Sébastien Wälti

The myth of decoupling

The decoupling hypothesis is the idea that business cycles in emerging market economies have become more independent from business cycles in advanced economies in recent years. Decoupling essentially amounts to a structural break in the degree of business cycle interdependence between the two groups of economies, and it can be tested as such. We develop an innovative measure of business cycle interdependence based on the Euclidean distance, available at the annual frequency, which allows for a proper test for a structural break in a graphical setup. We also make use of a standard econometric test. Both approaches point to the same conclusion: there has been no decoupling in recent years. If anything, the degree of business cycle interdependence has become stronger.

The Euro and Financial Integration

We provide a quantitative analysis of the impact of the euro on European financial integration. We consider both volume- and price-based indicators. In general, we find evidence that common membership of the euro area strengthens bilateral financial linkages. However, we emphasize that EMU has only been one innovation driving European financial integration in recent years, with global factors also increasingly important.

Women and Budget Deficits

If women have different economic preferences than men, then female economic and political empowerment is likely to change policy and household decisions, and in turn macroeconomic outcomes. We test the hypothesis that female enfranchisement leads to lower government budget deficits due gender differences in preferences over fiscal outcomes. Estimating the impact of womens vote on budget deficits in a differences-in-differences regression for Swiss cantonal panel data, we find that including women in the electorate reduces average per capita budget deficits by a statistically significant amount.

The Duration of Fixed Exchange Rate Regimes

This paper studies the survival of fixed exchange rate regimes. The probability of an exit from a fixed exchange rate regime depends on the time spent within this regime. In such a context durations models are appropriate, in particular because of the possible non-monotonic pattern of duration dependence. Non-parametric estimates show that the pattern of duration dependence exhibits non-monotonic behaviour and that it differs across types of economies. This behaviour persists when we control for time-varying covariates in a proportional hazard specification. We conclude that how long a regime has lasted will affect the probability that it will end, in a non-monotonic fashion.