Eduardo Engel

The Basic Public Finance of Public-Private Partnerships

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) cannot be justified because they free public funds. When PPPs are justified on efficiency grounds, the contract that optimally balances demand risk, user-fee distortions and the opportunity cost of public funds, features a minimum revenue guarantee and a revenue cap. However, observed revenue guarantees and revenue sharing arrangements differ from those suggested by the optimal contract. Also, this contract can be implemented via a competitive auction with realistic informational requirements. Finally, the allocation of risk under the optimal contract suggests that PPPs are closer to public provision than to privatization.

Effective Labor Regulation and Microeconomic Flexibility

Microeconomic flexibility is at the core of economic growth in modern market economies because it facilitates the process of creative-destruction, The main reason why this process is not infinitely fast, is the presence of adjustment costs, some of them technological, others institutional. Chief among the latter is labor market regulation. While few economists object to the hypothesis that labor market regulation hinders the process of creative-destruction, its empirical support is limited. In this paper we revisit this hypothesis, using a new sectoral panel for 60 countries and a methodology suitable for such a panel. We find that job security regulation clearly hampers the creative-destruction process, especially in countries where regulations are likely to be enforced. Moving from the 20th to the 80th percentile in job security, in countries with strong rule of law, cuts the annual speed of adjustment to shocks by a third while shaving off about one percent from annual productivity growth. The same movement has negligible effects in countries with weak rule of law.

Taxes and Income Distribution in Chile: Some Unpleasant Redistributive Arithmetic

This paper quantifies the direct impact of taxes on income distribution at the household level in Chile and estimates the distributional effect of several changes in the tax structure. We find that income distributions before and after taxes are very similar (Gini coefficients of 0.488 and 0.496, respectively). Moreover, radical modifications of the tax structure, such as raising the value added tax from 18 to 25% or substituting a 20% flat tax for the present progressive income tax affect the after-tax distribution only slightly. We present some arithmetic showing that the scope for direct income redistribution through progressivity of the tax system is rather limited. By contrast, for parameter values observed in Chile, and possibly in most developing countries, the targeting of expenditures and the level of the average tax rate are far more important determinants of income distribution after government transfers. Thus, a high-yield proportional tax can have a far bigger equalizing impact than a low-yield progressive tax. Moreover, a simple model shows that the optimal tax system is biased against progressive taxes and towards proportional taxes, with a bias that grows with the degree of inequality of pre-tax incomes. Our results suggest that to reduce income inequality, the focus of discussion should be on the amount to be redistributed, the targeting of public spending, and the relative efficiency of alternative taxes, and not on the progressivity of the tax system.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Soft Budgets and Renegotiations in Public-Private Partnerships

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are an increasingly popular organizational form of providing public infrastructure. They can increase efficiency and improve resource allocation, yet pervasive contract renegotiations cast doubts on whether they should be preferred over public provision. Renegotiating a PPP contract allows the present government to extract resources from future governments in exchange for current infrastructure spending by the PPP. This option is not available under public provision. We develop a model that formalizes this idea and predicts that government will use renegotiations to anticipate spending and shift payments to future administrations. Regulating renegotiation procedures so as to avoid opportunistic behavior does not avoid the use of renegotiations to anticipate government spending, changing fiscal accounting rules does. We analyze data from Chile, Colombia and Peru, comprising 59 highway PPPs and 535 renegotiation processes, to conclude that the evidence is broadly consistent with the predictions of our model. We find that the magnitude of renegotiations is substantial: renegotiations per concession year average 9.5% of the initial investment in Colombia, 3.6% in Peru and 1.3% in Chile. With concessions that last many decades, this suggests that the magnitude of renegotiations will end up being larger than the initial investment for many concessions, as is already the case for 11 out of the 25 concessions in Colombia. Most of the cost of renegotiations falls on future administrations and in the three countries more than 45% of renegotiations, as measured by volume, occur during the construction phase, which can be interpreted as evidence against incomplete contract models of renegotiations and in favor of our model.

