{"title":"Comment","authors":"J. Imbs","doi":"10.1086/648709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/648709","url":null,"abstract":"In its empirical section, this paper repeats Engel’s (1999) decomposition of real exchange rates into the international relative price of tradable goods and international differences in the relative price of nontraded goods. The main addition is the use of value‐added price deflators, rather than consumer price indexes, as in Engel (1999). Thanks to this, it is possible to perform the decomposition for a large cross‐section of countries—although only results pertaining to several non‐European pairs are effectively reported. The median country in this sample shares the features Engel documented 10 years ago: the bulk of the volatility in real exchange rates comes from volatility in the international price of traded goods. That said, there is considerable dispersion, with the volatility of traded goods prices explaining between 18% and 80% of real exchange rate volatility. In other words, Engel’s fact holds for themedian country, but the decomposition yields very different results depending on a country’s characteristics, as in Betts and Kehoe (2001, 2006, 2008). It seems as if samples with high trade (or, possibly, stable nominal exchange rates) tend to imply different results from Engel’s, a finding already evident in Mendoza (2000). The paper then proposes to explain Engel’s fact in a model in the international real business cycles tradition. Traded goods are imperfect substitutes across countries, and technological shocks affect both traded and nontraded sectors. Imperfect substitutability makes it possible for the international relative price of traded goods to vary over time in response to shocks. Labor is the only factor of production in all sectors, and it is perfectly mobile. An immediate consequence is that the relative price of traded goods maps directly into relative technologies. Whether the model can match Engel’s fact becomes, then, directly isomorphic to whether the volatility of relative productivity in the traded sector is high enough in the data. The paper uses labor productivity in manufacturing and service sectors to answer negatively.","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131251083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"A. Ritschl","doi":"10.1086/648698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/648698","url":null,"abstract":"“The End of Gatekeeping: Underwriters and the Quality of Sovereign Bond Markets, 1815–2007” by Marc Flandreau, Juan Flores, Norbert Galliard, and Sebastián Nieto‐Parra presents new, fascinating historical insights into sovereign bond issues. Underwriters untilWorldWar II specialized on certain default probability ranges in a case of assortative matching: first‐rate debt would be issued by first‐rate issuing houses, debts of slightly lower quality by second‐rate houses, and so forth. In contrast, underwriters nowadays appear to be rather despecialized with regard to default risk. In the old regime, the underwriting industry was highly concentrated, whereas today it is not. The authors also find that in the olden days, the issuing houses would assume the risk of issue failure, whereas today they do not. The puzzle stated by the authors is that in the old equilibrium, the underwriter ’s type would reveal the type of the borrower, whereas today it does not. The interpretation given to this evidence by the paper is that under the old regime, information asymmetries existed between debtors and creditors, which the issuing houses resolved by signaling quality to investors. Truthful revelation of borrower types was ensured by reputation effects. According to the authors, the increasing role of rating agencies since the postwar period has rendered this function of sovereign debt underwriters redundant: owing to the activity of rating agencies, default risk is now common knowledge (or that is at leastwhatwe thought until recently). The disappearance of information asymmetries leaves no role for signaling and reputation effects, and hence no role for underwriter specialization. The paper convincingly demonstrates that an equilibrium switch in the underwriting market indeed took place in the postwar period. But is there also a puzzle? One puzzling fact is that rating agencies appeared already before World War I, half a century earlier than the authors’ story would imply. If underwriters were indeed so critical in resolving information asymmetries, their position should have been eroded earlier by","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"999 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123103152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"P. Lane","doi":"10.1086/648701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/648701","url":null,"abstract":"The core of the seminal contribution by Feldstein and Horioka (1980) was to ask if a country saves more, how much of that extra saving is retained in domestic investment rather than sent overseas? Feldstein and Horioka interpreted the high cross‐sectional correlation between savings and investment as indicating that capital was largely internationally immobile: if a country saved more, its domestic capital stock would increase. However, the subsequent literature quickly established that other interpretations were possible and that the high observed correlation could also be consistent with perfect capital mobility. In particular, common shocks drive savings and investment in the same direction for all countries such that the observed correlation will be high if common shocks dominate idiosyncratic shocks. The contribution of “The Feldstein‐Horioka Fact” by Domenico Giannone and Michele Lenza is to provide an empirical framework that establishes the relative contributions of global and country‐specific shocks in driving savings and investment rates. Within the Feldstein‐ Horioka tradition, this is a clear methodological innovation. It is important to be clear about terminology in this area. We may define a symmetric shock as one that affects all countries in the same way (savings and investment respond identically in all countries), whereas an asymmetric shock is one that generates differential responses between savings and investment across countries. Clearly, a current account imbalance can arise only in the event of an asymmetric shock. While a country‐specific shock is by definition asymmetric, Giannone and Lenza do not assume that global shocks are necessarily symmetric. In particular, different economic structures mean that a global shock may generate current account imbalances if the global shock has an asymmetric impact on different