Isabel Argimón

Evidence of public spending crowding-out from a panel of OECD countries

The empirical relationship between government spending and private investment is examined, using a panel of 14 OECD countries. The evidence suggests the existence of a significant crowding-in effect of private investment by public investment, through the positive impact of infrastructure on private investment productivity. Moreover, government consumption appears to crowd out private investment. The implications of these results are of foremost importance when it comes to fiscal consolidation. Deficit reductions engineered through cuts in public investment could severely impinge on private capital accumulation and growth prospects.

Saving, investment and international capital mobility in EC countries

Abstract Drawing on different assumptions on the behaviour of the private and public sectors and on alternative scenarios of international capital mobility, causality relationships are derived between saving and investment and between the private-sector and public-sector saving-investment gaps. Cointegration is used to measure the resulting relationships between these sets of variables in EC countries over the 1960–1988 period. The paper shows that there has been a lack of any reaction by budgetary policy to the current-account balance in all the countries under study. Furthermore, the empirical results suggest that capital controls have been the main instrument used to target the external balance.

Fiscal Rules and Federalism as Determinants of Budget Performance

This article analyses the role of different potential determinants on the fiscal results of the Spanish regions (RGs). The empirical analysis suggests several conclusions. First, the fiscal rule in force between 1992 and 1998 does not appear to have had a significant effect on the fiscal balances of the autonomous regions. With regard to the degree of fiscal autonomy, a higher level in this variable is associated with a more disciplined behavior by RGs. The results also show that the greater transfer of tax revenues to the RGs, associated with a greater devolution of power, has generated greater dependency of fiscal performance on the economic cycle. There is also a strong inertial component in the implementation of fiscal policy in RGs.

Public Ownership and Business Performance in the Spanish Manufacturing Sector, 1983-1996

This article presents empirical evidence for the Spanish case on the hypothesis that public ownership may be a determinant of a firm’s performance. Two alternative definitions of efficiency are proposed: relative productivity and profitability. The former tries to approximate the concept of technical or productive efficiency, whereas the latter is associated with allocative or price efficiency. The role of ownership is tested, conditioning for the degree of competition, the financial position of the firm, and labor quality. The data used are a sample of Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1983-1996. The results show a negative and significant coefficient of the public ownership variable, which would denote that public ownership has a negative effect on efficiency. In addition, the degree of competition seems to have a positive and significant effect on firm’s performance. As for the variables that proxy the degree of financial constraint, the coefficient of the cash flow per unit of capital has a positive and significant sign.

Retirement behaviour and retirement incentives in Spain

In this paper we analyse the role that Social Security wealth and incentives play in the transition to retirement in Spain. We use the labour records and other relevant information contained in a newly released database [Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (2006)] to construct incentive measures stemming from the Social Security provisions in relation to retiring at old age and investigate the role played by such incentives and by other socio-economic variables on the retirement hazard. We compute the effects of the reform that took place in 2002, which made the requirements to access a pension stricter in general. We carry out a dynamic reduced-form analysis of the retirement decision using a duration model. Our results show that both the pension wealth and substitution effects have a significant role on retirement decisions, but that the latter has less relevance since the reform introduced in 2002.

The Determinants of Capital Held by UK Banks and Building Societies and the Role of Individual Capital Requirements

The globalisation of financial markets has attracted much academic and policymaking commentary in recent years, especially with the growing number of banking and financial crises and the current credit crisis that has threatened the stability of the global financial system. This major Research Handbook sets out to address some of the fundamental issues in financial regulation from a comparative and international perspective and to identify some of the main research themes and approaches that combine economic, legal and institutional analysis of financial markets.

Prudential Filters, Portfolio Composition and Capital Ratios in European Banks

European banks hold 10% of their total assets in portfolios that give rise to unrealised gains and losses which under Basel III will no longer be allowed to be removed from banks’ regulatory capital. Using a sample of European banks, and taking advantage of the different treatment afforded, under Basel II, to such gains and losses among jurisdictions and instruments and over time, we find evidence that: a) the inclusion of unrealised gains and losses in capital ratios increases their volatility; b) the partial inclusion of unrealised gains and total inclusion of losses on fixed-income securities in regulatory capital, compared with the complete exclusion of both (neutralisation), reduces the volume of securities categorised as Available For Sale (AFS), thus potentially affecting liquidity management and demand for bonds (most of which are currently government bonds); and c) the higher the partial inclusion of gains from debt instruments, the lower the holdings of such instruments in the AFS category and the higher the regulatory Tier 1 capital ratio, thus affecting banks’ capital buffer strategy. We do not find evidence that the removal of neutralisation would impact capital ratios.

Does the Intensity of Prudential Regulation Affect Banks? Evidence from the 2007-2009 Crises

The main objective of this research is to gather empirical evidence on the effects of more or less stringency and more or less risk sensitivity in regulatory capital requirements on the observed behaviour of European banks during the initial years of the financial crisis. To do so, we use the indices built in Argimon and Ruiz (2010), which capture such characteristics of capital regulation. We test their incidence using changes in yearly data for individual banks for 25 countries of the European Union covering the period 2007-2009. Our results show that more stringency and risk sensitivity in capital regulation resulted in higher capital increases, with limited effect on risk taking. However, for well capitalized banks, higher risk sensitivity resulted in higher capital and higher risk, thus requiring striking the right balance, so as to lead to increased stability.