Séminaires de recherche

Mardi | 2021-03-23
16H00 – Webinar

Mathieu COUTTENIER

We provide new evidence on how conflict adversely affects economic outcomes. Specifically, we ask whether and how the production network is a first-order determinant of the propagation of conflict to firms outside of conflict zone. Using microdata on Indian manufacturing plants and geo-coded information on Maoist insurgency, we first provide an estimate of the direct exposure to conflict. Firms located in conflict affected areas suffer a loss of 7-11% of their output. Estimating structurally a general equilibrium model of production networks, we then obtain an estimate for the overall macroeconomic impact of the Maoist insurgency by taking this propagation effects into account. We find that the Maoist insurgency resulted in a 0.4-0.7% decline in aggregate output of Indian’s manufacturing sector. Only 20% of this loss is due to direct exposure to conflict, whereas the remaining 80% is explained by the indirect exposure to conflict through the network production.

Mardi | 2021-03-16
16H00 – Webinar

Dylan BOURNY – Daniel MIRZA – Camélia TURCU

This paper identifies an externality of multinationals on trade, channeled through their power of promoting cultures across countries. In particular, it shows how multinationals, by selling products embodying cultural information related to their country of origin, actually promote exports of the latter. We argue that IKEA offers an ideal case to identify a multinational’s culture-promotion effect on trade. We build a dataset on IKEA’s presence in foreign markets between 1995 and 2015 and merge it with disaggregated product level trade between pairs of countries. We find solid evidence of an externality linked to IKEA: a setting of an IKEA new store in a destination increases trade flows by around 2% from Sweden for products that resemble to what the multinational offers (despite being completely unrelated to that multinational). This result is driven primarily by the products identified to encompass a high-cultural content. Other robustness checks and tests seem to be very much consistent with the hypothesis of IKEA promoting the Swedish culture to the world.

Mardi | 2021-03-09
16H00 – Webinar

Andrea PRESBITERO

Can debt moratoria help countries weather negative shocks? We study the bond market effects of an official debt service suspension endorsed by the international community during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using daily data on sovereign bond spreads and synthetic control methods, we show that countries eligible for official debt relief experience a larger decline in borrowing costs compared to similar, ineligible countries. This decline is stronger for countries that receive a larger relief, suggesting that the effect works through liquidity provision. By contrast, the results do not support the concern that official debt relief could generate stigma on financial markets.

Mardi | 2021-02-23
16H00 – Webinar

Jonathan BENCHIMOL – Lahcen BOUNADER

The form of bounded rationality characterizing the representative agent is key in the choice of the optimal monetary policy regime. While inflation targeting prevails for myopia that distorts agents’ inflation expectations, price level targeting emerges as the optimal policy under myopia regarding the output gap, revenue, or interest rate. To the extent that bygones are not bygones under price level targeting, rational inflation expectations is a minimal condition for optimality in a behavioral world. Instrument rules implementation of this optimal policy is shown to be infeasible, questioning the ability of simple rules à la Taylor (1993) to assist the conduct of monetary policy. Bounded rationality is not necessarily associated with welfare losses.

Mardi | 2021-01-26
16H00 – Webinar

Walter STEINGRESS

Exporting is known to improve _rm performance; numerous studies report efficiency gains arising from entry into foreign markets, greater _rm-level investment, greater employment among other complementary firm-level changes. However, successful exporters inherently satisfy multiple constraints simultaneously: they find buyers for their product abroad, hire sufficient inputs, access necessary financing, and pass legal obstacles, among others. We focus on two potentially limiting constraints to successful entry into export markets: profitability and access to credit. This paper develops an empirical approach which identifies (a) the heterogeneous returns to exporting across the distribution of Canadian manufacturers and (b) the fraction of firms restricted from export markets because of credit constraints. The latter result distinguishes firms which cannot export because financial costs cause exporting to be unprofitable at market rates, from those which do not export because of a binding credit constraint. We find that exporting more than doubles labour productivity, investment and firm-leverage, but many firms still cannot access export markets due to credit frictions. We estimate that as much as 14 percent of Canadian manufacturers are potentially limited from enjoying export-induced productivity growth because of credit constraints.