Ursel Baumann

US household deleveraging following the Great Recession – a model-based estimate of equilibrium debt

Abstract The balance sheet adjustment in the household sector was a prominent feature of the Great Recession that is widely believed to have held back the cyclical recovery of the US economy. A key question for the US outlook is therefore whether household deleveraging has ended or whether further adjustment is needed. The novelty of this paper is to estimate a time-varying equilibrium household debt-to-income ratio determined by economic fundamentals to examine this question. The paper uses state-level data for household debt from the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel over the period 1999Q1–2012Q4 and employs the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator developed by Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999), adjusted for cross-section dependence. The results support the view that, despite significant progress in household balance sheet repair, household deleveraging still had some way to go as of 2012Q4, as the actual debt-to-income-ratio continued to exceed its estimated equilibrium. The baseline conclusions are rather robust to a set of alternative specifications. Going forward, our model suggests that part of this debt gap could, however, be closed by improving economic conditions rather than only by further declines in actual debt. Nevertheless, the normalisation of the monetary policy stance may imply challenges for the deleveraging process by reducing the level of sustainable household debt.

Why Should the World Care? Analysis, Mechanisms and Spillovers of the Destination Based Border Adjusted Tax

Members of the US House of Representatives have proposed a major overhaul of the US corporate tax system, the so-called “destination-based border-adjusted cash-flow tax” (DBCFT). The literature on the economic implications and spillovers of such a DBCFT is scarce. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the mechanics of such a tax, its macroeconomic implications as well as its global spillovers using a fully structural global multi-country model. Our results suggest that the short term macroeconomic impact of the reform would depend primarily on how permanent agents perceive the policy to be. Robustness scenarios show that the magnitude of the short term impact will also depend on the extent to which exporters are reimbursed by their domestic costs; what categories of goods are excluded from the reform; how the government uses the revenues generated by the border adjusted tax; and the pricing system used by exporters. Moreover, global spillovers will depend on how easy it is to replace imported goods by domestic production; whether US trading partners retaliate, and how financial markets in emerging economies react. If there is disequilibrium in relative prices in the short term, global economic activity spillovers could be strongly negative and world trade could decline substantially. JEL Classification: C68, E47, F41, F44, F62, O41