We show that fluctuations in the ratio of non-core to core funding in the banking systems of advanced economies are largely driven by three global factors of both real and financial natures, with country-specific factors playing only a minor role. Exchange rate flexibility helps insulate the non-core to core ratio from such global factors. This insulation is stronger in periods away from global crises. Tighter prudential regulations appear to have a complementary effect to exchange rate insulation.

Using a new panel dataset of about 140 thousand Portuguese firms during 2006-2019, we measure the effects of globalization on firm-level performance along four dimensions: ownership of capital, employment of foreign-seasoned managers, and participation in export and import markets. Once at least one of these channels is active, firms are larger, less leveraged, employ better qualified workers, and pay higher hourly wages. We also uncover a pecking order of effects, with export-market participation having generally larger positive effects on productivity and negative effects on unit labor costs. All four channels interact, sometimes complementing, sometimes substituting one another. For instance, foreign ownership boosts exports at the extensive margin while being an importer and/or having a foreign-experienced manager help at the intensive margin; conversely, the marginal productivity gains of foreign-ownership are greatly reduced when the firm is already an exporter. Breaking down the effects of each channel by firm size, we show that smaller firms stand the most to gain from export market participation and foreign-ownership.

Using a sample of almost 600 banks in Latin America, we show that capital account liberalization lowers the share of equity and raises the share of interbank funding in total liabilities of the banking system. These shifts are mostly due to large banks; smaller banks, instead, increase their resort to retail funding by offering higher average deposit interest rates than larger banks. We also find significant differences in the behavior of banks with seemingly greater information opacity. These findings have positive implications for macro-prudential regulation. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Leading economists propose solutions to the problems of globalization Globalization has expanded economic opportunities throughout the world, but it has also left many people feeling dispossessed, disenfranchised, and angry. Luis Catao and Maurice Obstfeld bring together some of today's top economists to assess the benefits, costs, and daunting policy challenges of globalization. This timely and accessible book combines incisive analyses of the anatomy of globalization with innovative and practical policy ideas that can help to make it work better for everyone. Meeting Globalization's Challenges draws on new research to examine the channels through which international trade and the diffusion of technology have enhanced the wealth of nations while also producing unequal benefits within and across countries. The book provides needed perspectives on the complex interplay of trade, deindustrialization, inequality, and the troubling surge of nationalism and populism-perspectives that are essential for crafting sound economic policies. It tackles the vexing issue of how to most effectively compensate globalization's losers and reintegrate them into job markets. The book also explores how to design social insurance policies that can mitigate the risks posed by automation and offshoring, such as mass unemployment and its inherent dangers to democracy. With a foreword by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde and a history-rich synthesis by Catao and Obstfeld of main policy takeaways, Meeting Globalization's Challenges features contributions by Ufuk Akcigit, Edward Alden, Francois Bourguignon, Angus Deaton, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Jeffry Frieden, Gordon H. Hanson, Keyu Jin, Lori G. Kletzer, Anne Krueger, Paul Krugman, Nina Pavcnik, Andres Rodriguez-Clare, Dani Rodrik, Michael Trebilcock, Laura D. Tyson, Martin Wolf, and Ernesto Zedillo.

For at least two decades, scholars and other observers have understood that international economic integration—globalization—has in the past, and could in the present, give rise to a backlash.1 Over the past few years, in much of the advanced industrial world, we have gotten a sense of what that backlash looks like. Political discontent has been central to the globalization backlash. Dissatisfaction has taken the form of large increases in voting for extremist political parties, the emergence of new parties and movements, and challenges from within existing parties. Large numbers of voters have rejected existing political institutions, parties, and politicians, often in favor of “populists” of the Right or Left whose common themes include skepticism about economic integration and resentment of ruling elites. In the United States, both Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump ran on programs that were openly hostile to international trade, investment, and finance; Trump also campaigned in favor of tighter controls on immigration. In Europe, the populist turn of the Right has largely centered on antagonism to European integration and immigration; the populism of the Left has mostly attacked austerity programs associated

