A nonlinear econometric analysis of capital flight

This paper investigates the impact of globalization on productivity growth and the procyclicality of productivity growth in manufacturing industries in the United States and Germany. For U.S. industries, the analysis suggests that changes in international demand affect productivity growth differently from changes in exposure to international competition. An increase in foreign demand for U.S. exports raises trend productivity growth, but to a lesser degree than does a similar demand shock from domestic buyers. On the other hand, whereas an increase in U.S. imports reduces trend productivity growth of U.S. industries, a loss of market share to imports is associated with gains to productivity growth. For Germany, neither international demand shocks nor exposure to international competition seem to be associated with productivity growth rates, perhaps because German industries experienced a smaller increase in exposure to international competition over the time period. Comparing the U.S. and German results suggests that "going global" may affect productivity growth rates more than simply "being global." As for the procyclical characteristics of productivity growth, the U.S. and German measures evidence different procyclical behavior. For many industries, both U.S. and German labor productivity growth rates exhibit some degree of procyclicality. For German industries, this procyclicality of productivity growth disappears with broader measures of productivity growth that include utilization of capital and intermediate inputs. For U.S. industries, the degree of procyclicality increases when productivity growth is measured on these broader bases. Moreover, in the United States, procyclicality appears to be accentuated by export demand growth and dampened by import demand growth.Capital movements ; Econometric models

An econometric model of capital flight from developing countries

This paper analyzes capital flight from a group of seventeen developing nations over the period 1978 to 1993. The paper briefly discusses several empirical definitions of capital flight and presents estimates of capital flight for the sample based on some of these measures. In general, the data reveal periodic episodes of dramatic flight through the late 1980s, at which point many nations began to experience strong capital inflows. Anecdotal evidence for the nations in our sample underpins our hypothesis that capital flight is driven by a heightened, pervasive risk which reflects the degree of domestic macroeconomic imbalance which is domestically undiversifiable. Our econometric model of the determinants of capital flight extends previous empirical studies of flight by expanding both the cross section of nations and time horizon of analysis. Given the panel data set, we consider a country specific error component to account for the possibility of unobserved country heterogeneity and employ fixed- effects and random-effects estimation. We instrument for potentially endogenous explanatory variables and in doing so consider a fixed-effects system. The results, based on several different measures of flight, highlight the importance of modelling flight with a country specific error component. While other proxies of the risk associated with macroeconomic imbalance are not significant, the central government surplus is negatively, statistically significantly related to flight. This highlights the motivation of investors to move capital both to escape future taxation directly and indirectly via monetization of deficits. Therefore, even when taking into account other measures of risk, the higher taxation risk, both directly and indirectly through expectations of future inflation, dominates the regressions.Capital movements ; Developing countries ; Econometric models