Florian Pelgrin

Contributions of Financial Systems to Growth in OECD Countries

The recent period of sustained high growth in the United States has drawn attention to its financial system and the efficiency with which it seems to be able to channel funds to new productive investment projects, particularly in hi-tech industries. This study examines the role played by the financial systems in OECD countries and how they affect resource allocation and growth. It provides evidence suggesting that legal and regulatory framework conditions for financial systems, and particularly their enforcement and transparency, support innovation and investment in new enterprises. In addition, using dynamic panel regression techniques, the study finds significant relationships between investment and financial development, as measured by indicators of the scale of financial activity. Evidence is also found of significant relationships between financial development and growth — over and above the links via investment — indicating impacts via overall economic efficiency ... La forte croissance soutenue aux Etats-Unis pendant la periode recente a attire l’attention sur son systeme financier et l’efficacite avec laquelle il semble etre capable de financer des nouveaux projets d’investissement productif, en particulier dans les industries de haute technologie. Cette etude examine le role joue par les systemes financiers dans les pays de l’OCDE et comment ils influent sur l’allocation des ressources et la croissance. Elle prouve a l’evidence que les systemes financiers reunissant les conditions d’un cadre institutionnel et reglementaire, en particulier dans l’execution et la transparence, contribuent a l’innovation et l’investissement dans de nouvelles entreprises. De plus, en utilisant des techniques de regression dynamique en panel, l’etude constate des relations significatives entre l’investissement et le developpement financier, qui servent d’indicateurs de l’echelle de l’activite financiere. Il parait tout aussi evident qu’il y a une relation entre ...

The Decline in Private Saving Rates in the 1990s in OECD Countries: How Much Can Be Explained By Non-Wealth Determinants?

The substantial decline in private-sector saving rates observed in several OECD countries in the late 1990s coincided in several cases with a sharp increase in household financial net worth. This was seen by many observers as evidence that the strong rise in equity and residential property prices during the late 1990s had been treated by households as a permanent increase in wealth, leading to an unsustainable drop in saving and raising fears of an eventual negative wealth effect. Applying estimation techniques for systems of dynamic panel equations, this paper looks at basic determinants of private saving for a sample of 15 OECD countries and finds that the sharp decline in saving observed after 1995 can be largely explained, even in a post-sample fashion, by fundamentals other than financial wealth. Among the determinants, the rise in public-sector saving is found to have contributed the most to the decline in private saving between 1995 and 2000. Based on this investigation, there is little evidence that consumers had gone too far in responding to the stock market boom of the late 1990s, even in countries where private saving rates have fallen to historically low levels. On the other hand, the results suggest that a loosening of fiscal policy may have a limited stimulatory impact on private consumption...

Health and (Other) Asset Holdings

Despite clear evidence of correlations between financial and medical statuses and decisions, most models treat financial and health-related choices separately. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a tractable dynamic framework for the joint determination of optimal consumption, portfolio holdings, health investment and health insurance. We solve for the optimal rules in closed form and capitalize on this tractability to gain a better understanding of the conditions under which separation between financial and health-related decisions is sensible, and of the pathways through which wealth and health determine allocations, welfare and other variables of interest such as expected longevity or the value of health. Furthermore we show that the model is consistent with the observed patterns of individual allocations and provide realistic estimates of the parameters that confirm the relevance of all the main characteristics of the model.

Financial Development and Investment: Panel Data Evidence for OECD Countries from 1970 to 1997

Applying a panel error correction approach to data for 19 OECD countries from 1970 to 1997, the paper provides evidence that financial development is significantly related to investment levels. Different indicators of financial development are used. The results appear to be strongest for stock market capitalization, although the contribution of private credit issued by deposit money banks is also significant. The results go beyond previous work on the topic, which has found a significant link for low and middle-income economies, but not for those with relatively high income levels.

