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Rare Shocks vs. Non-linearities: What Drives Extreme Events in the Economy? Some Empirical Evidence
Franta, Michal
A small-scale vector autoregression (VAR) is used to shed some light on the roles of extreme shocks and non-linearities during stress events observed in the economy. The model focuses on the link between credit/financial markets and the real economy and is estimated on US quarterly data for the period 1984–2013. Extreme shocks are accounted for by assuming t-distributed reduced-form shocks. Non-linearity is allowed by the possibility of regime switch in the shock propagation mechanism. Strong evidence for fat tails in error distributions is found. Moreover, the results suggest that accounting for extreme shocks rather than explicit modeling of non-linearity contributes to the explanatory power of the model. Finally, it is shown that the accuracy of density forecasts improves if non-linearities and shock distributions with fat tails are considered.
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Habit Formation in Consumption: A Meta-Analysis
Havránek, Tomáš ; Rusnák, Marek ; Sokolova, Anna
We examine 567 estimates of habit formation from 69 studies published in peer-reviewed journals. In contrast to previous results for most fields of empirical economics, we find no publication bias in the literature. The median estimated strength of habit formation equals 0.4, but the estimates vary widely both within and across studies. We use Bayesian model averaging to assign a pattern to this variance while taking into account model uncertainty. Studies using micro data report consistently smaller estimates than macro studies: 0.1 vs. 0.6 on average. The difference remains large when we control for 21 other study aspects, such as data frequency, geographical coverage, variable definition, estimation approach, and publication characteristics. We also find that estimates of external habit formation tend to be substantially larger than those of internal habits, that evidence for habits weakens when researchers use higher data frequencies, and that estimates differ systematically across countries.
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Bank Competition and Financial Stability: Much Ado about Nothing?
Havránek, Tomáš ; Žigraiová, Diana
The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank competition should affect financial stability, and dozens of researchers have attempted to evaluate the relationship empirically. We collect 598 estimates of the competition-stability nexus reported in 31 studies and analyze the literature using meta-analysis methods. We control for 35 aspects of study design and employ Bayesian model averaging to tackle the resulting model uncertainty. Our findings suggest that the definition of financial stability and bank competition used by researchers influences their results in a systematic way. The choice of data, estimation methodology, and control variables also affects the reported coefficient. We find evidence for moderate publication bias. Taken together, the estimates reported in the literature suggest little interplay between competition and stability, even when corrected for publication bias and potential misspecifications.
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Cross-Country Heterogeneity in Intertemporal Substitution
Havránek, Tomáš ; Horváth, Roman ; Iršová, Zuzana ; Rusnák, Marek
We collect 2,735 estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption from 169 published studies that cover 104 countries during different time periods. The estimates vary substantially from country to country, even after controlling for 30 aspects of study design. Our results suggest that income and asset market participation are the most effective factors in explaining the heterogeneity: households in rich countries and countries with high stock market participation substitute a larger fraction of consumption intertemporally in response to changes in expected asset returns. Micro-level studies that focus on sub-samples of rich households or asset holders also find systematically larger values of the elasticity.
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International Reserves: Facing Model Uncertainty
Benecká, Soňa ; Komárek, Luboš
The abundant literature on the competing motives for holding international reserves stresses different factors, giving rise to a problem called model uncertainty. In this paper we search for the most important determinants of reserve holdings using data for 104 countries in 1999–2010 and evaluate their importance using Bayesian model averaging (BMA). We enrich the ongoing empirical discussion by examining the role of financial globalization and monetary policy and by introducing new variables and searching for alternatives to the traditional ones. The results confirm that trade openness and the broad-money-to-GDP ratio are the key determinants with a positive link to the level of reserves. On the other hand, financial development seems to lower the need for reserves.