countries.","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123935743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"Vincent R. Reinhart","doi":"10.1086/648697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/648697","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"265 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133748996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"Huw Pill","doi":"10.1086/648694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/648694","url":null,"abstract":"We live in an era of financial globalization. Yet we are not the first to do so. In an oft‐quoted passage from The Economic Consequences of the Peace— indeed, a passage thatDennisQuinn andHans‐JoachimVothquote in their paper “Free Flow, Limited Diversification: Openness and the Fall and Risk of StockMarketCorrelations, 1890–2001”—J.M.Keynes (1920, 11) famously describes how, prior to the FirstWorldWar, an investor could already “adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world” through a deep and integrated international capital market. By contrast, scholars of the global economy at midcentury have characterized national markets as “insular” (McKinnon 1981), with countries shielded from the impact of global financial developments by an extensive system of administrative controls on the cross‐border flow of capital, even as international trade was progressively liberalized. What can we learn from such historical variation in capital account openness about the role of financial forces in shaping the behavior of the global economy? How did the integrated international capital market at the turnof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shapedomestic financial institutions and markets? At midcentury, were controls on cross‐border capital movements an impediment to economic and financial development? Or did they help stabilize economies subject to financial shocks? These are the important questions that Quinn and Voth address. At a time when the efficiency of financial markets and the desirability of capital account openness are again being called into question, it is all themore important that we learn the correct lessons of history.","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128961574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"Daniel Gros","doi":"10.1086/596000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596000","url":null,"abstract":"Curcuru, Thomas, and Dvorak's paper provides an in‐depth discussion of the problems with the official data that depicts one of the greatest mysteries of modern macroeconomics, namely, that the net international investment position (IIP) of the United States does not seem to be deteriorating significantly, although the country is running very large current account deficits. The paper also argues convincingly that one can discriminate among various “theories” or rather “stories” about the mystery based on a careful evaluation of the relative reliability of data on various subcomponents of the international accounts (the stocks [IIP], the flows of asset accumulation, and the returns). The authors’ analysis suggests that the dark matter story fails since it is built on the assumption that the data on investment income are the most reliable and accurate item in the balance of payments, whereas in reality investment income is largely estimated. The paper describes in considerable detail the authors’ views on how the official U.S. statistics concerning the current account and the U.S. IIP should be adjusted to reflect reality. The paper concludes that after plugging various holes in the accounts, the authors find that the positive returns differential the United States earns on its net IIP is much smaller than implied by the exorbitant privilege theory. They thus take a more open stance on this later view, which implies that the United States can run much larger current account deficits because it receives a higher return on its investments abroad than it pays on its investment liabilities. The authors do not emphasize this, but the “exorbitant privilege view” is similar to the “dark matter view” in that both have at their basis a high return differential. The difference between these two views lies essentially in the way the income investment data are reconciled with the data on the stocks of","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125594003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plant Size Distribution and Cross‐Country Income Differences","authors":"Laura Alfaro, Andrew H. Charlton, Fabio Kanczuk","doi":"10.1086/596010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596010","url":null,"abstract":"Cross‐country differences in income per worker are widely known to be enormous. Per capita income in the richest countries exceeds that in the poorest countries bymore than a factor of 50 (see KlenowandRodriguez‐ Clare 1997; Prescott 1998; Hall and Jones 1999; Caselli 2005). An important strand of the literature trying to understand cross‐country differences in per capita incomes has focused on the role of aggregate factor accumulation by abstracting from heterogeneity in the production units. But there is an emerging and growing body of research that takes a different approach, focusing instead on the misallocation of resources across plants (Restuccia and Rogerson 2007; Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, and Scarpetta 2008; Hsieh and Klenow 2009). Policies’ and institutions’ differential effects on the business climate broadly defined might significantly influence the allocation of resources across establishments. The working hypothesis in this literature is that not only the level of factor accumulation but also how these factors are allocated across heterogeneous production units matters in trying to understand income differences. Our paper contributes to this literature by performing a development accounting exercise using a new data set of more than 20 million establishments in 79 developing and industrialized countries. Specifically, we develop a simple model of heterogeneous production units that follows Melitz (2003). Plants’ dynamics and policy distortions are as in Restuccia and Rogerson (2007), but we assume that production units have constant returns to scale technologies and some degree of market power, as in Hsieh and Klenow (2009). We calibrate the model to match our data set. Our calibration exercise consists in finding the profile of output taxes and subsidies needed to match each country’s plant size distribution. These distortions should be interpreted as the different","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121120952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"John Haltiwanger","doi":"10.1086/596011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596011","url":null,"abstract":"The