Open Economies Review最新文献

Profits accruing to foreign-owned firms can either be repatriated to the origin country or reinvested in the host country. Using bilateral country-level FDI earnings flow data, this paper empirically investigates what determines how much is reinvested in a given country. Panel data regressions are estimated on OECD country pairs for the time period 2005-2020 with origin and host country fixed effects. Macroeconomic conditions, institutional factors, agency problems, taxation, and global economic factors are considered as explanatory variables. Lagged independent variables are used as instruments in a 2SLS specification. The main finding is that geographical distance and the world GDP growth rate reduce reinvestment rates, while a shared legal origin increases them.

DSGE models based on New Keynesian principles, which have been extended to allow for banking, the zero lower bound on interest rates (ZLB), and varying price duration, can account well for recent macroeconomic behavior across a variety of economies. These models find that active fiscal policy can contribute to macroeconomic stability and welfare by reducing the frequency of hitting the ZLB. Fiscal policy can also share the stabilisation role with monetary policy, whose effectiveness under the ZLB is much reduced.

In this paper, I construct a dataset that measures the composition of 20 emerging market economies’ external liabilities across different instruments and currencies and at varying time spans from 2004 to 2019. The dataset is constructed from actual rather than synthetic data and shows the currency composition of the debts at the sectoral level. The new dataset confirms that emerging market economies have far less foreign currency exposure than historical averages, as their positions in foreign currencies have improved at both the aggregate and sector levels. External financing sources in emerging markets have shifted from foreign currency debt to foreign direct investment, portfolio equity investments, and local currency debt. At the same time, the countries have accumulated foreign currency assets. Also, only the nonfinancial corporate sectors in emerging markets have significant net foreign currency debt at the sector level. Another important empirical finding is the high correlation between the external liabilities in the form of equity and local currency debt and the depth of capital markets—stock and bond markets. This suggests that the original sin dissipation—local currency external liabilities in emerging economies, as opposed to the Original Sin hypothesis—is related to the growth in capital markets in emerging market economies.

This paper studies the stability properties of inflation-targeting interest rate rules in an economy with regulatory capital requirements. We derive the conditions for rational expectations equilibrium determinacy in a sticky-price model augmented with the cost channel of monetary policy transmission. We find that when tightening Basel II-type capital regulations, strict inflation targeting leads to significant expansions in regions of determinacy. This result is attributed to the supply side of credit markets, and especially to the procyclical nature of bank leverage and the restricted interest rate pass-through. However, when banks maintain capital ratios beyond the required thresholds, strict inflation targeting suffers from considerable shrinking regions of determinacy. Moreover, excessive bank capital holdings may give rise to self-fulfilling business cycles. The availability of countercyclical capital buffers, as proposed by Basel III, and/or a flexible inflation targeting regime offer an antidote to these problems.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered major disruptions in international capital flows, the latest of several extreme episodes since the global financial crisis (GFC). This paper presents a new monthly dataset of gross capital flows for 47 countries, available publicly and updated quarterly, that is better suited to the identification of sudden shocks than quarterly Balance of Payments data. Leveraging on this dataset, we revisit the occurrence and drivers of extreme episodes since the GFC, asking whether COVID-19 significantly changed recent findings of a weaker role of global factors. The answer is no. Rather, the exceptional spikes in global factors during the initial stages of COVID should have predicted many more sudden stops than experienced. Instead, pull factors such as pre-COVID vulnerabilities and pandemic-specific factors appear key in explaining the identified cross-country heterogeneity.

Developing a two-country oligopoly model with firm heterogeneity, this paper examines the relationship among market size, the Home Market Effect, and the gravity equation. We show that in the long-run with free entry, the Home Market Effect holds, namely, more firms locate in the large-sized country. This leads the large-sized country to be a net exporter of the oligopoly good. In the short-run with restricted entry, the Home Market Effect no longer holds and the large-sized country becomes a net importer of the oligopoly good. These results suggest that the theoretical predictions of Feenstra et al. (Can J Econ 34(2):430–447, 2001) survive firm heterogeneity.

We used a Bayesian dynamic factor model (BDFM) to examine the share of variance explained by the European and country factors for 59 regions in Eurozone countries in the period from 1992 to 2020. The BDFM output facilitated the construction of a criterion that enables the assessment of the cost of participation in the European Monetary Union, which is directly related to the optimum currency area theory. Over the examined period, we observed business cycle divergence, with 46 regions experiencing a drop in the share of variance explained by the European factor from 1992–2005 to 2006–2020. However, the analysis over shorter time spans demonstrated that all the regions decoupled from the European business cycle. The results contradict the predictions of "The European Commission View". On the one hand, two predictions stemming from "The Krugman View" are supported by the results: the European regions experienced a slight increase in sectoral specialization, and they experienced business cycle divergence. On the other hand, the data does not support the notion that the ongoing specialization was the underlying cause of this divergence.

This paper examines German and foreign bank factors that can explain net flows of cross-border central bank liquidity between Germany and the rest of the euro area. Using data from the German component of Eurosystem’s real-time gross settlement system TARGET2 and BankFocus for the period between 2009 and 2021, we provide empirical evidence that only few balance sheet items and profit and loss accounts affect net flows with Germany. We control for bilateral bank-specific relationships and time-varying macroeconomic country effects in our regressions. In general, German bank factors seem to be more important than characteristics of foreign banks. A German bank that exhibits relatively high claims against central banks seems to attract less additional central bank liquidity from abroad than a German bank with fewer existing central bank claims. Net claims against central banks, which also control for liabilities, have no effect on net transactions in TARGET2. However, higher overall liquidity of a German credit institution corresponds to additional net inflows. Foreign bank factors only matter for central bank payments and intragroup payments. We also document heterogeneities across different types of transactions which influence the German TARGET2 balance. While customer payments, interbank payments and central bank payments have increased net flows to Germany in sum, intragroup payments and ancillary systems’ transactions have led to net outflows.

This study examines how the productivity of an exporter influences the choice of cash-in-advance (CIA) payment. Using the transaction-level data of Turkish textile and clothing exports from 2009 to 2017 merged with the firm-level information, we find that the relationship between the exporter’s productivity and the likelihood that the exporter uses the CIA is nonlinear. An exporter with higher productivity is more likely to choose the CIA; however, this tendency is mitigated among the highest-productivity exporters. We build a parsimonious theoretical model considering firm productivity heterogeneity and provide a rationale for those empirical findings. Furthermore, the CIA is more commonly used for exports in small transactions and to countries with a weak rule of law. We also show that the CIA is more likely to be used for destination countries with low gross domestic products per capita. In addition, the CIA is used more commonly when the value of the Lira is low against the destination country’s currency.

This paper investigates the influence of economic institutions in the debt-growth nexus. Using data from 1970 to 2020 on Nigeria, the paper extends the econometric literature by deploying cointegration techniques that account for structural breaks. A long equilibrium relationship was found among debt, growth, economic institutions and associated variables. The effect of debt on growth was found to be positive up to a threshold of 13.62% and 27.19% of gross domestic product in the short and long-run respectively, beyond which its effect becomes negative and significant. Growth is more sensitive to economic institutions than debt, underscoring the criticality of institutions.