Adrienne Mack

A New Database of Global Economic Indicators

The Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas aims to standardize and disseminate economic indicators for policy analysis and scholarly work on the role of globalization. Its main purpose is to offer a broad perspective on a number of global factors affecting the U.S. economy. DGEI indicators are based on a core sample of 40 countries with aggregates for the rest of the world (ex. the U.S.) and by level of development attainment and openness to trade. DGEI indicators currently include real GDP, industrial production (IP), Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), merchandise exports and imports, headline CPI, core CPI (ex. food and energy), PPI/WPI inflation, nominal and real exchange rates, and short-term interest rates. Here we describe our methodology to transform and combine different time series, for temporal and cross-country aggregation, and to highlight the importance of using representative data in international macroeconomics research. Our paper makes a related contribution to the literature by providing a formal assessment of conventional interpolation methods used to adjust the data frequency. A selection of the DGEI-derived global indicators – to be updated monthly – can be accessed at the following URL: http://www.dallasfed.org/institute/dgei/index.cfm.

Credit booms, banking crises, and the current account

A number of papers have shown that rapid growth in private sector credit is a strong predictor of a banking crisis. This paper will ask if credit growth is itself the cause of a crisis, or is it the combination of credit growth and external deficits? This paper estimates a probabilistic model to find the marginal effect of private sector credit growth on the probability of a banking crisis. The model contains an interaction term between credit growth and the level of the current account, so the marginal effect of private sector credit growth may itself be a function of the level of the current account. We find that the marginal effect of rising private sector debt levels depends on an economys external position. When the current account is in balance, the marginal effect of an increase in debt is rather small. However, when the economy is running a sizable current account deficit, implying that any increase in the debt ratio is financed through foreign borrowing, this marginal effect is large.

Monitoring Housing Markets for Episodes of Exuberance: An Application of the Phillips Et Al. (2012, 2013) GSADF Test on the Dallas Fed International House Price Database

The detection of explosive behavior in house prices and the implementation of early warning diagnosis tests are of great importance for policy-making. This paper applies the GSADF test developed by Phillips et al. (2012) and Phillips et al. (2013), a novel procedure for testing, detection and date-stamping of explosive behavior, to the data from the Dallas Fed International House Price Database documented in Mack and Martinez-Garcia (2011). We discuss the use of the GSADF test to monitor international housing markets. We assess the international boom and bust cycle experienced during the past 15 years through this lens — with special attention to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Our empirical results suggest that these three countries experienced a period of exuberance in housing prices during the late 90s and the first half of the 2000s that cannot be attributed solely to the behavior of fundamentals. Looking at all 22 countries covered in the International House Price Database, we detect a pattern of synchronized explosive behavior during the last international house boom-bust episode not seen before.