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Research background: Output volatility has potentially adverse consequences on the economy and the stabilizing role of fiscal policy is linked to the share of government size in an economy. Hence, given the relative large share of government in developing countries, government size is expected to play an important role in stabilizing output volatility. Purpose: This study examines the relationship between output volatility and government size in Nigeria. The study seeks to establish if government size mitigates output volatility in Nigeria. Research methodology: The study employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique after conducting stationarity and co-integration tests. Results: The results of the ARDL estimate showed that government size lessens output volatility but the magnitude was insignificant. Further, the study found that volatility in aggregate government spending; international oil price and public debt were significant determinants of output volatility in Nigeria. Novelty: This showed that the automatic stabilization role of government size on output volatility could not be established. The automatic stabilization role of fiscal policy can be improved by increasing social security transfers (pension payment), payments of unemployment benefits and increasing civil servants minimum wage.

This study adopts a historical perspective to investigate variations in output volatility within and across world economies. The analysis uses annual data for 37 OECD and non-OECD countries covering the last two centuries. We focus on the relationship between inflation and output volatility. The results of a panel analysis show a positive effect of inflation on output volatility. This finding is consistent with the view that low inflation has a stabilizing effect on output volatility over the long term.

This study uses the output volatility–augmented environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) model to determine the dynamic short- and long-term impacts of the volatility of economic growth (VOL) on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in Turkey from 1980 to 2015. The results of the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach indicate that there is a long-run relationship between CO2, per capita real GDP, per capita energy use, and VOL. The coefficients obtained from the ARDL estimation indicate that economic growth and energy use increase CO2 emissions, while VOL decreases CO2 emissions in the long run. Moreover, the coefficients obtained from the ARDL error correction model show that VOL decreases CO2 emissions in the short run, as well. We also find that the EKC is valid in Turkey. This implies for the Turkish case that achieving macro-stability under a “just transition” is key for achieving both economic and environmental benefits from ratifying international agreements such as Paris Agreement and EU Green Deal.

We thank the editor Mark M. Spiegel and two anonymous referees for excellent useful comments and suggestions that helped to improve this article. We would like to thank Maximo Camacho, Luciano Campos, Alessandro Galessi, Domenico Giannone, Daryna Grechyna, Carlos Thomas, Gabriel Perez-Quiros, Iryna Sikora, Francesco Zanetti and the participants at the 2018 ASSA meetings, the Econometric Society meeting of Latin American, the International Association for Applied Econometrics Conference, the VIII Zaragoza Workshop on Time Series Econometrics, and at the internal seminar series of the Banco de Espana for helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are in no way the responsibility of the Banco de Espana or Eurosystem. Project PID2019-111708GA-I00 financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033., In this paper, we dissect the time-varying output volatility of the main world economies to study its dynamics, spillovers, and determinants, from a global perspective. Our analysis relies on a hierarchical volatility factor model and Bayesian model averaging. We show that the increasing comovement observed in international macroeconomic volatility is substantially larger in developing than in developed countries. Instead, developed countries have exhibited more asymmetric volatility shocks than developing countries in recent times. We also show that, although the downward trend in global volatility is related with increasing trade, idiosyncratic changes in volatility are highly influenced by domestic monetary policies. However, due to the declining role played by these idiosyncratic components over time, policymakers currently face greater constraints when it comes to stabilizing output fluctuations., Banco de Espana or Eurosystem PID2019-111708GA-I00 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033

This article investigates the long-run consequences of economic disasters. The results suggest the negative long-run effect of economic disasters on output growth and the limited empirical importance of the investment channel.

The 2007–2008 global financial crisis has spurred an increasing interest for investigating the financial and macroeconomic effects of the rare but extremely large economic crises, the so-called economic disasters. Current literature on the topic shows that probability of economic disasters plays an important role in the long-run effect of output volatility on investment. This paper investigates the long-run relationship between economic disasters and aggregate investment. We analyze the data for a large number of developing and developed countries after the World War II. The conducted panel data analysis indicates a negative effect of the probability of economic disasters on aggregate investment. Our results contribute to the recent literature on economic disasters by providing empirical support for the hypothesis that probability of infrequent but extremely large economic crises has a negative long-run effect on investment. We also find that the effect of ‘normal’ output volatility on aggregate investment is relatively small.

