Another reason to care about investment taxes

Alex Kontoghiorghes

Do lower taxes lead to higher stock prices? Do companies consider tax rates when deciding on their dividend pay-outs and whether to issue new capital? If you’re thinking ‘yes’, you might be surprised to know that there was little real-world evidence (let alone UK-based evidence) which finds a strong link between personal investment tax rates on the one hand, and stock prices and the financial decisions of companies on the other. In this post, I summarise the findings from a recent study which shows that capital gains and dividend taxes do indeed have big effects on risk-adjusted equity returns, as well as the dividend, capital structure, and real investment decisions of companies.

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Precautionary facilities: stitches for a fragmented financial safety net

Daniel Christen and Nicola Shadbolt

Geoeconomic fragmentation is one of the greatest risks to the international monetary and financial system at present, particularly since Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Fragmentation is likely to have wide-ranging implications for the global economy, including increasing the volatility of capital flows and exposing gaps in the global financial safety net (GFSN). In this post, we argue that increased take up of the IMF’s ‘precautionary facilities’ would reinforce the GFSN and help prepare it for these challenges. The IMF’s upcoming review of precautionary facilities is an opportune moment to find ways to reduce stigma and increase uptake.

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Capital flights during Covid-19

Fernando Eguren-Martin, Cian O’Neill, Andrej Sokol and Lukas von dem Berge

While planes were grounded, capital flew out of emerging market economies in response to the acceleration in the spread of the virus in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Was this capital flight predictable once you account for the sudden deterioration in the global financial environment? In this post we present a model that helps to think about how financial conditions and international capital flows are linked. We then apply this methodology to events observed between March and May 2020, and find that the model predicted a large increase in the likelihood of capital flight. However, the scale of outflows was abnormally large even once the sharp tightening in financial conditions is accounted for.

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Bitesize: Emerging market currency risk: evidence from the COVID-19 crisis

Simon Lloyd, Giancarlo Corsetti and Emile Marin

A striking regularity around global economic crises is that the dollar tends to appreciate sharply against emerging market (EM) currencies as capital flows out of EMs. In this respect, the adjustments observed since the onset of the COVID pandemic are no exception. Since the end of February, EM currencies have depreciated by around 15% (on average) and non-resident portfolio outflows from EMs summed to nearly $100 billion over a period of 45 days.

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Tracking foreign capital

Christiane Kneer and Alexander Raabe

Capital flows are fickle. In the UK, the largest and most volatile component of inflows from foreign investors are so-called ‘other investment flows’ – the foreign capital which flows into banks and other financial institutions. But where do these funds ultimately go and which sectors are particularly exposed to fickle capital inflows? Do capital inflows allow domestic firms to borrow more? Or does capital from abroad ultimately finance mortgages of UK households? Some of the foreign capital could also get passed on to the financial sector or flow back abroad.

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A prince not a pauper: the truth behind the UK’s current account deficit

Stephen Burgess and Rachana Shanbhogue

Introduction

In 2016 the UK’s current account deficit was 5.9% of GDP, the widest since official records began in 1948. Many economists, including the IMF and FPC have suggested the UK is therefore vulnerable to foreign investors becoming less willing to invest in the country. In this post we challenge the idea that the UK is at the mercy of the “kindness of strangers”. Looking at gross, rather than net capital flows since 2012 suggests inflows have been extremely subdued relative to past levels. Instead, the UK has benefitted from increasing capital gains on past foreign investments and used these to fund its spending. We argue this carries lower financial stability risks than relying on gross inflows to cover the current account deficit.

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Do rich countries lend to poor countries?

Almog Adir and Simon Whitaker

In the last few years there has been a small net overall flow of capital from advanced to emerging market economies (EMEs), in contrast to the ‘paradox’ prevailing for much of this century of capital flowing the ‘wrong’ way, uphill from poor to rich countries. In this post we show the ‘paradox’ in the aggregate flows actually concealed private capital flowing the ‘right’ way for much of the time. And even during recent turbulence, foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, likely to be particularly beneficial to growth, have persisted. But EMEs could still benefit more from harnessing capital from advanced economies and Argentina has set a useful precedent as it prepares to take over the Presidency of the G20 in 2018.

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Capital Inflows: The Good, the Bad and the Bubbly

Glenn Hoggarth, Carsten Jung and Dennis Reinhardt.

Supporters of financial globalisation argue that global finance allows investors to diversify risks, it increases efficiency and fosters technology transfer. The critics point to the history of financial crises which were associated with booms and busts in capital inflows. In our recent paper ‘Capital inflows – the good, the bad and the bubbly’, we argue that the risks depend on the type of capital inflow, the type of lender and also the currency denomination of the inflows. We find that equity inflows are more stable than debt, foreign banks are more flighty than non-bank creditors, and flows denominated in local currency are more stable than in foreign currency. We also find evidence that macroprudential policies can make capital inflows more stable.

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Will a Fed rate hike affect house prices in emerging markets?

Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi and Alessandro Rebucci

In some parts of the emerging world, housing markets have grown well ahead of income in recent years. Will a US monetary policy normalisation bring about a correction in house prices as the search for yield unwinds and capital flows back to the US? Looking at the past through the prism of a structural VAR, we think the answer is “yes it will”. Shocks to global liquidity have much larger effects on house prices in emerging markets than in advanced world economies. A tightening in global liquidity conditions also leads to a rapid capital account reversal, exchange rate depreciation and hence a sharp fall in consumption.

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