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Cover IMF Working Papers
Do Capital Controls Limit Inflow Surges?
Apoorv Bhargava
,
Romain Bouis
,
Annamaria Kokenyne
,
Manuel Perez-Archila
,
Umang Rawat
, and
Ms. Ratna Sahay
With rising financial integration, the magnitude and swings in capital flows have increased in the past two decades, intensifying the policy debate on how best to deal with these flows. This paper assesses the use and effectiveness of capital controls in limiting inflow surges. Using a novel dataset on capital control changes across 40 advanced and emerging market and developing economies over 1995-2018, we find that the tightening of capital controls reduces the probability of future surges both at the aggregate and the asset flow levels. The results are robust to various definitions of surges and are stronger when controls are matched to the asset class they target. Finally, we also find significant multilateral spillovers from capital control actions, pointing towards the need for international cooperation in the use of these policies.
Keywords:
Capital controls; capital inflows; surges
Cover IMF Working Papers
Optimal Monetary and Macroprudential Policies under Fire-Sale Externalities
Flora Lutz
I provide an integrated analysis of monetary and macroprudential policies in a model economy featuring a financial friction and a nominal wage rigidity. In this set-up, the monetary authority faces a trade-off between macroeconomic and financial stability: While expansionary counter-cyclical monetary policy prevents involuntary unemployment, it also amplifies an inefficient reallocation of capital across sectors. The main contribution of the analysis is threefold: First it highlights a novel channel through which monetary policy can impact financial stability. Second, it shows that, by itself, monetary policy can significantly mitigate the wedge between the constrained efficient and the competitive allocation. Third, regardless of the availability of macroprudential tools, stabilizing demand is usually not optimal for monetary policy.
Keywords:
Monetary Policy; Macroprudential Policy; Fire-sales; Pecuniary Externalities; Unemployment
Cover IMF Working Papers
Heterogeneous Spending, Heterogeneous Multipliers
Umberto Muratori
,
Pedro Juarros
, and
Daniel Valderrama
Do local fiscal multipliers depend on what the government purchases? We find that government purchases of services have larger effects on employment than spending on goods. Industries producing services are more labor-intensive than industries producing goods. This heterogeneity in labor intensity is an important mechanism behind these results. Spending directed toward labor-intensive industries generates stronger increases in employment and labor income relative to spending toward non-labor-intensive industries.
Keywords:
Heterogeneous Local Fiscal Multipliers; Services and Goods Spending; Labor Intensity
Cover IMF Working Papers
Sectoral Impact and Propagation of Weather Shocks
Guglielmo Zappalà
Local weather shocks have been shown to affect local economic output, however, little is known about their propagation through production networks. Using a six-sector global dataset over the past fifty years, this paper examines the effect of weather fluctuations and extreme weather events on sectoral economic production and the transmission of weather shocks across sectors, countries and over time. I document that agriculture is the most harmed sector by heat shocks, droughts and cyclones. Using input-output interlinkages, I find that sectors at later stages of the supply chain suffer from substantial and persistent losses over time due to domestic and foreign heat shocks in other sectors. A counterfactual analysis of the average annual output loss accounting for heat shocks across trade partners shows a substantial underestimation of the economic cost of temperature increases since 2000.
Keywords:
Climate change; sectoral shocks; spillovers; weather shocks
Cover IMF Working Papers
Who Pays for Your Rewards? Redistribution of the Credit Card Market
Sumit Agarwal
,
Mr. Andrea F Presbitero
,
Andre Silva
, and
Carlo Wix
We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution between consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers. To probe the underlying mechanisms, we exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level and show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving naive consumers with higher unpaid balances. Naive consumers also follow a sub-optimal balance-matching heuristic when repaying their credit cards, incurring higher costs. Banks incentivize the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable cards without rewards. We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.
Keywords:
household finance; credit cards; financial sophistication; rewards
Cover IMF Working Papers
The Heterogeneous Effects of U.S. Monetary Policy on Non-Bank Finance
Andrew Hodge
and
Miss Anke Weber
Using flow of funds and high frequency data from the Investment Company Institute, we study the effects of monetary policy shocks on the size of non-bank assets as well as on flows into long-term mutual funds and returns on their assets. Consolidating chains of non-bank intermediation to avoid double counting, we find that contractionary monetary policy shocks shrink the assets of non-banks reliant on long-term funding, while increasing those of nonbanks reliant on short-term funding. Contractionary shocks also cause sustained outflows from long-term mutual funds and reduce their returns. Using a Markov-Switching VAR, we find these effects to be more prevalent after the Global Financial Crisis, and show that monetary policy shocks had the opposite effects in some earlier periods. Policymakers will thus have to contend with a complex and heterogeneous transmission of monetary policy to financial and macroeconomic outcomes through the non-banks.
