A recent policy brief from the Peterson Institute suggests that the “Too Much Finance” result may be an artifact of spurious attribution of causality. While more works needs do be done to understand the links between finance and growth and explore the drivers of possible non-monotonicities, this note shows that the too much finance result is robust.
Comment les chocs de demande subis par les entreprises françaises sur leurs ventes à l’étranger se répercutent-ils sur leurs ventes en France ? Cette Lettre présente les résultats d’une analyse empirique mettant en évidence une relation de complémentarité entre exportations et ventes domestiques. Une hausse de 10% des exportations engendre, la même année, un accroissement des ventes domestiques compris entre 1% et 3% ; une baisse les réduit dans les mêmes proportions. Les contraintes de liquidité auxquelles font face les entreprises semblent jouer un rôle majeur dans la transmission à leur activité domestique du choc conjoncturel subi sur les marchés étrangers.
The surge in international asset trade since the early 1990s has lead to renewed interest in models with international portfolio choice. We develop the implications of portfolio choice for both gross and net international capital flows in the context of a simple two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We focus on the time-variation in portfolio allocation following shocks, and resulting capital flows. Endogenous time-variation in expected returns and risk, which are the key determinants of portfolio choice, affect capital flows in often subtle ways. The model is consistent with a broad range of empirical evidence. An additional contribution of the paper is to overcome the technical difficulty of solving DSGE models with portfolio choice by developing a broadly applicable solution method.
The paper asks whether the financial crisis is upsetting the struggle for dominance between monetary and fiscal policy. It argues that a crisis is indeed a key moment when challenges to monetary policy dominance are greatest. However, the need to bail out financial institutions blurs the distinction between monetary and fiscal policy. The subsequent shift to public debt stress further weighs on central banks. The paper also discusses the situation when the interest rate hits the zero lower bound.
This paper studies the determinants of pricing-to-market at the firm-level, with a particular focus on the role of firm-specific and policy-induced market power. We use a large dataset containing export values and quantities by product and destination for all exporting firms in 12 developing and emerging countries, over several years. We first show that firms in our sample do price to market, i.e. significantly adjust their unit values in home currency in response to exchange-rate variations. The extent of pricing-to-market is quantitatively limited but highly significant and homogenous across origin countries despite their very different levels of development. We then study how firm performance and trade policy affect pricing-to-market at the firm-level. We find that within a given origin-destination-product cell, large, high-performance exporters price more to market. More importantly, we identify significant effects of trade-policy instruments on pricing-to-market: Higher import tarifs on a destination market are associated with less pricing-to-market, whereas non-tarif measures are associated with more. These results are consistent with models where pricing-to-market is increasing in firm size and market share, and suggest that trade policy has deep effects on market power, the direction of which depends on the type of instrument used.
In the wake of the Alstom restructuring, the French government indicated that current merger control rules do not allow for the development of European champions and called for a change in the rules. This paper argues that such a move may be not be advisable but that enforcement of the current rules should be improved, in particular regarding the assessment of efficiencies and the delineation of the wider public policy considerations that Member States can appeal to in exercising their own control. With respect to efficiencies, the Commission’s practice exacerbates the inherent bias of its consumer harm standard against the development of more efficient firms. The identification of transactions that are likely to harm consumers requires the evaluation of the magnitude and likelihood of efficiencies with respect to a benchmark that is case specific. However, a review of the Commission practice suggests (i) that it has failed to develop a constructive standard for the evaluation of efficiencies, (ii) that the standard of proof that it applies to efficiencies is high and misguided with respect to the extent of pass-through, (ii) that the magnitude of efficiencies is often not assessed in relation to the potential harm and (iii) that a discrete threshold is often applied with respect to the likelihood of efficiencies. An improvement in the assessment of efficiencies along these dimensions would improve enforcement under the existing standard, making it less inimical to the development of efficient firms and would thereby also enhance its political acceptability in relation to the recurring debates on national champions. With respect to the additional oversight over transactions that Member States can exercise, the paper finds that the operation of the merger control framework would be improved if the Commission would pro-actively clarify the wider public policy considerations that can be brought to bear on the transactions under Art 21(4) and impose some transparency requirements on member states that elect to appeal to these public policy grounds to impose additional remedies. The paper also offers some guiding principles for the delineation of these policy grounds.
When allocating their aid budget, development agencies need to decide whether to give outright grants or use concessional loans that blend a grant and credit element. Theory suggests that the degree of concessionality should be negatively correlated with debt sustainability. Several donors use the World Bank/IMF Debt Sustainability Framework to guide their aid decisions. They give loans to low-risk countries, a blend of loans and grants to medium-risk countries, and only grants to high-risk countries. The paper shows that there are problems with this approach and proposes an alternative allocation mechanism based on GDP-indexed concessional loans.
We model merger control procedures as a process of sequential acquisition of information and compare US and EU procedures. In the US, the authorities do not have to justify their decision to require further information (issue a second request),whereas in the EU, the authorities face a different (enforceable) standard of proof in phase I relative to phase II. We found that in the absence of remedies, the US procedure is always superior in terms of expected consumer welfare. When we allow for remedies, we found that, compared to the US, merging parties in the EU have more scope to propose remedies in phase I that will preempt the authorities from uncovering unfavorable information in phase II, and this might reduce expected consumer welfare. However, the higher standard of proof in phase I can also in some circumstances act as a commitment not to accept remedies below some threshold and yield a higher expected consumer welfare in the EU. Our model also shows that for global mergers that have the same effect in the two jurisdictions, a decision to trigger a Phase II in the EU yields the same expected consumer welfare as a clearance in Phase I with remedies in the US. However, the converse is not true.
We study how substitutability between clean and dirty alternatives affects the effectiveness of environmental regulation in a field experiment that controls for the choice set of respondents. We consider four product categories with clean and dirty alternatives: (i) cola products in plastic bottles vs. in aluminum cans; (ii) skimmed vs. whole milk; (iii) chicken meat vs. beef meat; and (iv) margarine vs. butter. We employ two neutrally framed treatments to quantify the willingness to substitute between clean and dirty alternatives in each product market, namely a change in relative prices and the removal of the dirty alternative, leaving respondents the option of buying one of the remaining clean alternatives or nothing. We then compare the impact of a carbon footprint label and a Pigovian subsidy to the clean alternatives. While both instruments increase the market share of the clean products, their impact is higher when clean and dirty alternatives are close substitutes. We also find evidence that motivation crowding is present and increases with substitutability. Our results highlight the importance of product markets in the design of consumer-orientated policies.