Is government size the desirable response to macroeconomic risk, or it is the consequence of distorted political incentives with adverse effects on macroeconomic volatility? This paper reconsiders the mutual interdependence between government size and growth volatility in a large sample of countries within a system of simultaneous equations. We find that higher volatility is associated with larger government size and vice versa. Thus emphasis on government size as a mean capable, per se, of reducing macroeconomic risk is ill-conceived. We also identify a set of institutional limits to government discretion that also have beneficial effects on volatility. These include domestic political institutions, de facto central bank independence and a stable nominal exchange rate regime. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

Korean Abstract: 생산량 변동성과 성장 간의 관계를 분석한 선행연구의 결과는 자료의 선택, 분석대상 국 가, 추정방법 등에 따라 매우 다양하며, 그 분석대상이 서구의 산업화된 국가에 집중됐다. 본 연구에서는 1990~2009년 기간의 월별 산업생산지수 자료를 이용해 한국ᆞ중국ᆞ일본 에서 생산량 변동성이 성장에 미치는 영향을 실증적으로 분석했다. 구체적으로 한 국가 의 경제성장률은 전년동기대비 산업생산증감률로, 그리고 생산량 변동성은 산업생산증 감률의 조건부 표준편차로 측정했다. 추정방법은 경기변동의 비대칭성을 고려해 Nelson (1991)이 제안한 EGARCH-M 모형을 사용했다. 추정결과 한국에서는 생산량 변동성이 성장에 통계적으로 유의한 음(-)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 관측된 반면 중국에서는 그 영향이 통계적으로 유의한 양( )의 값으로 추정됐다. 또한 일본에서는 생산량 변동성의 추정계수가 양의 값으로 관측됐지만, 전통적인 유의수준에서 통계적으로 유의하지 않게 나타났다. 또한 기대하지 못한 양의 충격이 발생할 경우 한국과 중국에서는 양의 효과 가 나타난 것으로 관측됐지만, 일본의 경우 그 효과가 상당히 미약했다. 그러나 기대하지 못한 음의 충격이 발생할 경우 한국ᆞ중국ᆞ일본의 모든 국가에서 음의 효과가 나타난 것으로 관측됐으며, 그 크기는 대체로 한국, 중국, 일본의 순서로 나타났다. English Abstract: The existing literature has shown that the relationship between output volatility and growth depends on data and/or estimation methods. In this paper, an empirical examination is made of the link between output volatility and growth in Korea, China and Japan, using monthly data on the index of industrial product from 1990 to 2009. Specifically, a country’s growth and output volatility are measured by the ratio of change in industrial product and its conditional standard error, respectively. Using EGARCH-M model, provided by Nelson (1991), to accommodate the asymmetry of economic fluctuation, estimates indicates that output volatility is negatively and significantly associated with the growth in Korea. However, the relationship between output volatility and growth is positive and statically significant in China, whereas there exists very little evidence in Japan. Moreover, unexpected positive shocks have positive impacts on growth in Korea and China, whereas the impacts are very small in Japan. Regression results also suggest that the impacts of unexpected negative shocks on growth are negative in all countries, and the magnitude is the biggest in Korea and the lowest in Japan.

In Japan, like many other industrialized countries, output volatility declined dramatically in the 1980s. In order to investigate the cause of this decline, we decompose the variance of output growth by frequency. Our important findings are: (1) The total variance of output growth decreased, which resulted from a reduction in the volatility at business-cycle frequencies; (2) At business-cycle frequencies, the variance of production fell by a larger percentage than did the variance of sales; and (3) In stark contrast, at high frequencies, the variance of production increased, while the variance of sales decreased. These features of production at different frequencies cannot be explained by changes in the sales process and cost-shock process. Instead, improved business practices—such as the adoption of the just-in-time technique—played a direct role in stabilizing the business cycles, while increasing output volatility at high frequencies. J. Japanese Int. Economies 23 (1) (2009) 1–19.

Predominant government behavior is decomposed by frequency into several periodic components: updating cycles of infrastructure, Kuznets cycles, fiscal policy over business cycles, and election cycles. Little is known, however, about the theoretical impact of such cyclical behavior in public finance on output fluctuations. Based on a standard neoclassical growth model, this study intends to examine the frequency at which public investment cycles are relevant to output fluctuations. We find an inverted U-shaped relationship between output volatility and length of cycle in public investment. This implies that periodic behavior in public investment at a certain frequency range can cause aggravated output resonance. Moreover, we present an empirical analysis to test the theoretical implication, using the U.S. data in the period from 1968 to 2015. The empirical results suggest that such resonance phenomena change from low to high frequency.

Traditional models of the choice of exchange rate regimes ignore the destabilizing effects of sharp and unanticipated exchange rate movements. Recent research, however, has shown that these movements have real costs in emerging markets owing to the dollarization of liabilities. This paper evaluates the performance of an emerging market economy under a credibly fixed rate, a collapsing fixed rate, and a flexible-rate regime using a speculative attack model that takes into account the real effects of unanticipated movements in exchange rates. The model is applied to South Korea to determine the dominant exchange rate regime.