Keywords:
Non-bank market-based finance; mutual fund performance and flows; monetary policy shocks
Cover IMF Working Papers
Public versus Private Cost of Capital with State-Contingent Terminal Value
Luciano Greco
and
Mariano Moszoro
The economic debate underlines the reasons why discount rates of infrastructure projects should be similar, regardless the public or private source of financing, during the forecast period when flows are risky but predictable. In contrast, we show that the incompleteness of contracts between governments and private firms beyond the forecast period (i.e., when flows of net social benefits are state-contingent) entails expected terminal values that are systematically larger under government rather than private financing. This effect provides a new rationale for applying a lower discount rate in the assessment of projects under public financing as compared to private financing.
Keywords:
Social discount rate; public utilities; private financing of infrastructures; public-private partnerships
Cover IMF Working Papers
Sovereign ESG Bond Issuance: A Guidance Note for Sovereign Debt Managers
Peter Lindner
and
Kay Chung
This paper aims to provide guidance to issuers of sovereign ESG bonds, with a focus on Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs). An overview of the ESG financing options available to sovereign issuers is followed by an analysis of the operational requirements and costs that the issuance of sovereign ESG bonds entails. While green bonds are the instruments used to describe the issuance process, the paper also covers alternative instruments, including social and sustainability-linked bonds to provide issuers and other stakeholders with a comprehensive view of the ESG bond marketplace.
Keywords:
Bond issuance; Climate finance; ESG bonds; Green bonds; Public Financial Management; Social bonds; Sovereign debt management; Sustainable finance; Sustainability-linked bonds
Cover IMF Working Papers
Deconstructing ESG Scores: How to Invest with your own Criteria?
Torsten Ehlers
,
Ulrike Elsenhuber
,
Kumar Jegarasasingam
, and
Eric Jondeau
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores are a key tool for asset managers in designing and implementing ESG investment strategies. They, however, amalgamate a broad range of fundamentally different factors, creating ambiguity for investors as to the underlying drivers of higher or lower ESG scores. We explore the feasibility and performance of more targeted investment strategies based on specific ESG categories, by deconstructing ESG scores into their granular components. First, we investigate the characteristics of the various categories underlying ESG scores. Not all types of ESG categories lend themselves to more focused strategies, which is related to both limits to ESG data disclosure and the fundamental challenge of translating qualitative characteristics into quantitative measures. Second, we consider an investment scheme based on the exclusion of firms with the lowest scores in a given category of interest. In most cases, this strategy allows investors to substantially improve the ESG category score, with a marginal impact on financial performance relative to a broad stock market benchmark. The exclusion results in regional and sectoral biases relative to the benchmark, which may be undesirable for some investors.We then implement a “best-in-class” strategy by excluding firms with the lowest category scores and reinvesting the proceeds in firms with the highest scores, maintaining the same regional and sectoral composition. This approach reduces the tracking error of the portfolio and slightly improves its risk-adjusted performance, while still yielding a large gain in the targeted ESG category score.
Keywords:
Sustainable investment; ESG ratings; ESG investing; Negative screening; Best-in-class screening
Cover Policy Papers
Temporary Modifications to The Fund’s Annual and Cumulative Access Limits
International Monetary Fund. Strategy, Policy, & Review Department
,
International Monetary Fund. Finance Dept.
, and
International Monetary Fund. Legal Dept.
The paper discusses possible changes for the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT), for which the access limits were raised by 45 percent in 2021, bringing them into alignment with GRA access limits for the first time. While these changes helped address low-income countries’ (LICs) financing needs, these needs are projected to further increase in the medium term. An increase in the PRGT access limits in line with the proposed increase in the GRA access limits would help address these needs.
Keywords:
access limit; executive board review PRGT access; PRGT resource; PRGT access metrics; concessional financing arm; Credit; COVID-19; Emerging and frontier financial markets; Credit risk; Debt sustainability; Global