Tax Austerity: Does It Avert Solvency Crises?

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Abstract

Many high-debt countries are adopting tax austerity, whereby governments raise the tax rate as their debt levels rise with the hope to dispel future solvency crises. This paper investigates the impact of tax austerity on government debt solvency. A solvency crisis occurs once adverse shocks push the debt above its effective debt limit, the maximum level of debt that the government can repay. I show that the position of the effective debt limit depends on tax austerity. I find that high-debt countries like Italy that undergo tax austerity could lower their effective debt limit and induce a solvency crisis.

Credit Guarantee and Fiscal Costs

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Abstract

This paper studies the effectiveness of government-backed credit guarantees to the infrastructure sector. We propose a two-sector model with financial intermediary frictions so that infrastructure producers rely on bank loans to finance production. Governments can intervene in the credit market by providing a partial guarantee. We find that a credit guarantee increases infrastructure production, leading to a high fiscal multiplier in the longer run. In the near term, however, higher infrastructure-sector wages crowd out private-sector labor supply. Importantly, the higher leverage associated with credit expansion raises nonperforming loans, and this channel is particularly pronounced if the government-backed credit guarantees linger.

Endogenous Cycles in Collateralized Credit

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Abstract

This paper presents a simple and tractable equilibrium model, where collateralized credit emerges under limited commitment. We show that even if there is no time variation in fundamentals, credit trade can fluctuate endogenously over time. In our theory, credit fragilities are associated with endogenous fluctuations in trade probabilities, collateral values, and lending volumes.

Cryptocurrency, Security, and Financial Intermediation

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Abstract

In recent years, the use of cryptocurrencies has increased. As these currencies continue to play a larger role, they eventually will be an important component of banking system activity. Moreover, in addition to the standard role of financial intermediaries to facilitate lending, intermediaries can be valuable firms that help provide safekeeping of tokens. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate these important functions in a microfounded model of monetary exchange. Furthermore, we also consider the possibility that central banks issue their own digital currencies that may affect the level of intermediation in the private banking system.

Do Central Bank Communications Influence Survey of Professional Forecasters? An Empirical Investigation

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Business Perspectives and Research, Ahead of Print.
The present study contributes to our understanding regarding private-sector inflation expectations and how central bank communications influence them in an emerging economy like India. This study uses the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) regression function to estimate the influence of the determinants on the survey of professional forecasters for a period ranging from Q1 2014–2015 to Q4 2021–2022. Our results demonstrate the significant positive influence of the lagged period inflation forecasted by the professionals and central bank communications in the form of inflation projections on the inflation forecasted by the professionals in the current period. Macroeconomic variables like repo rate, lagged realized inflation, GDP, merchandise exports and imports, and crude oil rates turned out to be non-significant in influencing the inflation forecasted by the professionals, at least in the short run. The literature highlights the importance of anchoring private-sector expectations by the central bank in an economy, and our results provide empirical evidence for the same, along with its implications on policy making.