National Saving-Investment Dynamics and International Capital Mobility

The authors analyze the dynamics of national saving-investment relationships to determine the degree of international capital mobility. Following Coakley and Kulasi (1997), the authors interpret the close relationship between national saving and investment in the long run as reflecting a solvency constraint, rather than as evidence of limited capital mobility (Feldstein and Horioka 1980). As in Jansen (1996, 1998), the authors also examine the short-term saving-investment relationship, especially the speed at which the variables return to the long-run equilibrium relationship once they have deviated from it. The ease with which a country can borrow or lend and run current account imbalances in the short run, before it has to ultimately reverse the transaction at some future date to satisfy the solvency constraint, is interpreted as being positively related to the degree of international capital mobility. Extending the approach by Jansen, the authors apply panel error-correction techniques to data for 20 OECD countries from 1960 to 1999, and find that saving and investment display a long-run relationship that is consistent with the interpretation that a long-run solvency constraint is binding for each country. Furthermore, capital mobility has increased over time.

Life cycle responses to health insurance status

This paper studies the lifetime effects of exogenous changes in health insurance coverage (e.g. Medicare, PPACA, termination of employer-provided plans) on the dynamic optimal allocation (consumption, leisure, health expenditures), status (health and wealth), and welfare. We solve, simulate, and structurally estimate a parsimonious life cycle model with endogenous exposure to morbidity and mortality risks, and exogenous health insurance. By varying coverage, we identify the marginal effects of insurance when young and/or when old on allocations, statuses, and welfare. Our results highlight positive effects of insurance on health, wealth and welfare, as well as mid-life substitution away from healthy leisure in favor of more health expenses, caused by peaking wages, and accelerating health issues.

Estimating Aggregate Autoregressive Processes When Only Macro Data are Available

The aggregation of individual random AR(1) models generally leads to an AR(∞) process. We provide two consistent estimators of aggregate dynamics based on either a parametric regression or a minimum distance approach for use when only macro data are available. Notably, both estimators allow us to recover some moments of the cross-sectional distribution of the autoregressive parameter. Both estimators perform very well in our Monte-Carlo experiment, even with finite samples.

Aggregating Rational Expectations Models in the Presence of Unobserved Micro Heterogeneity

Our paper addresses the correction of the aggregation bias in linear rational expectations models when there is some unobserved micro-parameter heterogeneity and only macro data are available. Starting from Lewbel (1994), we propose two new consistent estimators, which rely on a flexible parametric specification of the cross-sectional parameter distributions and account for the dependence across coeffcients inherent in such models. A Monte-Carlo study reveals that the finite-sample and asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators correct the aggregation bias found with the maximum-likelihood and generalized-method-of-moments approaches. As a by-product, we can also infer the cross-sectional distribution of the parameters. Finally, we reassess the empirical evidence about the New Keynesian Phillips curve and explain the apparent discrepancy between micro- and macro-based estimates of the average persistence of inflation.

Using Implied Probabilities to Improve Estimation with Unconditional Moment Restrictions

In this paper, we investigate the information content of implied probabilities (Back and Brown, 1993) to improve estimation in unconditional moment conditions models. We propose and evaluate two 3-step euclidian empirical likelihood estimators and their bias-correction versions for weakly dependent data. The first one is the time series extension of the 3S-EEL proposed by Antoine, Bonnal and Renault (2007).The second one is new and uses in contrast only an estimator of the weighting matrix at an efficient 2-step GMM estimator, while leaving unrestricted the Jacobian matrix. Both estimators use implied probabilities to achieve higher-order improvements relative to the traditional GMM estimator. A Monte-Carlo study reveals that the finite and large sample properties of the (bias-corrected) 3-step estimators compare very favorably to the existing approaches: the 2-step GMM and the continuous updating estimator. As an application, we re-assess the empirical evidence regarding the New Keynesian Phillips curve in the US.

Increases in Business Investment Rates in OECD Countries in the 1990s

In several OECD countries, investment rates in the business sector grew strongly in the second half of the 1990s. In some cases, the strength of private investment relative to output growth had raised concerns about the risk of capital overhang and the prospect of a prolonged period of slow capital formation in order to bring investment levels back to more sustainable levels. It is possible that the stock market boom has contributed to a rise of investment demand to an excessive level, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia and Greece. The purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution of fundamental determinants to the change in investment in the second half of the 1990s, based on the estimation of panel cointegration equations for gross business investment for 18 OECD countries from 1970 to 1999. In addition to the levels of real GDP and a measure of the cost of capital, the set of explanatory variables includes four alternative ...