Remittances, Financial Development, and Growth
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There has been little systematic empirical study on the relationship between remittances and growth. This paper attempts to examine this relationship. Using a newly constructed cross-country of data series for remittances covering a large sample of developing countries, we relate the interaction between remittances and financial development and its impact on growth. We analyze how a country's capacity to use remittances and its effectiveness in doing so might be influenced by local financial sector conditions. Given the difficulty of borrowing in developing countries, we explore the hypothesis that remittances can substitute for a lack of financial development and hence promote growth. The empirical analysis shows that remittances can promote growth in less financially developed countries. This relationship controls for the endogeneity of remittances and financial development using a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach, does not depend on the particular measure of financial sector development used, and is robust to a number of sensitivity tests.Consumption
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The theoretical literature that neglects the benefits of stabilization policies (e.g., Lucas 1987, 2003) ultimately relies on the low impact of macroeconomic volatility on aggregate income and consumption. We argue that this conclusion is theoretically and empirically weak. Theoretically, the cost of volatility should be measured by including not only monetary magnitudes, but also those psychological costs whose relevance has been stressed by behavioural economics and that are correlated with the number of unemployment episodes. We refer here to implications for the experienced utility of loss aversion, the endowment effect and hedonic adaptation. Empirically, downturns more severely affect those who have less and who suffer greater well-being losses from each shock, magnifying the negative impact of recessions. It follows that the traditional analysis, which disregards the main causes of well-being losses determined by downturns, cannot represent a sound basis for dismissing policies aimed at preventing downturns (and/or their impact on the labour market).
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Abstract I study unemployment insurance (UI) in general equilibrium with incomplete markets, search frictions, and nominal rigidities. An increase in generosity raises the aggregate demand for consumption if the unemployed have a higher marginal propensity to consume than the employed or if agents precautionary save in light of future income risk. This raises output and employment unless monetary policy raises the nominal interest rate. In an analysis of the U.S. economy over 2008–2014, UI benefit extensions had a contemporaneous output multiplier around 1. The unemployment rate would have been as much as 0.4 pp higher absent these extensions.
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ABSTRACT The first part of the paper deals with the effects of an exogenous variation in the monetary interest rate on the real equilibrium position of the economic system in a Kaleckian effective demand model. Different regimes of accumulation are derived and it is shown that a negative relation between the interest rate and the equilibrium rates of capacity utilization, accumulation and profit usually expected in post‐Keynesian theory only exists under special conditions. In the second part the model is applied to the data of some major OECD countries, the relevant coefficients are estimated and the relevance for an explanation of the course of GDP and capital stock growth since the early 1960s is discussed.
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This paper argues that the rate of equilibrium unemployment depends on the objectives of the Central Bank. In a model where the Central Bank uses monetary policy to stabilise the economy, we show that unemployment and inflation will be lower with an inflation target than with targets for output, money or nominal GDP. The intuition for this is that the elasticities of demand in both the product and the labour markets are greater when there is an inflation target; we show that this leads to a lower mark‐up of price over marginal cost and makes wages more sensitive to unemployment.
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ABSTRACT Empirical observations suggest the existence of an unstable inflation‐unemployment trade‐off: whereas high levels of employment generate accelerating inflation rates, stability of the price level seems to require growing rates of unemployment. Under these conditions, macroeconomic policy has to produce countervailing economic fluctuations in order to limit the extent of the two‐sided instability. This is discussed within the framework of a macroeconomic model, in which prices and wages are determined by potential competition, and in which employment depends on monetary demand. The model is confronted with prevailing natural rate theories in which a stable equilibrium rate of employment is determined by supply conditions.
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