessions following a global uncertainty shock, as credit constraints in shallow financial markets limit smoothing. Active policy responses often exacerbate the cycle. The present study uses a novel proxy of uncertainty – inspired on Jurado et al. (2015) – in which I extract a common factor that is not driven by the business cycle from a broad set of forecast indicators. I then estimate an interacted panel VAR on a large set of developed and emerging economies over the period 1990Q1-2014Q3 to test responses to shocks to uncertainty. Emerging markets suffer a larger fall in consumption and investment as uncertainty spreads globally. The main finding is that more developed financial markets are key to dampen the transmission of the shock. Fiscal policy is an alternative, but only if there is sufficient fiscal space to smooth shocks. Monetary policy dampens the effects of uncertainty under a fixed peg better than in a floating exchange rate regime.

This paper characterizes analytically the adjustment of an open economy with a stock collateral constraint to fundamental and nonfundamental shocks. In the model, external borrowing is limited by the value of physical capital. Three results are established: (1) Adjustment to external shocks is nonlinear. In response to small negative output shocks, the economy adjusts as prescribed by the intertemporal approach to the current account, with increases in debt, deficits in the trade and current account balances, and no significant movement in the price of collateral. By contrast, in response to large negative output shocks the economy experiences a sudden stop with debt deleveraging, trade and current account reversals, and a Fisherian deflation of asset prices. (2) Generically, weak fundamentals (low output and high external debt) give rise to multiple equilibria. (3) In this case, the economy is prone to self-fulfilling sudden stops driven by downward revisions of expectations about the value of collateral.