Are Crises Good for Long-Term Growth? The Role of Political Institutions

This paper provides empirical evidence for the importance of institutions in determining the outcome of crises on long-term growth. Once unobserved country-specific effects and other sources of endogeneity are accounted for, political institutions affect growth through their interaction with crises. The results suggest that only countries with strong democracies, high levels of political competition and external constraints on government can potentially benefit from crises and use them as opportunities to enhance long-term output per capita and productivity growth.

Trade, gravity, and sudden stops: On how commercial trade can increase the stability of capital flows

Financial stability is an important policy objective since crises are associated with big economic, social, and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to the discussion by providing new theoretical and empirical evidence on the causal connection between lack of exposure to commercial trade and proclivity to sudden stops. On the theoretical front, I show how exposure to trade raises the creditworthiness of countries and reduces the probability of sudden stops. In relatively closed economies, sudden stops (when they occur) are more harmful, and thus the option to default on the inherited debt is more attractive. Therefore, conditional on the amount that lenders are willing to loan, decreased exposure to trade increases the likelihood of default. A sudden stop takes place when the borrowers reject the amount that lenders want to loan: They receive no new funding, and they concurrently default on the outstanding debt to 'ease the pain.' This proposition is tested using 'gravity estimates,' which are based on countries' geographic characteristics as appropriate instruments for trade. The results indicate that, all else equal, a 10 percentage point decrease in the trade-to-gross domestic product ratio increases the probability of a sudden stop between 30 percent and 40 percent. The policy implications are unambiguous: Increasing the tradable component of a country's GDP will, ceteris paribus, reduce the vulnerability of that country to sudden stops in capital flows

La Sostenibilidad de Deuda frente a Riesgo de Catastrofes Naturales

Los desastres naturales son una importante fuente de vulnerabilidad en la región del Caribe. A pesar de ser una de las regiones del mundo con más altas probabilidades de desastres naturales, el Caribe tiene los niveles más bajos de cobertura de seguro. Este articulo examina la vulnerabilidad de las finanzas publicas de Belice debido a la alta ocurrencia de huracanes. El artículo estudia el potencial de instrumentos de aseguración que podrían reducir la vulnerabilidad a estos desastres naturales. Este estudio encuentra que el seguro de Riesgos Catastróficos mejora la sostenibilidad de la deuda del gobierno de Belice. La metodología aplicada por el estudio hace posible estimar el nivel apropiado de cobertura de seguro apropiado. Para el caso de Belice, es como máximo, US$120 millones por año. Organizaciones internacionales pueden jugar un papel importante en asistir a los países a sobrellevar las distorsiones de los mercados de seguros, como también en ayudar a disminuir la resistencia política interna contra la aplicación de esta póliza.

Debt Sustainability Under Catastrophic Risk: The Case for Government Budget Insurance

Natural disasters are an important source of vulnerability in the Caribbean region. Despite being one of the more disaster-prone areas of the world, it has the lowest levels of insurance coverage. This paper examines the vulnerability of Belize’s public finance to the occurrence of hurricanes and the potential impact of insurance instruments in reducing that vulnerability. The paper finds that catastrophic risk insurance significantly improves Belize’s debt sustainability. In addition, the methodology employed makes it possible to estimate the appropriate level of insurance, which for the case of Belize is a maximum coverage of US$120 million per year. International organizations can play a role in assisting countries to overcome distortions in insurance markets, as well as in helping to relax internal political resistance to the purchase of insurance policies.

Quid pro Quo: National Institutions and Sudden Stops in International Capital Movements

The paper explores the incidence of sudden stops in capital flows on the incentives for building national institutions that secure property rights in a world where sovereign defaults are possible equilibrium outcomes. Also thepaper builds upon the benchmark model of sovereign default and direct creditor sanctions by Obstfeld and Rogoff (1996). In their model it is in the debtor country’s interest to “tie its hands” and secure the property rights of lenders as much as possible because this enhances the credibility of the country’s romise to repay and prevents default altogether. It incorporate two key features of today’s international financial markets that are absent from the benchmark model: the possibility that lenders can trigger sudden stops in capital movements, and debt contracts in which lenders transfer resources to the country at the start of the period, which have to be repaid later. The papershows that under these conditions the advice “build institutions to secure repayment at all costs” may be very bad advice indeed.

The Determinants of Corporate Risk in Emerging Markets: An Option-Adjusted Spread Analysis

This study explores the determinants of corporate bond spreads in emerging market economies. Using a largely unexploited dataset, the paper finds that corporate bond spreads are determined by firm-specific variables, bond characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, sovereign risk, and global factors. A variance decomposition analysis shows that firm-level characteristics account for the larger share of the variance. In addition, the paper finds two asymmetries. The first is in line the sovereign ceiling “lite” hypothesis which states that the transfer of risk from the sovereign to the private sector is less than 1 to 1. The second is consistent with the popular notion that panics are common in emerging markets where investors are less informed and more prone to herding.

Does Openness to Trade Make Countries More Vulnerable to Sudden Stops, or Less? Using Gravity to Establish Causality

Openness to trade is one factor that has been identified as determining whether a country is prone to sudden stops in capital inflows, crashes in currencies, or severe recessions. Some believe that openness raises vulnerability to foreign shocks, while others believe that it makes adjustment to crises less painful. Several authors have offered empirical evidence that having a large tradable sector reduces the contraction necessary to adjust to a given cut-off in funding. This would help explain lower vulnerability to crises in Asia than in Latin America. Such studies may, however, be subject to the problem that trade is endogenous. Using the gravity instrument for trade openness, which is constructed from geographical determinants of bilateral trade, this paper finds that openness indeed makes countries less vulnerable, both to severe sudden stops and currency crashes, and that the relationship is even stronger when correcting for the endogeneity of trade.

Does Openness to Trade Make Countries More Vulnerable to Sudden Stops, Or Less? Using Gravity to Establish Causality

Openness to trade is one factor that has been identified as determining whether a country is prone to sudden stops in capital inflow, currency crashes, or severe recessions. Some believe that openness raises vulnerability to foreign shocks, while others believe that it makes adjustment to crises less painful. Several authors have offered empirical evidence that having a large tradable sector reduces the contraction necessary to adjust to a given cut-off in funding. This would help explain lower vulnerability to crises in Asia than in Latin America. Such studies may, however, be subject to the problem that trade is endogenous. We use the gravity instrument for trade openness, which is constructed from geographical determinants of bilateral trade. We find that openness indeed makes countries less vulnerable, both to severe sudden stops and currency crashes, and that the relationship is even stronger when correcting for the endogeneity of trade.

Output volatility and openness to trade: A reassessment

Many economists believe that, while openness to trade increases average GDP growth rates, it also raises output volatility by exposing countries to terms-oftrade shocks. This view does not take into account that, as suggested by a recent strand of the financial fragility literature, commercial trade might also reduce financially related volatility. Once this is taken into account, the relationship between exposure to trade and output volatility is still an open question. Trade therefore is not necessarily a destabilizing force in countries that are exposed to volatile capital flows. This paper presents new empirical evidence that suggests that the net effect of trade openness on output volatility is stabilizing. The methodology employed seeks to correct for the likely endogeneity of trade in this setting using gravity estimates as instrumental variables. The results confirm that exposure to trade raises output volatility through the terms-of-trade channel, as previously documented in the literature, but also shows that this is counteracted by a quantitatively larger stabilizing effect. Additional evidence is presented showing that the latter effect comes (at least in part) through the financial channel. Splitting the sample into countries that are more exposed to capital flows and countries that are less exposed, the paper shows that the stabilizing effect of commercial trade predominates in the first sub-sample