Rebecca Neumann

Evidence on the cross-country transmission of monetary shocks

The international transmission of monetary shocks between the US and Canada is explored. Focusing on real variables such as consumption, investment, employment, and the bilateral trade balance, along with measures of US and Canadian money, the empirical analysis examines the impact of a monetary shock in one country on real activity in both countries. The long-run analysis provides evidence of cointegration among the variables and suggests that money plays an important role in the equilibrium relationships between the two countries. Variance decompositions and impulse response functions reveal interesting avenues of real transmission in the short run. The short-run analysis provides strong evidence that US monetary shocks affect real activity in both the USA and Canada. The analysis also indicates that Canadian monetary disturbances affect Canadian and US real activity, and that many of these effects are similar in magnitude to the effects of US monetary shocks. The importance of the nominal exchange-rate regime is also discussed.

Compositional Effects of Capital Controls - Theory and Evidence

This paper examines the effects of capital controls on the composition of international capital flows, paying particular attention to debt inflows versus equity inflows. A two-period small open economy model with stochastic second-period output and asymmetric information between domestic agents and international financiers is utilised to generate predictions regarding the effects of capital controls on the relative use of debt versus equity for financing first-period investment. These capital control implications are then investigated with quarterly frequency panel data for Latin America. Capital controls are found to significantly affect the composition of the capital account.

Globalization and state„local government finances

State and Local Finances under Pressure explores the future of state and local government fiscal systems given the numerous pressures they face from economic, legal, technological, demographic and political forces. It explores how these multiple forces play out in terms of the changes state and local governments should and are likely to make.

Is ‘no news’ really ‘good news’? Country visibility and FDI location choice

Abstract In choosing where to invest, firms seek out information on a set of possible locations. Information asymmetries may make country visibility particularly important in decisions to locate investment abroad. We develop a country visibility index based on international news stories in The Economist, and show that broad country visibility is at least as important in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) as other specific investment promotion activities or proxies for information frictions. Controlling for standard gravity model determinants of FDI, we find that greater visibility of developing countries, in particular lower middle- and low-income countries, increases the investment that they receive from US multinational corporations.

An Explanation For The Diversity Of Financial Structure

This paper seeks to provide a theoretical explanation for the weak association between measures of financial structure—as defined by the mixture of bank-based and market-based financial systems in an economy—and economic development. Lenders fund risky investment projects of firms by drawing up loan contracts in the presence of an informational asymmetry. An optimal contract entails the issue of debt, equity, or a mix of the two. The equilibrium choice of contract and the financial structure depend on the state of the economy, which in turn depends on the contracting regime. Based on this analysis, the paper provides a theory that can explain the wide diversity of financial structure among middle-income countries.

Real and perceived losses from unemployment: a cross-country study

This article compares the Unemployment Rate (UR) as a measure of inefficiency with several other potential measures across 18 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Results show that the UR is not a very good measure of relative inefficiency between countries, it overestimates the number of individuals who would get jobs if the market is clear, the Dead Weight Losses (DWLs) of UR are remarkably low even in high unemployment countries and the aggregate perceived monetary losses by the unemployed as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are also uniformly low, although inframarginal individuals in some countries may perceive their losses to be high.