Imf Economic Review最新文献

This paper examines the impact of carbon pricing on the economy, with a focus on European carbon taxes and the carbon market. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, while both policies have successfully reduced emissions, the economic costs of the European carbon market are larger than for national carbon taxes. Second, we explore four factors that explain this difference: fiscal policy and revenue recycling, pass-through and sectoral coverage, spillovers and leakage, and monetary policy. Our findings point to important differences in pass-through and revenue use that help reconcile the differential effects between the two policies. Third, we document substantial regional heterogeneity in the impacts of the carbon market, which depend on the share of freely allocated emission permits and the degree of market concentration in the power sector.

While the merits of a macroprudential approach to financial regulation are now taken for granted, there is little consensus on which authority to lead the charge. It is, however, often assumed that delegating such powers to independent central banks will limit the interference of short-term political considerations and hence strengthen macroprudential capacity. This paper tests this hypothesis leveraging a newly computed index of macroprudential institutional arrangements for 58 countries in the post-global financial crisis period and finds contrasting results: when in charge, independent central banks are less likely than Ministries of Finance to tighten macroprudential policy in the expansion phase of the credit cycle. This is especially the case for more visible and unpopular tools such as loan-to-value caps compared to less visible measures such as capital requirements. However, the mere existence of financial stability committees coordinating ministries and central bank positions appears to condition macroprudential regulators’ policy reactions. The paper concludes by discussing different explanations for such institutional behavior to be tested in future work.

This paper examines the drivers of fluctuations in global inflation, defined as a common factor across monthly headline consumer price index (CPI) inflation in G7 countries, over the past half-century. We estimate a factor-augmented vector autoregression model, where a wide range of shocks, including global demand, supply, oil price, and interest rate shocks, are identified through narrative sign restrictions motivated by the predictions of a simple dynamic general equilibrium model. We report three main results. First, oil price shocks followed by global demand shocks explained the lion’s share of variation in global inflation. Second, the contribution of global demand and oil price shocks increased over time, from 56 percent during 1970–1985 to 65 percent during 2001–2022, whereas the importance of global supply shocks declined. Since the pandemic, global demand and oil price shocks have accounted for most of the variation in global inflation. Finally, oil price shocks played a much smaller role in global core CPI inflation variation, for which global supply shocks were the main source of variation. These results are robust to various sensitivity exercises, including alternative definitions of global variables, different samples of countries, and additional narrative restrictions.

We use a general open-economy wedge-accounting framework to characterize the set of shocks that can account for major exchange rate puzzles. Focusing on a near-autarky behavior of the economy, we show analytically that all standard macro economic shocks—including productivity, monetary, government spending, and markup shocks—are inconsistent with the broad properties of the macro exchange rate disconnect. News shocks about future macro economic fundamentals can generate plausible exchange rate properties. However, they show up prominently in contemporaneous asset prices, which violates the finance exchange rate disconnect. International shocks to trade costs, terms of trade and import demand, while potentially consistent with disconnect, do not robustly generate the empirical Backus–Smith, UIP and terms-of-trade properties. In contrast, the observed exchange rate behavior is consistent with risk-sharing (financial) shocks that arise from shifts in demand of foreign investors for home-currency assets, or vice versa.

This paper uses a quantitative theory to explore whether escalating geoeconomic conflict and protectionism could threaten the dominant role of the US dollar in the international monetary system. The theory emphasizes the joint determination of countries’ portfolio choices and the currency used for financing international trade, and introduces the Chinese yuan as a potential competitor to the dollar. We find that even a substantial increase in trade tariffs and protectionism would not change the dollar’s dominant role. However, policies directly supporting the yuan’s international use could end the dollar’s dominance if implemented for more than a decade. US economic sanctions on a substantial portion of dollar assets held abroad also pose a threat, but only if maintained for more than 15 years. If competing trading blocs substantively eliminated trade across blocs, a regime with bloc-specific dominant currencies becomes likely.

I separately identify and estimate the effects of innovations to the Federal Reserve’s federal funds rate, forward guidance, and large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) policies on the US economy. I extend the high-frequency identification strategy of Bauer and Swanson (NBER Macroecon Annu 37:87–155, 2023b) for monetary policy VARs by allowing each of the above policies to have possibly different economic effects. I follow Swanson (J Monetary Econ 118:32–53, 2021) and Swanson and Jayawickrema (Speeches by the Fed Chair Are More Important than FOMC Announcements: An Improved High-Frequency Measure of US Monetary Policy Shocks. University of California, Irvine, 2024) to separately identify federal funds rate, forward guidance, and LSAP components of monetary policy announcements using high-frequency interest rate changes around the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements, post-FOMC press conferences, FOMC meeting minutes releases, and speeches and testimony by the Fed Chair and Vice Chair. I estimate that federal funds rate shocks had the most powerful effects on the US economy, followed by shocks to forward guidance and, lastly, LSAPs, although the standard errors around each of these estimates are substantial.

This paper examines whether IMF lending is associated with increases in outflows to offshore financial centers (OFCs), known for bank secrecy and asset protection, relative to other international destinations. Using quarterly data from the BIS on bilateral bank deposits, we are unable to detect any positive and statistically significant effect of IMF loan disbursements on bank deposits in OFCs. The result holds even after restricting the sample to the duration of the IMF program, where disbursement quarters and non-disbursement quarters should be subject to similar degrees of macroeconomic stress. It is also robust to using the scheduled tranche of disbursements as an instrument for actual disbursements. While the effects vary by the type and conditionality of the IMF program, as well as the amount of lending, none of the effects is found to be positive and statistically significant. We also estimate whether the recent surge in emergency lending, during the COVID-19 crisis, is associated with an increase in outflows to OFCs but find no evidence to support this.

Motivated by empirical evidence, we propose an open-economy New Keynesian model with financial integration that allows financial intermediaries to hold foreign long-term bonds. We find financial integration features an amplification for a domestic monetary policy shock and a negative spillover for a foreign shock. These results hold for conventional and unconventional monetary policies. Among various aspects of financial integration, the bond duration plays a major role, and our results cannot be replicated by a standard model of perfect risk sharing between households. Finally, we observe an important interaction between financial integration and trade openness and demonstrate trade alone does not have an economically meaningful impact on monetary policy transmission.

This paper presents a novel method to estimate Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) at the micro level employing solely the information on resident business units (MNEs and domestics). The method contributes to the existing literature in two ways. Firstly, focusing on microdata referring to resident business units it overcomes the challenge associated to the availability and reliability of worldwide firm-level databases, which is currently a critical issue in BEPS measurement. Secondly, BEPS estimates at the MNE level enable the results to be applied in several research areas, such as informing specific policies, adjusting National Accounts and measuring Illicit Financial Flows. The application of the method to the Italian economy suggests significant findings: approximately 6 out of 10 MNEs shift their profits abroad; estimated BEPS amounts to slightly less than 25.9 billion euros, accounting for 1.4% of the Italian GDP at current prices in 2019.

In this paper, we highlight a new channel through which dollar fluctuations can become a self-fulfilling pro-cyclical force. We call this mechanism Imperial Circle as it makes the dollar the dominant macroeconomic variable in the context of the current international monetary system. At the core of it, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the shrinking exposure of the “real” US economy to global developments versus the growing global role of the US dollar. Dollar appreciation leads to a decline in global economic activity, which in turn benefits, in relative terms, the dollar itself, reinforcing the initial appreciation and its effects.