infonet-economy

This paper develops a model of honest rational professional forecasters with different abilities and submits it to empirical verification using data on 3- and 12-months ahead forecasts of short-term interest rates and of long-term bond yields for up to 33 countries collected by Consensus Economics. The main finding is that in many countries, less-precise forecasters weigh public…

Media reports suggest that the recent Chinese anti-corruption campaign adversely influenced business prospects of globally operating luxury goods firms. This paper empirically tests this hypothesis. This paper finds that risk-adjusted returns on stock portfolios consisting of luxury goods firms with high exposure to China shifted persistently downward around the launch of the anti-…

Contrary to widespread presumption, a surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of their investment for extended periods using foreign finance. While many of these episodes are in countries where official finance is important, we also identify episodes where a substantial fraction of domestic investment is financed by private capital…

Using a cross-country panel of 925 banks from 19 advanced economies, for the period 1981-2016, I examine how the bank lending channel of monetary policy has evolved over time. I find that the sensitivity of lending to bank balance sheet liquidity declines over time, with nearly all the reduction occurring between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. Contrary to normal times, during…

The literature on drivers of capital flows stresses the prominent role of global financial factors. Recent empirical work, however, highlights how this role varies across countries and time, and this heterogeneity is not well understood. We revisit this question by focusing on financial intermediaries' funding flows in different currencies. A portfolio model shows that the sign and…

This paper investigates how welfare losses for facing high-order risk increases change when the risk environment of the decision maker is altered. To that aim, we define the nth-order utility premium as a measure of pain associated with facing the passage of one risk to a more severe one and we examine some of its properties. Changes in risk are expressed through the concept of…

In this article, we address the numerical solution of the Dirichlet problem for the three-dimensional elliptic Monge–Ampère equation using a least-squares/relaxation approach. The relaxation algorithm allows the decoupling of the differential operators from the nonlinearities. Dedicated numerical solvers are derived for the efficient solution of the local optimization problems with…

Using data for advanced and emerging economies, we show that there is a negative correlation between public debt and corporate investment. Industry-level regressions show that high levels of government debt are particularly damaging for industries that need more external financial resources. Firm-level regressions show that government debt increases the sensitivity of corporate…

In this double issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy we publish a set of papers concerned with the mobilization of domestic and foreign capital in support of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals that were launched in September 2015. The papers were originally presented at a conference on 'Financing for Development' organized by the International Monetary Fund and…