idea that an important source of cross‐country differences in income is related to differences in the degree ofmisallocation across countries has core appeal to economists. After all, economic efficiency is all about the nature and extent towhich resources are allocated to their highest‐valued use. The basic premise in the paper by Alfaro, Charlton, and Kanczuk is that in well‐functioning economies such as the United States the size distribution of activity largely reflects an efficient allocation of resources. For the core models of the size distribution of activity in the literature, the key implication is that in efficient economies, firms (and establishments) are large because they are the most productive. However, in low income per capita countries, the working conjecture in this paper is that the allocation of resources across firms is distorted. Specifically, the authors explore the implications of recent models that idiosyncratic distortions to the scale of activity in a country will distort the size‐productivity relationship. In this respect, this paper fits into a growing literature seeking to understand the extent of such misallocation. While I am very sympathetic to this line of argument, I have a number of concerns about the identification approach used in this paper. The concerns reflect both conceptual issues and related concerns on whether the data used are sufficient for this identification. Before I proceed to my concerns, it is useful to emphasize the various facets of the analysis that I think are on the right track. For one, there is substantial evidence that there is substantial productivity heterogeneity within industries. The results in Syverson (2004) suggest that the interquartile range for measured revenue‐based total factor productivity within narrowly defined sectors is around 30 log points. In addition, the results in the literature show that there is considerable dispersion and skewness in the size distribution of activity within sectors. These two basic facts offer considerable scope for misallocation to play a role.","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122928478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regional Difference‐in‐Differences in France Using the German Annexation of Alsace‐Moselle in 1870–1918","authors":"Matthieu Chemin, Étienne Wasmer","doi":"10.1086/596013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596013","url":null,"abstract":"The evaluation of labor market policies has been an expanding field in the last decades. This is partly due to the increasing availability of survey data and computing power and partly to the recognition that even complex phenomena such as the impact of laws and regulations on labor markets can be rigorously tested thanks to new empiricalmethodologies, such as the so‐called difference‐in‐difference approaches (also called double differences). In this approach, the outcome (education, access to employment, unemployment rate) of a treated group, that is, a group subject to a policy change, is compared to that of a control group, that is, a group made up of individuals (or any other unit of observation) as close as possible to the treated group but unaffected by the treatment. The strategy of the researchers consists in finding a sudden change in policy and building a relevant comparison group. A recent paper by Imbens and Wooldridge (2008) discusses the issues associated with the choice of the groups and surveys the literature. In countries with a federal structure such as the United States or Canada, it is straightforward to use this technique to evaluate policy changes. Indeed, many laws are specific to a state (for the United States) or a province (for Canada). When states experiencing a reform are compared to states with no change, it is straightforward to obtain inferences about the causal effects of the reform. In contrast, researchers studying French labor laws typically face cases in which there is no geographical variance in policy changes since the main law is supposed to apply equally to all the French territory. Therefore, policy evaluation has to rely on other control groups. A consequence of this “universal”character of the law is that the evaluation of the reduction in working time in France—from","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122118802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"Michael P. Dooley","doi":"10.1086/595999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/595999","url":null,"abstract":"The paper by Curcuru, Thomas, and Dvorak is an important contribution to the debate about the sustainability of recent U.S. current account deficits. If estimates of the U.S. net international investment position (NIIP) published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis are correct, U.S. net international debt at the end of 2007 was about $2.4 trillion and was growing at a decreasing rate (light solid line in Curcuru et al.’s fig. 2). NIIP estimated by cumulating the same agency’s estimates of the current account deficit stood at about $6 trillion at the end of 2007 and was growing at an increasing rate (broken line in fig. 2). The conclusion that the U.S. current account is unsustainable is usually based on projections for U.S. current account deficits. If recent history is repeated, however, the level of NIIP will continue to grow more slowly. If the factors that slowed NIIP growth are reversed, the outlook would be much more alarming. If lower levels and growth rates for reported NIIP have been generated by large persistent yield differentials in favor of U.S. investors, U.S. NIIP will continue to grow relatively slowly. Curcuru, Dvorak, and Warnock (2008) presented evidence that estimates for much higher returns for U.S. investors within asset classes are based on an inappropriate merging of data sets. In particular, they argue convincingly that revisions in reported stocks of U.S. international assets and liabilities are not entirely due to realized returns. Nevertheless, in that paper and the current paper there remains a small yield differential in favor of the United States, and “valuation effects” calculated by the authors account for about a $2 trillion lower estimate of the NIIP in 2007. A problem associated with Curcuru et al.’s conclusion is that it leaves about $1.7 trillion of reported balance of payments data without a home. The authors’ rejection of the hypothesis that the $1.7 trillion belongs in differential returns would be strengthened by finding plausible","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123202589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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