Lucyna Gόrnicka
Economics
- Division
Prices & Costs
- Current Position
-
Senior Economist
- Fields of interest
-
Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics,Financial Economics,International Economics
- Education
- 2010-2015
PhD at University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute, The Netherlands
- Professional experience
- 2015-2022
Economist, International Monetary Fund
- 18 November 2024
- FINANCIAL STABILITY REVIEW - ARTICLEFinancial Stability Review Issue 2, 2024Details
- Abstract
- Productivity growth in the euro area has been declining for several decades. In light of the importance of bank lending as a source of external funding for euro area firms, this special feature investigates the link between firm productivity and bank credit allocation. Bank credit in the euro area has been skewed towards sectors that have contributed only marginally to aggregate productivity growth, such as real estate. Additionally, bank loans tilted towards less-productive firms within the same sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic, supported by state credit guarantees. Banks with weaker balance sheets lent more to less-productive firms during this period than other banks did. The tilt towards less-productive firms could have an indirect effect on aggregate productivity if the survival of less-productive firms suppresses the profitability of more-productive competitors, discouraging market entry and investment. A more diversified external funding structure could help boost the productivity of euro area firms, to the benefit of financial stability.
- JEL Code
- D24 : Microeconomics→Production and Organizations→Production, Cost, Capital, Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity, Capacity
E22 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy→Capital, Investment, Capacity
E44 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Money and Interest Rates→Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages
- 16 May 2024
- FINANCIAL STABILITY REVIEW - BOXFinancial Stability Review Issue 1, 2024Details
- Abstract
- The rapid increase in interest rates observed over the last few years could weaken the ability of firms to service and roll over their debt and, consequently, worsen the outlook for bank asset quality. This box combines firm-level balance sheet data with loan-level data to assess the joint impact of resilient post-pandemic profitability and higher financing costs on the debt servicing capacity of euro area firms. The interest burdens of euro area firms are estimated to have increased only slightly, as higher revenues largely offset their higher interest payments. The impact of higher debt service costs has been disproportionately strong in the real estate sector, which has faced weakened demand, as well as in countries where floating-rate lending is prevalent. Some vulnerable firms may benefit from refinancing in a more favourable environment if market rates fall as expected. Banks should recognise credit distress promptly and offer viable solutions to firms which struggle to service their debt. However, even among firms with low interest coverage ratios, the majority of bank loans have not been restructured and remain performing..
- JEL Code
- G32 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→Financing Policy, Financial Risk and Risk Management, Capital and Ownership Structure, Value of Firms, Goodwill
G33 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→Bankruptcy, Liquidation
- 8 February 2024
- OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES - No. 338Details
- Abstract
- This paper introduces innovative, newly developed forward-looking indicators of negotiated wage growth in the euro area using data on collective bargaining agreements from seven countries: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria and Greece. The paper demonstrates how agreement-level data can be used to study drivers of aggregate negotiated wage growth, as well as monitor the breadth of wage increases and account for time-varying factors such as one-off payments, when assessing wage pressures. Lastly, the paper shows that the new indicators can provide reliable signals about current and future developments of wage pressures in the euro area while also serving as important cross-checking tools for negotiated wage growth forecasts.
- JEL Code
- E24 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy→Employment, Unemployment, Wages, Intergenerational Income Distribution, Aggregate Human Capital
J31 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→Wage Level and Structure, Wage Differentials
J50 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Labor?Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining→General
- 15 February 2023
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2784Leakages from macroprudential regulations: the case of household-specific tools and corporate creditDetails
- Abstract
- Sector-specific macroprudential regulations can increase the riskiness of credit to other sec-tors. First, using cross-country bank-level data we find that after a tightening of household-specific macroprudential policy during a credit expansion, banks with larger portfolios of residential mortgages increase their corporate lending by more than banks with smaller mortgage portfolios. Second, we compute three country-level measures of the riskiness of corporate credit allocation based on firm-level data. Consistently across the measures, an unexpected tightening of household-specific macroprudential tools during a credit expansion is followed by an increase in riskiness of corporate credit. These effects are quantitatively meaningful: the riskiness of corporate credit increases by around 10 percent of the historical standard deviation following an unexpected policy tightening. Further evidence from bank lending standards surveys suggests that the leakage effects are stronger for larger firms com-pared to SMEs, consistent with recent evidence on the use of personal real estate as loan collateral by small firms.
- JEL Code
- G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages
G28 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Government Policy and Regulation
G38 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→Government Policy and Regulation
- 9 January 2023
- ECONOMIC BULLETIN - ARTICLEEconomic Bulletin Issue 8, 2022Details
- Abstract
- This article discusses wage developments and the main factors that have influenced them since the start of the pandemic. First, it reviews developments in a broad range of wage measures for the euro area and discusses their current usefulness as signals of wage pressures. In this context, it illustrates how the growth of compensation per employee was adjusted for the impact of job retention schemes. Second, the article looks at how wage developments have differed across sectors, reflecting the heterogeneous impact of the pandemic shock. Finally, it discusses the impact of inflation on purchasing power of wage incomes and real wage costs in the euro area by examining developments in real consumer and producer wages for the economy as a whole and in its main sectors.
