Empirica最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic had disastrous effects on health and economic activity worldwide, including in the Euro Area. The application of mandatory lockdowns contributed to a sharp fall in production and a rise in unemployment, inducing an expansionary fiscal and monetary response. Using a uniquely large macro database, this paper examines the effects of the pandemic and the ensuing economic policies on public support for the common currency, the euro, as measured by the Eurobarometer survey. It finds that public support for the euro increased in a majority of the 19 Euro Area member states and reached historically high levels in the midst of the pandemic. This finding suggests that the expansionary fiscal policies initiated at the EU level significantly contributed to this outcome, while the monetary measures taken by the European Central Bank did not have a similar effect.

We study the impact of tiered payments originating from client banks on the liquidity consumption (relative intraday liquidity use) of settlement banks. Estimates of a panel data model, employing wholesale payments in euro, show that a higher share of tiered payments reduces liquidity consumption by settlement banks. Metrics on timing, delay, and payment priorities suggest that settlement banks use more leeway in settling tiered payments from client banks compared to in-house payments. Payment timing as a proxy for external delay suggests that tiered payments help smooth liquidity positions. Payment delay within the system does not follow a clear dynamic over time, whereas banks consistently de-prioritize tiered payments. Thereby, settlement banks employ tiered arrangements to manage intraday liquidity more efficiently. To a certain extent, this hints at “free riding” or higher recycling of liquidity from client banks’ payments. However, the results are also consistent with settlement banks’ monitoring role or tiered payments potentially exhibiting different characteristics which may be attributable to contractual arrangements.

This paper investigates factors that contribute to the survival of export relationships at the firm and product levels using a large anonymised firm-level database for Latvia. It finds that some characteristics of exporting firms, such as a higher productivity level, larger size, lower indebtedness and higher profitability are associated with longer duration of export relationships. This paper also reveals the role of product characteristics for export product survival, in particular focusing on product absolute and relative complexity, as well as proximity to existing product basket. Exporting complex products improves the survival of trade relationships. However, exporting products that are more complex or distant from the firm’s previous export bundle reduces the chances of survival.

In this paper, we study whether adopting inflation targeting in emerging market economies affects the output costs of disinflation, controlling for a number of additional factors. Based on a sample of 40 emerging market economies during 1990–2017, we provide evidence that adopting inflation targeting is not associated with lower sacrifice ratios in emerging market economies. Specifically, we show that, controlling for the macroeconomic and institutional environment in EMEs, the choice of monetary regimes does not matter for disinflation costs. We also find that, when starting from low to moderate initial inflation, the speed of disinflation (shock therapy versus gradual disinflation) does not matter in these economies. Moreover, we show that trade openness is associated with lower sacrifice ratios, while we obtain opposite results for central bank independence. However, the impact of these factors on sacrifice ratios is rather small. Our main findings are robust to alternative classifications of the inflation targeting regime, alternative definitions of disinflation episodes, different peak levels of trend inflation rate, and across various specifications of the empirical model.