The Unassuming Economist

My tribute to Stan Fischer.

Stanley Fischer, Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System speaks during the seminar The Elusive Pursuit of Inflation during the 2015 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings on Thursday, April 16 in Washington, D.C. IMF Photo/Ryan Rayburn

We study the impact of fluctuations in global oil prices on domestic inflation using an unbalanced panel of 72 advanced and developing economies over the period from 1970 to 2015. We find that a 10 percent increase in global oil inflation increases, on average, domestic inflation by about 0.4 percentage point on impact, with the effect vanishing after two years and being similar between advanced and developing economies. We also find that the effect is asymmetric, with positive oil price shocks having a larger effect than negative ones. The impact of oil price shocks, however, has declined over time due in large part to a better conduct of monetary policy. We further examine the transmission channels of oil price shocks on domestic inflation during the recent decades, by making use of a monthly dataset from 2000 to 2015. The results suggest that the share of transport in the CPI basket and energy subsidies are the most robust factors in explaining cross-country variations in the effects of oil price shocks during the this period.

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A BBC Radio 4 programme quoted my research:

“Prakash Loungani at the IMF analysed the accuracy of economic forecasters and found something remarkable and worrying. ‘The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished,’ he said.

His analysis revealed that economists had failed to predict 148 of the past 150 recessions. Part of the problem, he said, was that there wasn’t much of a reputational gain to be had by predicting a recession others had missed. If you disagreed with the consensus, you would be met with scepticism. The downside of getting it wrong was more personally damaging than the upside of getting it right.”

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On cross-country:

• Workshop: Housing and Household Finance – Norges Bank

On the US:

• Perspective and Trends in the US Housing Market – Unassuming Economist
• Credit Growth and the Financial Crisis: A New Narrative – NBER, Quartz
• The Housing Industry Still Hasn’t Realized It’s Building Too Many Homes for Rich People – Slate
• Mortgage Interest Deduction Reform On the Table – Cato Institute
• S. house prices to keep rising on supply constraints: Reuters poll – Reuters

On other countries:

• [Canada] Advice for Toronto’s next chief planner—give Torontonians housing options – Fraser Institute
• [China] China to boost rental housing supply by building on rural land – Reuters
• [New Zealand] Housing Affordability Fires Up New Zealand’s Voters – Bloomberg

Recent discussions of the extent of decoupling between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and real gross domestic product (GDP) provide mixed evidence and have generated much debate. We show that to get a clear picture of decoupling it is important to distinguish cycles from trends: there is an Environmental Okun’s Law (a cyclical relationship between emissions and real GDP) that often obscures the trend relationship between emissions and real GDP. We show that, once the cyclical relationship is accounted for, the trends show evidence of decoupling in richer nations—particularly in European countries, but not yet in emerging markets. The picture changes somewhat, however, if we take into consideration the effects of international trade, that is, if we distinguish between production-based and consumption-based emissions. Once we add in their net emission transfers, the evidence for decoupling among the richer countries gets weaker. The good news is that countries with underlying policy frameworks more supportive of renewable energy and supportive of climate change tend to have greater decoupling between trend emissions and trend GDP, and for both production- and consumption-based emissions.

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