Documents Röhn, Oliver 2 results

"This paper explores the relationship between policy settings and extreme positive and negative growth events, what we call GDP tail risks, using quantile regression methods. Conditioning on several country characteristics such as the size, stage of development and openness to trade as well as macroeconomic policies, the following findings for a panel of mostly OECD countries emerge: First, countries with stronger banking supervision and capital market development, better quality of governance, higher foreign reserves and several labour market characteristics such as higher unemployment benefits and greater spending in active labour market policies tend to experience less severe negative growth shocks (negative tail risk). Second, greater use of macro-prudential tools is generally associated with less extreme positive growth shocks (positive tail risk) and lower average growth. Third, larger automatic stabilisers are associated with both less severe negative and positive growth shocks but also lower average growth."

"Considering the deep and long-lasting impact of severe recessions, such as the 2008-09 financial crisis, it is important that measures be taken to minimise the risk of such event. But in doing so the benefits need to be balanced against the potential costs in terms of lower average growth that some of the actions to lower vulnerabilities to bad events could entail. Insofar as the risk-mitigating measures can involve a trade-off between growth and crisis risk, the most cost-effective actions need to be identified, spanning both macro and structural policies. The work summarised in this paper has explored this issue using two complementary empirical approaches, both providing insights on the impact of various policy settings on average GDP growth on the one hand, and either crisis risks or GDP growth at the (negative) tail end, on the other. The results indicate that pro-growth product and labour market policies generally have little impact on the exposure to crisis. More significant tradeoffs between efficiency and crisis risk arise in the case of financial market policies."