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Working Paper
Flying geese or sitting ducks: China’s impact on the trading fortunes of other Asian economies
This paper updates our earlier work (Ahearne, Fernald, Loungani and Schindler, 2003) on whether China, with its huge pool of labor and an allegedly undervalued exchange rate, is hurting the export performance of other emerging market economies in Asia. We continue to find that while exchange rates matter for export performance, the income growth of trading partners matters far more. This suggests the potential for exports of all Asian economies to grow in harmony as long as global growth is strong. We also examine changes in export shares of Asian economies to the U.S. market and find ...
Working Paper
Firm size and the impact of profit-margin uncertainty on investment: do financing constraints play a role?
We study the response of investment to changes in uncertainty about future profits. We find that in industries dominated by small firms, an increase in uncertainty about future profits depresses investment; in all other industries, increased uncertainty has virtually no effect (or has a positive effect) on investment. The data set from which these findings emerge is a balanced panel, consisting of annual data from 1958 to 1991 for 252 manufacturing industries in the United States. The theoretical work on this topic points to uncertainty about future profit flows as one of the important actors ...
Journal Article
Stock-market-based measures of sectoral shocks and the unemployment rate
Downturns in the construction and finance sectors played a significant role in the recent recession. A stock-market-based measure that captures sectoral shocks shows that these disturbances are important for explaining long-duration unemployment. This is consistent with the intuition that sectoral shocks cause workers to engage in time-consuming moves across industries in their searches for work. It also suggests that it will take a while before the more than 1.8 million unemployed construction workers and close to a half million unemployed finance and insurance workers find jobs.
Working Paper
Central bank independence, inflation and growth in transition economies
In this paper, we document two empirical relationships that have emerged as the former communist countries have taken steps to transform their economies from command systems to market-based systems. First, increased central bank independence has tended to improve inflation performance. Second, high inflation has adversely affected real activity. More specifically, in the first section of this paper, we develop indices of central bank independence (CBI) for twelve transition economies and examine the relationship between CBI and inflation performance across these countries. Statistical ...
Working Paper
New evidence on cyclical and structural sources of unemployment
We provide cross-country evidence on the relative importance of cyclical and structural factors in explaining unemployment, including the sharp rise in U.S. long-term unemployment during the Great Recession of 2007-09. About 75% of the forecast error variance of unemployment is accounted for by cyclical factors?real GDP changes (?Okun?s Law?), monetary and fiscal policies, and the uncertainty effects emphasized by Bloom (2009). Structural factors, which we measure using the dispersion of industry-level stock returns, account for the remaining 25 percent. For U.S. long-term unemployment the ...
Journal Article
Predicting when the economy will turn
Working Paper
Supply-side sources of inflation: evidence from OECD countries.
We evaluate the merits of the "supply-side" view under which inflation results from sectoral shocks, and compare it with the "classical" view in which inflation results from aggregate factors such as variations in money growth. Using a panel VAR methodology applied to data for 13 GECD countries, we find support for a multi-shock view of inflation: supply-side shocks are statistically significant determinants of inflation, even after taking into account aggregate demand factors. While oil prices are the dominant supply-side influence, other measures such as the skewness of relative price ...
Working Paper
Minimum wages and firm employment: evidence from China
This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect firm employment in China using a unique county level minimum wage data set matched to disaggregated firm survey data. We investigate both the effect of imposing a minimum wage, and the effect of the policies that tightened enforcement in 2004. We find that the average effect of minimum wage changes is modest and positive, and that there is a detectable effect after enforcement reform. Firms have heterogeneous responses to minimum wage changes which can be accounted for by differences in their wage levels and profit margins: firms with high ...
Conference Paper
New evidence on cyclical and structural sources of unemployment