Lumpy Investment in Dynamic General Equilibrium

Microeconomic lumpiness matters for macroeconomics. According to our DSGE model, it explains roughly 60% of the smoothing in the investment response to aggregate shocks. The remaining 40% is explained by general equilibrium forces. The central role played by micro frictions for aggregate dynamics results in important history dependence in business cycles. In particular, booms feed into themselves. The longer an expansion, the larger the response of investment to an additional positive shock. Conversely, a slowdown after a boom can lead to a long lasting investment slump, which is unresponsive to policy stimuli. Such dynamics are consistent with US investment patterns over the last decade. More broadly, over the 1960-2000 sample, the initial response of investment to a productivity shock with responses in the top quartile is 60% higher than the average response in the bottom quartile. Furthermore, the reduction in the relative importance of general equilibrium forces for aggregate investment dynamics also facilitates matching conventional RBC moments for consumption and employment.

A Note on Enforcement Spending and Vat Revenues

Tax compliance studies usually focus on the effect of enforce-ment spending on tax evasion. Reliable estimates are difficult to obtain because evasion data are often suspect. This note shows how tax revenues can be used instead of evasion data to estimate the impact of changes in enforcement spending. Applying our method to Chilean data, we find that 1 (USD) of additional enforcement spending increases VAT revenues by 31. Moreover, current levels of spending could increase by 40 and still be within sample values. Hence, a 10 increase in spending could reduce evasion from its current rate of 23 to 20.

Missing Aggregate Dynamics: On the Slow Convergence of Lumpy Adjustment Models

The estimated persistence of macro aggregates involving lumpy microeconomic adjustment is biased downward when inferred from VAR estimates. The extent of this “missing persistence bias” decreases with the level of aggregation, yet convergence is very slow. Paradoxically, while idiosyncratic shocks smooth away microeconomic non-convexities and are often used to justify approximating aggregate dynamics with linear models, their presence exacerbates the bias. We propose a method to estimate the true speed of adjustment and illustrate its effectiveness via simulations and applications to real data. The missing persistence bias is relevant for macroeconomists on many grounds. First, when calibrating or estimating models via simulation based methods, macroeconomists should pay attention to the number of agents used in simulations for otherwise they are likely to obtain systematic biases in their parameter estimates. Second, results purporting to find persistence measures that vary systematically with levels of aggregation should be examined with care since the differential speeds may disappear when using estimation methods robust to the missing persistence bias. To illustrate the latter, we show that the difference in the speed with which inflation responds to sectoral and aggregate shocks (Boivin et al 2009; Mackoviak et al 2009) disappears once we correct for the missing persistence bias.

On the Efficient Provision of Roads

The main problem with road provision in developing countries is lack of maintenance, which leads to increased transportation costs. Other important problems are the inefficient choice of projects and excessive costs of construction. To a large extent, these problems are due to a poor institutional design of the public works authority that exacerbates a host of agency problems.We explore alternatives to improve road provision policies both under the traditional model and when using public-private partnerships. We discuss in detail the principles that should underly the institutions in charge of the road sector in both cases, and analyze the extent to which institutions that exist in different countries come close to this ideal.

Poisoned grapes, mad cows and protectionism

This paper studies two episodes where a ban on imports was imposed to safeguard peoples health. The first case is the poisoned grapes crisis involving Chile and the United States in 1989. The second is the “mad cows” dispute, which broke out in 1996, between the United Kingdom and the European Union. These case studies motivate a new definition of “protectionist measure” which is applied to argue that the European Unions ban on British beef exports was not protectionist, while the US ban on Chilean fruit possibly classifies as such a measure.

Urban Transport : Can Public-Private Partnerships Work?

Cities exist, grow, and prosper because they take advantage of scale economies and specialization wrought by agglomeration. But output growth inevitably stresses transport infrastructure because production requires space and mobility. To prevent congestion from crowding out agglomeration benefits and to expand the supply of urban land, cities must invest in transport infrastructure. Yet balancing the growing demand for infrastructure with its supply is often difficult. In particular, many cities lack the funding to maintain and expand streets and urban highways. Also problematic is that roads are managed like a social service rather than subjected to market discipline. This leads to the central question of this chapter: Can public-private partnerships (PPPs) deal with these problems better than conventional public provision and ensure proper maintenance, timely expansion, and less congestion? And if so, how? To answer these questions, the paper examines what PPPs can do and what they need to work, focusing in particular on the role of institutions. This is followed by an investigation of common PPP pitfalls and the ways in which they can be avoided. The paper concludes with a case study of a successful transportation PPP in Chile that emphasizes the importance of planning.