Welfare

Pricing electricty blackout among South African households

South African households, like households in many other developing countries, are faced with regular power outages. This is a big problem, since the outages that the households experience are both frequent and long in duration. Efficient electricity infrastructure investment decisions are possible only if the welfare loss of electricity blackouts is determined. We estimate a measure for welfare analysis. The surveys were conducted using electronic equipment (gadgets/tablets) instead of the orthodox paper method. We subject respondents to eight power outage scenarios.

Macroprudential policy and foreign interest rate shocks: A comparison of different instruments and regulatory regimes

This paper presents a generic small open economy real business cycle model with banking and foreign borrowing. We incorporate capital requirements, reserve requirements, and loan-to-value (LTV) regulation into this framework, and subject the model to a positive foreign interest rate shock that raises the country risk premium and reduces the supply of foreign funds. The results show that these macroprudential instruments can attenuate the impact of such a shock, and that this attenuation property increases with the strictness of the regulatory regime.

Flow specific capital controls for emerging markets

This paper investigates the impact of capital controls on business cycle fluctuations and welfare. To perform this analysis, we deploy an asymmetric two country model that is subject to negative foreign interest rate shocks. The results show that both an inflow and outflow capital control are able to attenuate capital flow dynamics, but each control bears different implications for macroeconomic outcomes. Whilst the outflow capital control is associated with shock attenuation benefits, the inflow capital control is shown to amplify the impact of shocks.

Welfare analysis of bank capital requirements with endogenous default

This paper presents a tractable framework with endogenous default and evaluates the welfare implication of bank capital requirements. We analyze the response of social welfare to a negative technology shock under different capital requirement regimes with and without default. We show that including default as an additional indicator of capital requirements is welfare improving. When implementing capital requirements, a more aggressive reaction to the default rate is more effective for weakening the negative effect of the shock on welfare.
Subscribe to RSS - Welfare