Living With Macro Financial Linkages

This book deals with the challenges of macro financial linkages in the emerging markets.

We propose a stress testing framework of credit risk, which analyzes macro-financial linkages, generate consistent forecasts of macro-financial variables, and projects NPL on the basis of such forecasts. Economic contractions are generally associated with increases in non-performing loans (NPL). However, despite the common assumption used in the empirical literature of homogenous impact across banks, the strength of this relationship is often bank-specific, and imposing homogeneity may lead to over or underestimating the resilience of the financial system to macroeconomic woes. Our approach accounts for banks’ heterogeneous reaction to macro-financial shocks in a dynamic context and potential cross-sectional dependence across banks caused by common shocks. An application to Ecuador suggests that substantial heterogeneity is present and that this should be taken into account when trying to anticipate inflections in the quality of portfolio.

This paper investigates macro-financial linkages in Egypt using two complementary methods, assessing the interaction between different macroeconomic aggregates and loan portfolio quality in a multivariate framework as well as through a panel vector autoregressive method that controls for bank-level characteristics. Using a panel of banks over 1993-2010, the authors find that a positive shock to capital inflows and growth in gross domestic product improves banks’ loan portfolio quality, and that the effect is fairly similar in magnitude using the multivariate and panel vector autoregressive frameworks. In contrast, higher lending rates may lead to adverse selection problems and hence to a drop in portfolio quality. The paper also reports that a larger market share of foreign banks in the industry improves loan quality.

Macrofinancial linkages have long been at the core of the IMF's mandate to oversee the stability of the global financial system. With the advent of the economic crisis, the Fund has drawn on this research in order to contribute to critical debates on the nature of appropriate policy responses at both the national and multilateral levels. The current juncture offers a good opportunity to take stock of this body of research by IMF staff and to share it with a wider audience, particularly since few collections have been published in this area. This volume brings together some of the best writing by IMF economists on macrofinancial issues, and highlights the issues and approaches that have guided IMF thinking in an area that makes up an increasingly important component of the IMF's overall remit. The chapters in the volume fit into three broad themes: financial crises and boom-bust cycles; financial integration, financial liberalization, and economic performance; and policy issues relating to macroeconomic policy and the corporate and financial sectors-including domestic and external financial liberalization.

Growth perspectives in emerging market economies are increasingly dependent on international capital flows in recent decades because of their influences on business cycles. In fact, volatile international capital flows has been one of the main concerns for the macroeconomic policy authorities. Focusing on emerging economies in the Pacific region, this book reveals how they are different from those in other regions in terms of international macro-financial linkages to the global capital market and domestic financial development,. The book also discusses how these characteristics have interacted with their macroeconomic policy regimes and their macroeconomic performance throughout the two major international financial crises in the past more than two decades. It suggests facts that have strengthened the resilience of these emerging economies in the Pacific region against the global financial crisis along with the intensified intra-regional economic integration through trade and investment. The book also examines their macroeconomic management focusing on monetary policy regimes and suggests that their factual unorthodox policies with exchange rate management and capital controls have contributed to their resilience against the intrinsic volatility of the international capital market and financial flows.

This paper develops a small open economy dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with macrofinancial linkages. The model includes a financial accelerator--entrepreneurs are assumed to partially finance investment using domestic and foreign currency debt--to assess the importance of financial frictions in the amplification and propagation of the effects of transitory shocks. We use Bayesian estimation techniques to estimate the model using India data. The model is used to assess the importance of the financial accelerator in India and the optimality of monetary policy.

Oil-macro-financial linkages in Saudi Arabia are analyzed by applying panel econometric frameworks (multivariate and vector autoregression) to maceoeconomic and bank-level balance sheet data for 9 banks spanning 1999–2014. Lower growth of oil prices and non-oil private sector output leads to slower credit and deposit growth and higher nonperforming loan ratios, with feedback loops within bank balance sheets which in turn dampens economic activity. U.S. interest rates are not found to be a key determinant.