Discussion Paper 2019/5 is now available: El-Shagi, M. / von Schweinitz, G.: Fiscal Policy and Fiscal Fragility: Evidence from the OECD

Abstract:

In this paper, we use local projections to investigate the impact of consolidation shocks on GDP growh, conditional on the fragility of government finances. Based on the database of fiscal plans in OECD countries, we show that spending shocks are less detrimental than tax-based consolidation. In times of fiscal fragility, our results indicate strongly that governments should consolidate through surprise policy changes rather than announcements of consolidation at a later horizon.

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Discussion Paper 2019/4 is now available: El-Shagi, M. / Jiang, L.: Efficient Dynamic Yield Curve Estimation in Emerging Financial Markets

Abstract:

The current state-of-the-art estimation of yield curves relies on the dynamic state space version of the Nelson and Siegel (1987) model proposed in the seminal paper by Diebold et al. (2006). However, things become difficult when applying their approach to emerging economies with less frequently bond issuance and more sparse maturity available. Therefore, the traditional state space representation, which requires dense and fixed grids of maturities, may not be possible. One remedy is to use the traditional Nelson and Siegel (1987) OLS estimation instead, though it sacrifices efficiency by ignoring the time dimension. We propose a simple augmentation of the Diebold et al. (2006) framework, which is more efficient than OLS estimation as it allows exploiting information from all available bonds and the time dependency of yields. We demonstrate the efficiency gains generated by our method in five case studies for major emerging economies including four of the BRICS.

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Discussion Paper 2019/3 is now available: El-Shagi, M. / Sawyer, W.C. / Tochkov, K.: The Income Elasticity of Import Demand - A Meta Survey

Abstract:

Import demand has been a major research topic in international economics for the past 80 years because of its importance for analyzing trade and evaluating trade policies. The goal of this paper is to survey the literature and conduct a meta-analysis of empirical studies on import demand with the intention of clarifying the effect of economic development on income elasticity. In particular, we test the hypothesis that higher income levels are associated with a more elastic import demand. We apply a combination of parametric and non-parametric methods on estimates from a sample of 152 papers published over the period 1975-2014 and find that this relationship is signicant and robust. Specifically, kernel densities of income elasticity estimates for high-income countries in North America and Europe are shown to exceed those for poorer parts of the world. The results from quartile regressions confirm this pattern and establish its robustness when controlling for the effect of model specifications.

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