The Term Structure And World Economic Growth

This paper introduces global factors within a FAVAR framework in an empirical affine term structure model. We apply our method to a panel of international yield curves and show that global factors account for more than 80 percent of term premia in advanced economies. In particular they tend to explain long-term dynamics in yield curves, as opposed to domestic factors which are instead more relevant to short-run movements. We uncover the key role for global curvature in shaping term premia dynamics. We show that this novel factor precedes global economic and financial instability. In particular, it coincides with immediate expectations of permanent expansionary monetary policy during the recent crisis.

This study is dedicated to investigating the long-run relation between interest rate spreads and economic activities which include industrial production, inflation, and unemployment rate- in OECD countries over the period between2005 and 2015 by using panel data analysis. This study will use the latest panel data models that take structural breaks and cross-sectional dependency into account. Besides using panel data analysis on this issue, this paper will also try to see the effect of new monetary policies that are taking place by major central banks on yield spread and economic activities, especially industrial production. As it is known that, in the post-financial crisis of 2008 period, major central banks such as the Federal Reserve1 (The FED was the first central bank that started to implement new monetary policies just after the collapse of several large-scale investment banks in the U.S), European Central Bank, Bank of Japan and Bank of England, have taken action to stimulate the world economy. Henceforth, not only these major central banks, but also other economies started to lower their policy interest rates soon in conventional way. These policies pushed interest rates almost to zero and since then the rates have remained very low due to lower output level and disinflationary fears.

This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also because of a structural change in the trade-GDP relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and GDP.

The introduction of the thesis consists of four parts: first, we motivate our chosen macroeconomic setting by looking at some real world phenomena. For a better understanding of these phenomena, we argue that the mutual dynamic interactions between flScal policy and financial markets need to be closely examined in a macroeconomic framework. Second, we review different strands of the economic literature in order to show that most of the literature has so far exclusively concentrated either on fmancial market dynamics or on flScal policy issues. We conclude that a more integrated model setting is called for in order to explain the dynamic interactions observed in reality. Third, we discuss at length the economic assumptions underlying our model. This avoids multiple repetition later on. Finally, we outline the structure of the thesis and the objectives we pursue in the different chapters. 1. 1 Motivation Fiscal policy and financial market reactions are increasingly receiving world wide attention. The most recent examples are the Maastricht criteria about flScal control, the South-East Asia financial crisis and the resulting IMF policy stance, the high level of public debt in developed and developing countries and the effect on interest rates and economic growth. In contrast to the still underdeveloped theoretical literature on these dynamic links, finding empirical evidence that supports the existence of these links is not a very hard task.

This book provides an innovative framework to analyze the process of industrial upgrading and diversification, a key feature of economic development. Based on this framework, it provides concrete advice to development practitioners and policy makers on how to unleash a country's growth potential.

In recent years, term premia have been very low and sometimes even negative. Now, with the United States economy growing above potential, inflationary pressures are on the rise. Term premia are very sensitive to the expected future path of growth, inflation, and monetary policy, and an inflation surprise could require monetary policy to tighten faster than anticipated, inducing to a sudden decompression of term and other risk premia, thus tightening financial conditions. This paper proposes a semi-structural dynamic term structure model augmented with macroeconomic factors to include cyclical dynamics with a focus on medium- to long-run forecasts. Our results clearly show that a macroeconomic approach is warranted: While term premium estimates are in line with those from other studies, we provide (i) plausible, stable estimates of expected long-term interest rates and (ii) forecasts of short- and long-term interest rates as well as cyclical macroeconomic variables that are stunningly close to those generated from large-scale macroeconomic models.

This short paper resolves an apparent contradiction between Feldman's (1989) and Riedel's (2000) equilibrium models of the term structure of interest rates under incomplete information. Feldman (1989) showed that in an incomplete information version of Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985), where the stochastic productivity factors are unobservable, equilibrium term structures are interior and bounded. Interestingly, Riedel (2000) showed that an incomplete information version of Lucas (1978), with an unobservable constant growth rate, induces a corner unbounded equilibrium term structure: It decreases to negative infinity. This paper defines constant and stochastic asymptotic moments, clarifies the apparent conflict between Feldman's and Riedel's equilibria, and discusses implications. Because productivity and growth rates are not directly observable in the real world, the question we answer is of particular relevance.