Eller M., Fidrmuc J. and Fungacˇ ova Z. Fiscal policy and regional output volatility: evidence from Russia, Regional Studies. This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal policy and output volatility in Russian regions between 2000 and 2009. Accounting for endogeneity between output volatility and fiscal developments by using system-generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation techniques, the results indicate that discretionary fiscal policy contributes to output volatility and induces macroeconomic instability at the regional level in Russia. This corroborates previous studies using cross-country data. To reduce business cycle fluctuations, it would be necessary to curtail procyclical fiscal activism at the regional level, e.g. via fiscal rules and sound institutions of fiscal federalism.

The objective of the paper is to offer a critique on the theoretical and empirical literature on inflation targeting (IT). It seems to exist a consensus in the theoretical literature that this monetary regime reduces both inflation and output volatility, mainly through building monetary policy credibility. When the role of the exchange rate is discussed, while there are some arguments that, as an instrument, it should not be explicitly stated in the central-bank loss function, theoretical arguments and evidence are still mixed as regards the effectiveness of exchange-rate management under IT. On the empirical front, the paper concludes that despite the fact that the work on IT in the last two decades has been immense in quality and quantity, still there is no quantitatively-credible study for the developing world, let alone a study that appropriately measures the regime switch from one monetary strategy to another.

This paper presents strong empirical evidence that automatic stabilizers and countercyclical fiscal policy decrease output volatility. The conducted empirical analysis proves the economic intuition that the automatic fiscal stance is countercyclical, regardless of the size and the prosperity of the economy. Connecting our empirical results to the Endogenous Growth Theory, we develop the idea that countercyclical fiscal policy boosts long-term economic growth. We conduct the study on two samples of countries – developed and developing. We recognize the fiscal policy pattern of the developed nations to be countercyclical, whereas the one of the developing countries to be acyclical. The derived results support our hypothesis that countercyclical fiscal policy reduces output volatility as the volatility of per capita output of the developed nations appear significantly less than the one of the developing countries. We identify possible determinants of fiscal policy in good and bad times. We empirically recognize that openness to trade, terms of trade, level of corruption and financial development affect fiscal policy in both samples of countries.

Macroeconomic Volatility and Welfare in Developing Countries: An Introduction Norman V. Loayza, Romain Ranciere, Luis Serven, ` and Jaume Ventura Macroeconomic volatility, both a source and a reflection of underdevelopment, is a fundamental concern for developing countries. This article provides a brief overview of the recent literature on macroeconomic volatility in developing countries, highlighting its causes, consequences, and possible remedies. to reduce domestic policy-induced macroeconomic volatility by controlling the level and variability of fiscal expenditures, by keeping inflation low and stable, and by avoiding price rigidity (including that of the exchange rate), which eventually leads to drastic adjustments. The ability to conduct countercyclical fiscal policies is crucial, and it depends largely on the ability of the authorities to reduce public indebtedness to internationally acceptable levels, establish a record of saving in good times to provide for bad times, and develop credibility that forestalls perceptions of wasteful spending and default risk. Governments can reduce financial fragilities and deepen financial markets by eliminating implicit insurance schemes (such as fixed exchange rate regimes) and credit restrictions that distort the valuation of financial assets and liabilities. Following Ehrlich Becker's (1972) classic "comprehensive insurance" framework, three possible options can be identified: Self-protection (reducing the exposure to risk through, for instance, limited trade and financial openness). Primiceri and van Rens (2006*) explore the source of this increase by examining the consumption behavior of a large panel of individuals, finding that their behavior is consistent with an increase in the persistence of individual income shocks. Loayza and Raddatz (2007*) analyze how financial openness and trade openness, as well as product-market flexibility, factor-market flexibility, and domestic financial development, influence the impact of terms of trade shocks on output. To obtain their measure of policy volatility, the authors construct a measure of exogenous policy decisions unrelated to the state of the economy and take the standard deviation of this measure as a proxy for policy volatility. Even so, the literature and the lessons from the Barcelona conference reviewed here can provide some elements of sensible policy recommendations and identify areas where research is especially needed.

This paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model can generate a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of output. However, in the model, we find that the stabilizing effect is only due to a composition effect and it is not present when we look at the volatility of private output. Given that empirically we also observe a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of consumption, we modify the model by introducing rule-of-thumb consumers. In this modified version of our initial model we observe that consumption volatility is also reduced when government size increases in similar way to the observed pattern in OECD economies over the last 45 years.

This paper studies how the HP-Filter should be adjusted, when changing the frequency of observations. The usual choices in the literature are to adjust the smoothing parameter by multiplying it with either the square of the observation frequency ratios or simply with the observation frequency. In contrast, the paper recommends to adjust the filter parameter by multiplying it with the fourth power of the observation frequency ratios. Based on this suggestion, some well-known comparisons of business cycles moments across countries and time periods are recomputed. In particular, we overturn a finding by Backus and Kehoe (1992) on the historical changes in output volatility and return instead to older conventional wisdom (Baily, 1978, Lucas, 1977): based on the new HP-Filter adjustment rule, output volatility turns out to have decreased after the Second World War.