Economic Systems最新文献

The international propagation of uncertainty shocks from the United States is not fully understood, despite extensive literature on domestic effects. This study examines the impact of U.S. financial, macroeconomic, and policy uncertainty on credit growth, stock prices, economic activity, bond yields, and inflation in five major recipients of U.S. foreign investment from 1950 to 2019. Findings highlight the pivotal role of U.S. financial uncertainty in driving global business cycles. Increased uncertainties in the U.S. financial sector negatively affect global economic activity by impeding credit and stock prices, limiting funding opportunities for firms and households worldwide. This underscores the significant influence of U.S. financial markets on global economic fluctuations.

Existing research focuses on the crowding out effect of local government debt on the quantity of corporate bank loans, but hardly explores the impact of local government debt on bank loan prices. This paper empirically finds that a rise in local government debt increases bank loan prices, based on the loan-level data of Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2018. This result is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. Besides, local government debt is found to affect the costs of unsecured loans and short-term loans more strongly. Hence, in response to the expansion of local government debt, enterprises may replace transaction loans with relationship loans to control financing costs. The mechanism tests show that local government debt increases loan prices by increasing both financial constraints and environmental uncertainty. The paper provides new insights into the impact of local government debt on corporate financing.

Using a dataset obtained by matching and merging three major databases, this paper investigates the impact of counterfeiting on firm survival in a sample of Italian manufacturing firms established between 2004–2006. This paper contributes to the literature on firm survival, which has identified firm-level characteristics, macroeconomic conditions and institutional features as key contributing factors to growth and survival probability among firms. The topic is hugely significant since this illegal competition may displace and damage the firms that produce genuine products. Overall, our analysis finds that the presence of counterfeit products negatively affects the chances of firms surviving. Moreover, after performing an in-depth analysis, we find that the presence of counterfeit products affects firms operating in lower tech sectors and smaller in size. Our evidence, which is robust to an alternative measure of counterfeiting and different estimation methods, provides room for policy interventions.

Economic policies have been shown to affect the macroeconomy in a different fashion when a sizeable shadow economy is explicitly taken into account. But, in spite of its seemingly high relevance, no intermediate-Macroeconomics textbook posits a discussion on this topic. In this paper, we seek to make a contribution by extending an otherwise conventional IS-MR-PC model along the same lines of the approach used in Blanchard’s highly acclaimed textbook (Blanchard, 2016a) to include an informal sector. We find that this two-sector model is capable of qualitatively reproducing the main basic results obtained in this literature. Therefore, importantly, this work provides a toolkit intended for undergraduate students, practitioners, policymakers, and, in general, nonspecialists on the cost-benefit analysis of economic policies in the presence of a significant underground economy.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the dynamic relationships binding European financial market indices over the decade 2013–2022. In particular, we estimate a quantile VAR to study spillovers in different volatility scenarios using a measure of realised volatility robust to jumps and microstructural noise. Our results reveal that, especially for low quantiles, the degree of implied interconnectedness between the indices is affected negatively by the Brexit and the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while it augments after the Covid-19 pandemic occurrence. We also found that the EU central markets (Belgian, Dutch, French, and German) are important for the stability of the Eurozone system when uncertainty increases. On the other hand, the Italian and Portuguese markets transmit spillovers when volatility is high, whereas when the volatility is moderate or reduced, they absorb spillovers. The role of Scandinavian markets is mixed since the Finnish and Swedish markets are spillover emitters, while the Danish and the Norwegian emit only when the volatility is high. Our empirical analysis provides valuable information to policymakers, practitioners, and financial institutions.

This paper identifies foreign cross-listings as a potential drain on reserves and a source of vulnerability to capital reversals for host nations. Simulations of a reasonably calibrated portfolio choice model demonstrate that restrictions on the outflow side of capital markets are most effective in mitigating this vulnerability for Jamaica. A panel data and Jamaica specific empirical analysis that distinguishes between outflow and inflow restrictions shows that it is inflow, and not outflow, restrictions that are negatively related to the total amount of capital in the economy. Outflow restrictions, therefore, are preferable to inflow restrictions as they prevent reserve drainage without stunting capital market growth. Institution-level evidence, however, indicates that outflow restrictions limit local financial institutions’ ability to hedge local and global risks.

Using a unique district-level panel dataset, we investigate the effect of banking system penetration on financial inclusion in Ghana. To purge potential endogeneity bias in the underlying relationship, we exploit a change in the policy environment of the Ghanaian banking system to instrument for bank branch expansion. We show, first, that the switch from the compartmentalized system of banking to the universal banking system in Ghana has resulted in an expansion of banks’ branch network, which has benefited hitherto financially less developed districts. Second, our instrumental variable evidence suggests that banking system penetration promotes financial inclusion—notably, access to bank credit and to formal credit. The results of this paper provide important insights into the role of policy in enhancing financial inclusion.

Land is considered as one of the most widely prevalent forms of collateral in credit markets of developing economies. It has also been observed that the landless segment do get loans. Using a nationally representative data for Indian households, the present study examines whether assets other than land, that is, physical and financial assets enable the landless to obtain loans. We also study if there is any association between different types of assets and purpose of loan, which represents immediate and direct return from projects. We introduce instrumental variables to tackle the issues of endogeneity in a Heckman Probit model (sample selection model). Results suggest that physical assets act as substitute to land not only in getting credit from any source but also particularly in getting formal credit. However, financial instruments serve dual roles: these are both substitutable and complementary to land in the formal sector. Further, a complementarity is observed between land and productive investments in formal sector. On one hand, our study explains why looking beyond land as collateral is important for households with limited immovable property while on the other hand some of our findings re-establish the dominance of land.

We investigated the resilience of exporting manufacturing sectors during the Brazilian domestic recession (2014–2016) using data from various sources at the Brazilian state-sector level. We propose a new identification strategy that gauges a sector’s exposure to the recession by examining its current position in the international demand cycle, deemed exogenous from the viewpoint of a local exporter in Brazil. Following the two-year Brazilian recession, we observe a persistent negative effect on exporting sectors that are more reliant on domestic economic activity (and thus more vulnerable to the domestic recession) than those less reliant on domestic economic activity (less exposed to the domestic recession). Sectors with lower labor productivity and higher technological intensity were less resilient during the domestic recession, as revenues declined and financing costs increased substantially. Given the critical role of exports in regional economic growth, this study contributes to the formulation of public policies by documenting the economic performance of exporting sectors during periods of economic stress.

This paper analyzes cooperation between governments to set up a public firm and decide what percentage of that firm each of them owns. A symmetric model is assumed, with two countries and one domestic private firm in each country. Firms produce a homogeneous good and have quadratic cost functions. The counterintuitive result emerges that there are two equilibria, in each of which one government has a higher percentage of ownership in the public firm than the other. We extend the analysis to consider other factors that may influence the distribution of ownership of the firm between the countries: Heterogeneous goods, constant marginal cost of production, inequality in the number of private firms existing in each country, and different numbers of consumers in each country.