Macro Research

Abstract

We study how the recent run-up in housing and rental prices affects the outlook for inflation in the USA. Housing held down the overall inflation in 2021. Despite record growth in private market-based measures of home prices and rents, the government-measured residential services inflation was only 4% for the 12 months ending in January 2022. After explaining the mechanical cause for this divergence, we estimate that, if past relationships hold, the residential inflation components of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) are likely to move close to 7% during 2022. These findings imply that housing will make a significant contribution to overall inflation in 2022, ranging from one percentage point for headline PCE, to 2.6 percentage points for core CPI. We expect residential inflation to remain elevated in 2023.

There have been important methodological changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over time. These distort comparisons of inflation from different periods, which have become more prevalent as inflation has risen to 40-year highs. To better contextualize the current run-up in inflation, this article constructs new historical series for CPI headline and core inflation that are more consistent with current practices and expenditure shares for the post-war period. Using these series, we find that current inflation levels are much closer to past inflation peaks than the official series would suggest. In particular, the rate of core CPI disinflation caused by Volcker-era policies is significantly lower when measured using today’s treatment of housing: only 5 percentage points of decline instead of 11 percentage points in the official CPI statistics.

Where and when does export-led growth work? This paper estimates the importance of inter-industry productivity spillovers for the export-led growth of developing countries. My empirical strategy is based on a standard quantitative trade model that features sector-level gravity in trade flows. Applying the framework to four decades of trade data, I find clear evidence of spillovers, which are larger for skill-intensive sectors. The estimates imply that patterns of sectoral specialization play a quantitatively important role in accounting for the slow convergence of labor productivity in tradable sectors. Quantitative exercises suggest that export-led growth works for poorer countries with an initial comparative advantage in manufacturing, as these countries can use foreign demand from richer countries to reallocate labor towards sectors with high spillovers.

Rising debt vulnerabilities in low- and middle-income countries have rekindled interest in a Brady Plan-style mechanism to facilitate debt restructurings. To inform this debate, this paper analyzes the impact of the original Brady Plan by comparing macroeconomic outcomes of 10 Brady countries to 40 other emerging markets and developing economies. The paper finds that following the first Brady restructuring in 1990, Brady countries experienced substantial declines in public and external debt burdens and a sharp pick-up in output and productivity growth, anchored by a comparatively strong structural reform effort. The impact of the Brady Plan on overall debt burdens was many times greater than initial face value reductions, indicating the existence of a “Brady multiplier.” Brady restructurings took longer to complete than non-Brady restructurings. Today, similar mechanisms could be helpful in delivering meaningful debt stock reduction when solvency challenges are acute, but Brady-style mechanisms alone would not solve existing challenges in the sovereign debt landscape, including those related to creditor coordination, domestic barriers to economic reforms, and the increased prevalence of domestic debt, among others.

Unemployment is low and inflation is falling, but consumer sentiment remains depressed. This has confounded economists, who historically rely on these two variables to gauge how consumers feel about the economy. We propose that borrowing costs, which have grown at rates they had not reached in decades, do much to explain this gap. The cost of money is not currently included in traditional price indexes, indicating a disconnect between the measures favored by economists and the effective costs borne by consumers. We show that the lows in US consumer sentiment that cannot be explained by unemployment and official inflation are strongly correlated with borrowing costs and consumer credit supply. Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels since the Volcker-era. We then develop alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs and can account for almost three quarters of the gap in US consumer sentiment in 2023. Global evidence shows that consumer sentiment gaps across countries are also strongly correlated with changes in interest rates. Proposed U.S.-specific factors do not find much supportive evidence abroad.

Since the Global Financial Crisis, fiscal policy in advanced economies has become more “active” – that is, increasingly unresponsive to rising debt levels. This paper explores tensions between active fiscal and monetary policies by introducing the concept of “fiscal r-star,” which is the real interest rate required to stabilize debt levels when the primary balance is set exogenously, output is growing at potential, and inflation is at target. It is proposed that the difference between monetary r-star and fiscal r-star—referred to as the “fiscal monetary gap”—is a proxy for fiscal-monetary policy tensions. An analysis of over 140 years of data from 16 advanced economies shows that larger fiscal-monetary gaps are associated with rising debt levels, higher inflation, financial repression, lower real returns on bonds and cash, with elevated risks of future debt, inflation, currency, housing, and systemic crises. Current estimates indicate that fiscal-monetary tensions are at historic highs. Given the tepid growth outlook, growth-enhancing reforms and fiscal consolidation, among other policy adjustments, may be needed to attenuate fiscal-monetary tensions over time.

This paper presents a new dataset of monetary policy shocks for 21 advanced economies and 8 emerging markets from 2000-2022. We use daily changes in interest rate swap rates around central bank announcements to identify unexpected shocks to the path of monetary policy. The resulting series can be used to examine cross-country heterogeneity in the impact of monetary policy shocks. We establish a new empirical fact on monetary policy spillovers across countries: the monetary policy decisions of small open economy central banks, and not just major central banks, have substantial spillover effects on swap rates and bond yields in other countries.

We construct a new database which covers production and trade in 136 primary commodities and 24 manufacturing and service sectors for 145 countries. Using this new more granular data, we estimate spillover effects from plausible trade fragmentation scenarios in a new multi-country, multi-sector, general-equilibrium model that accounts for unique demand and supply characteristics of commodities. The results show fragmentation-induced output losses can be sizable, especially for Low-Income-Countries, although the magnitudes vary according to the particular scenarios and modelling assumptions. Our work demonstrates that not accounting for granular commodity production and trade linkages leads to underestimation of the output losses associated with trade fragmentation.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a large disruption of global supply chains. This paper studies the implications of supply chain disruptions for inflation and monetary policy in sub-Saharan Africa. Increases in supply chain pressures have had a sizeable impact on headline, food, and tradable inflation for a panel of 29 sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2022. Our findings suggest that central banks can stabilize inflation and output more efficiently by monitoring global supply chains and adjusting the monetary policy stance before the disruptions have fully passed through into all inflation components. The gains from monitoring supply chain disruptions are particularly large for open economies which tend to experience outsized second-round effects on the prices of non-tradable goods and services.