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Labor and Product Market Reforms in Advanced Economies
Product and labor market reforms are needed to lift persistently sluggish growth in advanced economies. But reforms have progressed slowly because of concerns about their distributive and short-term economic effects. Our analysis, based on new empirical and numerical analysis and country case-studies shows that most labor and product market reforms can improve public debt dynamics over the medium-term. This because reforms raise output by boosting employment and/or labor productivity. But the effect of some labor market reforms on budgetary outcomes and fiscal sustainability depends critically on business cycle conditions. Our evidence also suggests that some temporary and well-designed up-front fiscal stimulus can help enhance the economic impact of reforms. In the past, countries have used fiscal incentives in the past to facilitate reforms by alleviating transition and social costs. But strong ownership of reforms was crucial for their successful implementation.
Labor and Product Market Reforms and External Imbalances: Evidence from Advanced Economies
We explore the impact of major labor and product market reforms on current account dynamics using a new “narrative” database of major changes in employment protection for regular workers and product market regulation for non-manufacturing industries covering 26 advanced economies over the past four decades. Our main finding is that product market deregulation is associated with a weakening of the current account, while labor market deregulation is associated with an improvement. These effects are transitory and driven by both saving and investment responses. Labor and product market reforms both have a more positive impact on the current account balance when implemented under weak macroeconomic conditions. Our results are broadly consistent with predictions from recent DSGE models with endogenous producer entry and labor market frictions.
Rising Corporate Market Power
Corporate market power has risen in recent decades, and new estimates in this note suggest that the likely wave of small and medium-sized enterprise bankruptcies from the ongoing pandemic will further strengthen market concentration. Whether and how policymakers should address this issue is hotly debated. This note provides new evidence on the policy relevance of rising market power and highlights possible implications for the design of competition policy frameworks and macroeconomic policies.
Insolvency Prospects Among Small-and-Medium-Sized Enterprises in Advanced Economies
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased insolvency risks, especially among small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are vastly overrepresented in hard-hit sectors. Without government intervention, even firms that are viable a priori could end up being liquidated—particularly in sectors characterized by labor-intensive technologies, threatening both macroeconomic and social stability. This staff discussion note assesses the impact of the pandemic on SME insolvency risks and policy options to address them. It quantifies the impact of weaker aggregate demand, changes in sectoral consumption patterns, and lockdowns on firm balance sheets and estimates the impact of a range of policy options, for a large sample of SMEs in (mostly) advanced economies.
The Needle in the Haystack: What Drives Labor and Product Market Reforms in Advanced Countries?
The political economy literature has put forward a multitude of hypotheses regarding the drivers of structural reforms, but few, if any, empirically robust findings have emerged thus far. To make progress, we draw a parallel with model uncertainty in the growth literature and provide a new version of the Bayesian averaging of maximum likelihood estimates (BAMLE) technique tailored to binary logit models. Relying on a new database of major past labor and product market reforms in advanced countries, we test a large set of variables for robust correlation with reform in each area. We find widespread support for the crisis-induces-reform hypothesis. Outside pressure increases the likelihood of reform in certain areas: reforms are more likely when other countries also undertake them and when there is formal pressure to implement them. Other robust correlates are more specific to certain areas—for example, international pressure and political factors are most relevant for product market and job protection reforms, respectively.
Credit Supply and Productivity Growth
We study the impact of bank credit on firm productivity. We exploit a matched firm-bank database covering all the credit relationships of Italian corporations, together with a natural experiment, to measure idiosyncratic supply-side shocks to credit availability and to estimate a production model augmented with financial frictions. We find that a contraction in credit supply causes a reduction of firm TFP growth and also harms IT-adoption, innovation, exporting, and adoption of superior management practices, while a credit expansion has limited impact. Quantitatively, the credit contraction between 2007 and 2009 accounts for about a quarter of observed the decline in TFP.
A Narrative Database of Major Labor and Product Market Reforms in Advanced Economies
This paper describes a new database of major labor and product market reforms covering 26 advanced economies over the period 1970-2013. The focus is on large changes in product market regulation in seven individual network industries, employment protection legislation for regular and temporary workers, and the replacement rate and duration of unemployment benefits. The main advantage of this dataset is the precise identification of the nature and date of major reforms, which is valuable in many empirical applications. By contrast, the dataset does not attempt to measure and compare policy settings across countries, and as such is no substitute for other publicly available indicators produced, for example, by the ILO, the OECD or the World Bank. It should also be seen as work in progress, for researchers to build on and improve upon. Based on the dataset, major reforms appear to have been more frequent in product markets than in labor markets in the last decades, and were predominantly implemented during the 1990s and 2000s.
Growth Slowdowns and the Middle-Income Trap
The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as large sudden and sustained deviations from the growth path predicted by a basic conditional convergence framework. We then examine their determinants by means of probit regressions, looking into the role of institutions, demography, infrastructure, the macroeconomic environment, output structure and trade structure. Two variants of Bayesian Model Averaging are used as robustness checks. The results—including some that indeed speak to the special status of middle-income countries—are then used to derive policy implications, with a particular focus on Asian economies.
Heterogeneity and Persistence in Returns to Wealth
We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway’s administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, during our sample period individuals earn markedly different average returns on their financial assets (a standard deviation of 14%) and on their net worth (a standard deviation of 8%). Second, heterogeneity in returns does not arise merely from differences in the allocation of wealth between safe and risky assets: returns are heterogeneous even within asset classes. Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth: moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the financial weal...
A Proposal to End the COVID-19 Pandemic
Urgent steps are needed to arrest the rising human toll and economic strain from the COVID-19 pandemic that are exacerbating already-diverging recoveries. Pandemic policy is also economic policy as there is no durable end to the economic crisis without an end to the health crisis. Building on existing initiatives, this paper proposes pragmatic actions at the national and multilateral level to expeditiously defeat the pandemic. The proposal targets: (1) vaccinating at least 40 percent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 and at least 60 percent by the first half of 2022, (2) tracking and insuring against downside risks, and (3) ensuring widespread testing and tracing, maintai...
