Volume 17, Issue 1

This paper analyzes how the formation of global value chains (GVCs) has affected the exchange rate elasticity of exports. Using a panel framework covering 46 countries over the period 1996–2012, we first find some suggestive evidence that the elasticity of real manufacturing exports to the real effective exchange rate (REER) has decreased over time. We then examine whether the formation of supply chains has affected this elasticity using different measures of GVC integration. Intuitively, as countries are more integrated in global production processes, a currency depreciation only improves competitiveness of a fraction of the value of final good exports. In line with this intuition, we find evidence that GVC participation reduces the REER elasticity of manufacturing exports by 22 percent, on average.

Using data from the Multinational Time Use Study, this paper documents the trend and level of time allocation, with a focus on home hours, for the US and European countries. Three patterns emerge. First, home hours per person have declined in both the US and European countries over the past 50 years. Second, female time allocation contributes more to the difference in time allocation per person between the US and European countries than does male time allocation. Third, the time allocation between the US and European countries is more similar for prime-age individuals than for young and old individuals.

We investigate the effects of assuming a fully permanent income shock in a standard buffer-stock consumption model, when the true income process is only highly persistent . This assumption is computationally very advantageous, and thus often used, but might be problematic due to the implied misspecification. Across most parameterizations, and using the method of simulated moments, we find a relatively large estimation bias in preference parameters. For example, assuming a unit root process when the true AR(1) coefficient is 0.97, leads to an estimation bias of up to 30 percent in the constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) coefficient. If used for calibration, misspecified preferences could, for example, lead to a serious misjudgment in the value of social insurance mechanisms. Economic behavior, such as the marginal propensity to consume (MPC), of households simulated from the estimated (misspecified) model is, on the other hand, rather close to that from the correctly specified model.

We use wavelet analysis to conclude that individual U.S. states’ business cycles are very well synchronized. We also find evidence of a strong and significant correlation between business cycle dissimilitudes and the distance between each pair of states, consistent to gravity type mechanisms where distance affects trade. Trade, in turn, increases business cycle synchronization, while a higher degree of industry specialization is associated with a higher dissimilitude of the state cycle with the aggregate economy. Finally, there is evidence that business cycle dissimilitudes have been decreasing with time, consistent with the previous findings coupled with the idea that information and communications technology make distances smaller.

We aim to investigate the simultaneous and interacted effects of central bank qualitative and quantitative communication on private inflation expectations, measured with survey and market-based measures. The effects of ECB inflation projections and Governing Council members’ speeches are identified through an instrumental-variables estimation using a principal component analysis to generate relevant instruments. We find that ECB projections have a positive effect on current-year forecasts, and that ECB projections and speeches are substitutes at longer horizons. Moreover, ECB speeches and the ECB rate reinforce the effect of ECB projections when they are consistent, and convey the same signal about inflationary pressures.

This paper develops a tractable multi-sector endogenous growth model with labor market friction and human capital accumulation to analyze the underlying link between economic growth and labor market institutions. The model, calibrated based on the Japanese structural transformation episodes, demonstrates that lifetime employment system has contributed to unprecedentedly rapid economic growth, by enhancing human capital accumulation and facilitating physical capital formation. The counterfactual experiment finds that had the job durations of a typical worker been 1 year (roughly one tenth of the actual average job duration) for 1960–1990 in the Japanese labor market, the non-agricultural GDP per capita in 1990 would have accounted for 71 percent of the actual values.

Feldstein-Horioka hypothesis states that if there is perfect capital mobility, low correlation between domestic investment and savings should be observed. However, empirical analysis failed to confirm the hypothesis. This study attempts to shed a new light on international capital mobility by incorporating the effect of the fiscal balance and the financial balance. Specifically, for a panel of 161 countries over the 1990–2013 period, the extended model is tested in comparison with the existing models of capital mobility. At the aggregate level, strong support is found for the extended model; while, at the region disaggregated level, compared to the existing models the hypothesis of capital mobility holds for a larger number of regions. Our model and estimates are additionally extended to account for the fact that the above mentioned relationships, are conditional on the country’s level of financial development.

We study two-sector R&D model with endogenous human capital accumulation. Allowing for fractional human capital spillover from parents to their offspring, which are subject to congestion in fertility rate, we establish non-monotonic relations between population growth and economic growth. These non-monotonic relations, which are polynomial in general, are determined by the base level of human capital spillover and the magnitude of the congestion effect: a U shape relation can arise under low congestion factor, whereas a hump shape may present for high congestion factor. Hence this work contributes to the recent line of modified R&D-based growth models, aimed to align theory with the mixed empirical data on the relation between population growth and economic prosperity.

A sharp increase in unemployment accompanied by a relatively muted response of inflation during the Great Recession and a consecutive inflationless recovery cast further doubts on the very existence of the Phillips curve as a systemic relation between real activity and inflation. With the aid of dynamic model averaging, this paper aims to highlight that this relation resurfaces if (i) inflationary pressures are captured by a richer set of real activity measures, and (ii) one accounts for the existence of a non-linear response of inflation to the driving variable. Based on data for the US and other G7 countries, our results show that the relation between economic activity and inflation is quite sturdy when one allows for more complex assessment of the former. We find that measures of economic activity describe inflation developments to a varying degree across time and space. This can blur the picture of inflation–real economy comovements in models where only a single variable of economic activity is considered. The output gap is often outperformed by unemployment-related variables. Our results also confirm a weakening of the inflation–activity relationship (i.e. a flattening of the Phillips curve) in the last decade that is robust both across activity measures and across countries.