The recent Eurozone debt crisis has witnessed sharp decouplings in cross-country bond yields without commensurate shifts in relative fundamentals. We rationalize this phenomenon in a model wherein countries with different fundamentals are on different equilibrium paths all along, but which become discernible only during bad times. Key ingredients are cross-country differences in the volatility and persistence of fiscal revenue shocks combined with their unobservability by investors. Differences in the cyclicality of fiscal revenues affect the option value of borrowing and resulting default risk; unobservability of fiscal shocks makes bond pricing responsive to market actions. When tax revenues are hit by common positive shocks, no country increases net debt and interest spreads stay put. When a common negative revenue shock hits and is persistent, low volatility countries with higher default costs adjust spending, while others resort to borrowing. This difference signals a relative deterioration of fiscal outlooks, interest spreads jump and decoupling takes place.

Using a sample of over 700 banks in Latin America, we show that international financial liberalization lowers bank capital ratios and increases the shares of short-term funding.Following liberalization, large banks substitute interbank borrowing for equity and long-term funding, whereas small banks increase the proportions of retail funding in their liabilities, which have been particularly vulnerable to flight-to-quality during periods of financial distress in much of Latin America.We also find evidence that riskier bank funding in the aftermath of financial liberalizations is exacerbated by asymmetric information, which rises on geographical distance and the opacity of balance sheets.

High external deficits in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are widely regarded as culprits of the post-2008 financial crises in the eurozone. This paper examines the main drivers of those imbalances and discusses how the mix of macroeconomic adjustment and structural reforms implemented in the last few years has affected the evolution of those countries’ external positions. The analysis combines modern theories of the current account and of the real exchange rate with panel data regressions to shed light on the standing of those economies’ external “competitiveness” broadly defined.

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the context of dynamic heterogeneous panel data models with cross-sectionally dependent errors and illustrate, by means of Monte Carlo experiments, that they perform well in small samples. On the empirical side, using data on a sample of 40 countries (grouped into advanced and developing) over the 1965-2010 period, we find no evidence for a universally applicable threshold effect in the relationship between public debt and economic growth, once we account for the impact of global factors and their spillover effects. Regardless of the threshold, however, we find significant negative long-run effects of public debt build-up on output growth. Provided that public debt is on a downward trajectory, a country with a high level of debt can grow just as fast as its peers. for helpful comments and suggestions. The views in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.

We re-assess the view that sovereigns with a history of default are charged only a small and/or short-lived premium on the interest rate warranted by observed fundamentals. Our reassessment uses a metric of such a “default premium” (DP) that is consistent with asymmetric information models and nests previous metrics, and applies it to a much broader dataset relative to earlier studies. We find a sizeable and persistent DP: in 1870-1938, it averaged 250 bps upon market re-entry, tapering to around 150 bps five years out; in 1970- 2011 the respective estimates are about 400 and 200 bps. We also find that: (i) these estimates are robust to many controls including on actual haircuts; (ii) the DP accounts for as much as 60% of the sovereign spread within five years of market re-entry; (iii) the DP rises with market exclusion spells. These findings help reconnect theory and evidence on why sovereign defaults are infrequent and earlier debt settlements are desirable.

We re-appraise the cross-country evidence on the dollarization of financial systems in emerging market economies. Amidst striking heterogeneity of patterns across regions, we identify a broad global trend towards financial sector de-dollarization from the early 2000s to the eve of the global financial crisis of 2008–09. Since then, de-dollarization has broadly stalled or even reversed in many economies. Yet a few of them have continued to de-dollarize. This suggests that domestic factors are also important and interact with global factors. To gain insight into such an interaction, we examine the experience of Peru since the early 1990s and find that low global interest rates, low global risk-aversion, and high commodity prices have fostered de-dollarization. Domestic macro-prudential measures that raise the relative cost of domestic dollar loans and the introduction and adherence to inflation targeting have also been key.

