Suchergebnisse

Population aging challenges the financing of social security systems in developed economies, as the fraction of the population in working age declines. The resulting pressure on capital-labor ratios translates into a pressure on factor prices and production. While European countries all face this challenge, the speed at which their population ages differs, and thus the pressure on capital-labor ratios. If capital markets are integrated, differences in population aging may lead to cross-country spillovers, as investors freely seek the best returns on capital. Using a multi-country overlapping-generations model covering 14 European Union countries, I quantify spillovers and find that capital market integration leads to redistribution across countries over the long run. For instance, GDP per capita would on average be 2.9 %-points lower in Germany in each of the next 50 years if capital markets were perfectly integrated and increases in labor income taxes maintained public debt constant, compared to a closed economy case; by contrast, GDP per capita would on average be 2.1 %-points higher in France, whose population ages slower than in Germany. I also show that pension reforms can change the cross-country redistribution patterns, some countries losing from capital market integration without the reform but winning with it. The research has policy and methodological implications.

For a large number of OECD countries we estimate the cross-country spillover effects of government purchases on output. Following the methodology in Auerbach and Gorodnichenko (2012a, b), we allow these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and use real-time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable components. Our findings suggest that cross-country spillovers have an important impact. The findings also confirm those of our earlier papers--namely that fiscal shocks have a larger impact when the affected country is in recession.

With limited participation in an international climate agreement, standard economic analysis suggests that a unilateral action taken by a group of countries in order to reduce its emissions is likely to be undermined by increases in emissions from other countries (carbon leakage). While analyses of carbon leakage typically have regarded the technology in each country as given, abatement technologies are in reality endogenous, and thus technology development may be affected by environmental policies. We demonstrate that with endogenous technologies and technology diffusion between countries, it is no longer obvious that reduced emissions in some countries will increase emissions in other countries. We identify cases in which reduced emissions in some countries might reduce emissions also in other countries.

The Great Recession underlined that policies in some countries can have profound spillovers elsewhere. Sadly, the solution of simulating large macroeconomic models to measure these spillovers has been found wanting. Typical models generate lower international correlations of output and financial asset prices than are seen in even pre-crisis data. Imposing higher financial market correlations creates more reasonable cross-country spillovers, and is likely to become the norm in policy modeling despite weak theoretical underpinnings, as is already true of sticky wages. We propose using event studies to calibrate market reactions to particular policy announcements, and report results for U.S. monetary and fiscal policy announcements in 2009 and 2010 that are plausible and event-specific.