Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Gravity equations have been widely used to infer trade flow effects of various institutional arrangements. We show that estimated gravity equations do not have a theoretical foundation. This implies both that estimation suffers from omitted variables bias and that comparative statics analysis is unfounded. We develop a method that (i) consistently and efficiently estimates a theoretical gravity equation and (ii) correctly calculates the comparative statics of trade frictions. We apply the method to solve the famous McCallum border puzzle. Applying our method, we find that national borders reduce trade between industrialized countries by moderate amounts of 20-50 percent.

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Gravity with Gravitas: A Solution to the Border Puzzle

In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

This paper summarizes and explains the main events of the liquidity and credit crunch in 2007-08. Starting with the trends leading up to the crisis, I explain how these events unfolded and how four different amplification mechanisms magnified losses in the mortgage market into large dislocations and turmoil in financial markets.

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Deciphering the Liquidity and Credit Crunch 2007-08

We construct estimates of external assets and liabilities for 145 countries for the period 1970-2004. We describe our estimation methods and present key features of the data at the country and the global level. We focus on trends in net and gross external positions, and the composition of international portfolios, distinguishing between foreign direct investment, portfolio equity investment, official reserves, and external debt. We document the increasing importance of equity financing and the improvement in the external position for emerging markets, and the differing pace of financial integration between advanced and developing economies. We also show the existence of a global discrepancy between estimated foreign assets and liabilities, and identify the asset categories that account for this discrepancy.

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The External Wealth of Nations Mark Ii: Revised and Extended Estimates of Foreign Assets and Liabilities, 1970-2004

This paper studies determinants and effects of capital controls using a panel of 61 developed and developing countries. The results suggest that capital account restrictions are more likely to be in place in countries with low income, a large share of government, and where the central bank is not independent. Other determinants of controls include the exchange rate regime, current account imbalances and the degree of openness of the economy. We also find that capital controls and other foreign exchange restrictions are associated with higher inflation and lower real interest rates. We do not find any robust correlation between our measures of controls and the rate of growth, although there is evidence that countries with large black market premia grow more slowly.

Economic Effects and Structural Determinants of Capital Controls

It has long been recognized that contemporaneous wage indexation stabilizes output and employment in the face of monetary shocks, but hampers the adjustment of the economy to real shocks that require changes in the real wage. Another feature of wage indexing is that it reduces the incentive of the government to raise output through unexpected inflation, since wages react automatically to prices. In this paper I construct a simple model where the decision on the degree of wage indexation is not taken by atomistic agents, but by a "large" agent such as the government. Under this assumption I show that the optimal degree of indexing depends not only on the variance of real shocks, but also on the "inflation bias" of the government, due to the incentive to raise employment above the market-clearing level. In particular the model predicts that wage indexation will be low not only if real shocks are large, but also if the government is inflation-averse. The ability of monetary policy to offset monetary disturbances makes them irrelevant to the determination of the optimal degree of indexing.

Wage indexation and the time consistency

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the frequency of currency and balance of payments crises in developing countries. More important, the crises have become more virulent, have caused widespread disruption to other developing countries, and have even had repercussions on advanced economies. To predict crises, their causes must be clearly understood. Two competing strands of theories are reviewed in this paper. The first focuses on the consequences of such policies as excessive credit growth in provoking depletion of foreign exchange reserves and making a devaluation enevitable. The second emphasizes the trade-offs between internal and external balance that the policymaker faces in defending a peg.

Anticipating Balance of Payments Crises--The Role of Early Warning Systems; The Role of Early Warning Systems

What determines the composition of external liabilities, both across countries and over time? More specifically, which countries account for the massive increase in equity-like liabilities (foreign direct investment and portfolio equity), especially since the mid-1990s? The empirical analysis draws on the newly-released “External Wealth of Nations Mark II” dataset. In the cross-section, we find that larger, more open economies with a better institutional quality score have a greater equity share in external liabilities, which is also positively related to natural resource production. Along the time-series dimension, we find that the shift towards equity financing is stronger among those countries that have undertaken a greater degree of domestic financial reform.

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti

Papers

Economic Effects and Structural Determinants of Capital Controls

Wage indexation and the time consistency

Anticipating Balance of Payments Crises--The Role of Early Warning Systems; The Role of Early Warning Systems

The Shifting Composition of External Liabilities

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON FINANCIAL GLOBALIZATION* The Drivers of Financial Globalization