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What We Know About Monetary Policy Transmission in the Czech Republic: Collection of Empirical Results
Babecká Kucharčuková, Oxana ; Franta, Michal ; Hájková, Dana ; Král, Petr ; Kubicová, Ivana ; Podpiera, Anca ; Saxa, Branislav
This paper concentrates on describing the available empirical findings on monetary policy transmission in the Czech Republic. Besides the overall impact of monetary policy on inflation and output, it is useful to study its individual channels, in particular the interest rate channel, the exchange rate channel, and the wealth channel. The results confirm that the transmission of monetary impulses to the real economy works in an intuitive direction and to an intuitive extent. Our analyses show, however, that the global financial and economic crisis might have somewhat slowed and weakened the transmission. We found an indication of such a change in the functioning of the interest rate channel, where elevated risk premiums played a major role.
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Sources of Asymmetric Shocks: The Exchange Rate or Other Culprits?
Skořepa, Michal ; Komárek, Luboš
We analyze and quantify the determinants of asymmetric shocks showing up in the form of medium-term real exchange rate (RER) changes. First, we discuss sources of asymmetric shocks causing exchange rate variability and the role of the RER as a shock generator. Second, we use data for 21 advanced and late-transition economies to gauge the extent to which medium-term bilateral real exchange rate variability can be explained by various fundamental factors. Using Bayesian model averaging, we find that out of 22 factors under consideration, four types of dissimilarities within a given pair of economies are likely to be included in the true model: dissimilarities as regards (i) financial development, (ii) per capita income growth, (iii) central bank independence, and (iv) the structure of the economy. A regression based on these four factors indicates that these factors explain about one third of the behavior of the three-year RER variability for the whole sample and almost half of the behavior of the three-year RER variability for the RERs involving specifically the euro. The remaining part of the total variability represents an estimate of the influence of the exchange rate market itself (together with the influence of fundamental price level or nominal exchange rate determinants not captured by the regressors used).
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Economic Research Bulletin (2013, No.2). No. 2, Vol. 11, November 2013, Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Policy
Česká národní banka
This edition of the Research Bulletin focuses on four articles which analyse the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy. The first article examines the interactions between monetary and fiscal policies in six industrialised countries during 1980–2008. Employing a novel empirical framework, the article documents changes in monetary-fiscal interactions over time. Next, these changes are linked to the monetary policy regime set-up. The second article assesses the extent to which fiscal discretion in the Czech Republic contributed to smoothing the real economy over the business cycle in the past decade. Using several alternative approaches, the results suggest that fiscal discretionary measures have been procyclical, that is, have amplified business cycle fluctuations. The third article analyses in an empirical framework how unexpected changes to government spending and revenues affect the Czech economy. The article detects certain regularities and at the same time shows the limits of the existing identification methods when applied to short Czech fiscal data. The fourth article takes a complementary approach by building a dynamic stochastic general equilib rium (DSGE) model to quantify the effects of fiscal measures on the expenditure and revenue sides of the Czech economy. The model, which is still rather in the development stage, demonstrates the potential for calculating fiscal multipliers and simulating the macroeconomic effects of fiscal measures for individual categories of the government budget.
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The Effect of Non-Linearity Between Credit Conditions and Economic Activity on Density Forecasts
Franta, Michal
This paper examines the effect of non-linearities on density forecasting. It focuses on the relationship between credit markets and the rest of the economy. The possible non-linearity of this relationship is captured by a threshold vector autoregressive model estimated on the US data using Bayesian methods. Density forecasts thus account for the uncertainty in all model parameters and possible future regime changes. It is shown that considering nonlinearity can improve the probabilistic assessment of the economic outlook. Moreover, three illustrative examples are discussed to shed some light on the possible practical applicability of density forecasts derived from non-linear models.
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Structural Reforms and Economic Growth: A Meta-Analysis
Babecký, Jan ; Havránek, Tomáš
This paper evaluates the impact of structural reforms, mainly liberalization and privatiza- tion, on economic growth. To provide stylized facts on how such reforms worked in the past, we quantitatively review 60 studies that estimate the relation between reforms and growth empirically. These studies examine structural reforms carried out in 26 transition and post-transition countries around the world. Our results show that a typical reform caused costs in the short run, but had strong positive effects on long-run growth. Reforms focused on external liberalization proved to be more beneficial than other types of reform in both the short and long run. The findings hold even after correction for publication bias and misspecifications present in some primary studies
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