How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices? We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect. A key novelty is that the real exchange rate and the terms of trade can move in opposite directions in response to world food price shocks. This exacerbates the policy trade-off between stabilizing output prices vis a vis the real exchange rate, to an extent that depends on risk sharing and the price elasticity of exports. We characterize implications for dynamics, optimal monetary policy, and the relative performance of practical monetary rules. While CPI targeting and expected CPI targeting can dominate PPI targeting if international risk sharing is perfect, even seemingly mild departures from the latter make PPI targeting a winner.

We re-assess the view that sovereigns with a history of default are charged only a small and/or short-lived premium on the interest rate warranted by observed fundamentals. Our reassessment uses a metric of such a “default premium” (DP) that is consistent with asymmetric information models and nests previous metrics, and applies it to a much broader dataset relative to earlier studies. We find a sizeable and persistent DP: in 1870-1938, it averaged 250 bps upon market re-entry, tapering to around 150 bps five years out; in 19702011 the respective estimates are about 400 and 200 bps. We also find that: (i) these estimates are robust to many controls including on actual haircuts; (ii) the DP accounts for as much as 60% of the sovereign spread within five years of market re-entry; (iii) the DP rises with market exclusion spells. These findings help reconnect theory and evidence on why sovereign defaults are infrequent and earlier debt settlements are desirable. JEL Classification Numbers: F34; G15; H63; N20

This is a thought-provoking paper on a timely topic. The past decade has witnessed large swings in world commodity prices as global economic growth waxed and waned. While commodity prices have been better behaved over the past two years as global growth limped along, this state of affairs may not endure. As the global recovery strengthens, we may soon have to revisit the vexing issue of how national monetary policies should respond to imported commodity inflation – particularly, if food prices should again become the villain of the piece.

How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices?We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect.A key novelty is that the real exchange rate and the terms of trade can move in opposite directions in response to world food price shocks.This exacerbates the policy trade-off between stabilizing output prices vis a vis the real exchange rate, to an extent that depends on risk sharing and the price elasticity of exports.Under perfect risk sharing, targeting the headline CPI welfare-dominates targeting the PPI if the variance of food price shocks is not too small and the export price elasticity is realistically high.In such a case, however, targeting forecast CPI is a superior choice.With incomplete risk sharing, PPI targeting is clearly a winner.

The recent Eurozone debt crisis has witnessed sharp decouplings in cross-country bond yields without commensurate shifts in relative fundamentals. We rationalize this phenomenon in a model wherein countries with different fundamentals are on different equilibrium paths all along, but which become discernable only during bad times. Key ingredients are cross-country differences in the volatility and persistence of fiscal revenue shocks combined with asymmetric information on country-specific fiscal shocks. Differences in the cyclicality of fiscal revenues affect the option value of borrowing and resulting default risk; unobservability of fiscal shocks makes bond pricing responsive to market actions. When tax revenues are hit by common positive shocks, no country increases net debt and interest spreads stay put. When a common negative revenue shock hits and is persistent, low volatility countries adjust spending while others resort to borrowing. This difference signals a relative deterioration of fiscal outlooks, interest spreads jump and decoupling takes place.

We examine the determinants of external crises, focusing on the role of foreign liabilities and their composition. Using a variety of statistical tools and comprehensive data spanning 1970–2011, we find that the ratio of net foreign liabilities to GDP is a significant crisis predictor. This is primarily due to the net position in debt instruments—the effect of net equity liabilities is weaker and net FDI liabilities seem, if anything, an offset factor. We also find that: i) breaking down net external debt into its gross asset and liability counterparts does not add significant explanatory power to crisis prediction; ii) the current account is a powerful predictor; iii) foreign exchange reserves reduce the likelihood of crisis more than other foreign asset holdings; and iv) a parsimonious probit containing those and a handful of other variables has good predictive performance in- and out-of-sample. The latter result stems largely from our focus on external crises sensu stricto.