When Do Structural Reforms Work? On the Role of the Business Cycle and Macroeconomic Policies

Structural reforms are expected to lift growth and employment, but their effects are surprisingly difficult to pin down empirically. One reason is their potential endogeneity to the economic environment in which they are conducted. For example, the impact of a reform implemented shortly before a cyc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bordon, Anna
Other Authors: Ebeke, Christian, Shirono, Kazuko
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C. International Monetary Fund 2016
Series:IMF Working Papers
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: International Monetary Fund - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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245 0 0 |a When Do Structural Reforms Work? On the Role of the Business Cycle and Macroeconomic Policies  |c Anna Bordon, Christian Ebeke, Kazuko Shirono 
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300 |a 28 pages 
651 4 |a Germany 
653 |a Economic theory 
653 |a Structural reforms 
653 |a Wages 
653 |a Finance: General 
653 |a Manpower policy 
653 |a General Financial Markets: General (includes Measurement and Data) 
653 |a Labor market reforms 
653 |a Commodity markets 
653 |a Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit: General 
653 |a Finance 
653 |a Intergenerational Income Distribution 
653 |a Macrostructural analysis 
653 |a Labor 
653 |a Labor Economics Policies 
653 |a Income economics 
653 |a Fiscal Policy 
653 |a Employment rate 
653 |a Employment 
653 |a Commodity exchanges 
653 |a Financial markets 
653 |a Unemployment 
653 |a Institutions and the Macroeconomy 
653 |a Aggregate Labor Productivity 
653 |a Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies: General 
653 |a Labour 
653 |a Macroeconomics 
653 |a Aggregate Human Capital 
700 1 |a Ebeke, Christian 
700 1 |a Shirono, Kazuko 
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520 |a Structural reforms are expected to lift growth and employment, but their effects are surprisingly difficult to pin down empirically. One reason is their potential endogeneity to the economic environment in which they are conducted. For example, the impact of a reform implemented shortly before a cyclical upswing is difficult to distinguish from the recovery itself. Similarly, macroeconomic policies conducted along a structural reform could affect the estimated impact. Exploring various options, this paper develops robust estimates of the impact of labor and product market reforms by using local projection techniques while controlling for endogeneity of reforms and other biases. The results suggest that labor and product market reforms have a lagged but positive impact on employment creation, and the positive effect remains even after controlling for the endogeneity of the decision to reform. Supportive macroeconomic policies are found to increase the effect of labor and product market reforms, consistent with the view that some structural reforms are best initiated in conjunction with supportive fiscal or monetary policy