- JEL Code
- E24 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy→Employment, Unemployment, Wages, Intergenerational Income Distribution, Aggregate Human Capital
E31 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Price Level, Inflation, Deflation
J30 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→General
J31 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→Wage Level and Structure, Wage Differentials
J38 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→Public Policy
- 9 November 2022
- ECONOMIC BULLETIN - BOXEconomic Bulletin Issue 7, 2022Details
- Abstract
- The strong increase in euro area HICP inflation over the past 18 months has placed additional emphasis on monitoring and understanding the behaviour of consumers’ inflation expectations. Data from the ECB’s Consumer Expectations Survey show that, after HICP inflation rose above 2% in July 2021, consumers’ inflation perceptions and expectations started to move upwards too. However, this rise in shorter-term (one-year ahead) inflation expectations was much more pronounced than that of more medium-term (three-years ahead) expectations and the term structure of consumers’ inflation expectations remained strongly downward sloping. There is some evidence that the responsiveness of inflation expectations to inflation perceptions has increased recently, but it remains noticeably lower for medium-term inflation expectations. Consumers’ uncertainty surrounding their inflation expectations has also grown. Overall, the upward movement in expectations, the increase in uncertainty surrounding them and rising sensitivity of medium-term expectations to perceived current inflation all call for continued close monitoring and analysis.
- JEL Code
- E31 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Price Level, Inflation, Deflation
E52 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Monetary Policy
D84 : Microeconomics→Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty→Expectations, Speculations
- 20 September 2022
- ECONOMIC BULLETIN - BOXEconomic Bulletin Issue 6, 2022Details
- Abstract
- The strong rise in inflation has renewed attention on longer-term inflation expectations. The distribution of individual longer-term inflation expectations from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters has recently recentred around 2%, although some respondents have lately raised their inflation expectations clearly above 2%. Some commentators have argued that movements in the upper “tails” of the inflation expectations’ distribution might signal a possible de-anchoring of expectations. This box takes a closer look at recent movements in long-term inflation expectations, especially of those forecasters currently in the upper tail of the distribution. We find that (a) historically, this tail group's longer-term inflation expectations have been higher, more volatile and more sensitive to realised inflation than the expectations of the rest of respondents, (b) respondents in this tail group perceive the current inflation spike to be more persistent, and (c) the evidence suggests that their expectations have not led movements in those of the rest of the professional forecasters.
- JEL Code
- E3 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
D83 : Microeconomics→Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty→Search, Learning, Information and Knowledge, Communication, Belief
D84 : Microeconomics→Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty→Expectations, Speculations
- 5 September 2018
- RESEARCH BULLETIN - No. 49Details
- Abstract
- Economists often try to forecast whether the economy as a whole will grow or contract. When measuring the effects of fiscal policy measures on economic activity, such forecasts are based on so-called multipliers. Using a new dataset compiled from economic forecasts and recommendations by the European Commission under the excessive deficit procedure of the Stability and Growth Pact, we derive the multipliers that were assumed by forecasters during the European sovereign debt crisis to project the effects of fiscal consolidation on economic growth. Our results confirm that forecasters adapted their assumptions on multipliers as the crisis progressed and accounted for larger effects of consolidation on growth later on in the crisis. Another finding is that the actual fiscal multipliers were not exceptionally large during the crisis.
- JEL Code
- E32 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Business Fluctuations, Cycles
E62 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook→Fiscal Policy
H20 : Public Economics→Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue→General
H5 : Public Economics→National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
- 30 May 2018
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2154Details
- Abstract
- Identifying fiscal multipliers is usually constrained by the absence of a counterfactual scenario. Our new data set allows overcoming this problem by making use of the fact that recommendations under the EU’s excessive deficit procedure (EDP) provide both a baseline no-policy-change scenario and a fiscal-adjustment EDP scenario that entails a forecast of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal consolidation over the EDP horizon. For a sample of 24 EU countries to which 48 EDP recommendations were applied between 2009 and 2015, we derive country-specific fiscal multipliers as actually applied by forecasters during the crisis. Our results confirm Blanchard and Leigh’s (2013, 2014) presumption that forecasters learned during the crisis. According to our findings, fiscal multipliers as applied by the European Commission increased over time – from about 1/4 in the early years of the crisis to about 2/3 in the later years. However, different from Blanchard and Leigh (2013, 2014), we do not find evidence for the hypothesis that ex-post fiscal multipliers have been substantially above 1 during the crisis.
- JEL Code
- E32 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Business Fluctuations, Cycles
E62 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook→Fiscal Policy
H20 : Public Economics→Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue→General
H5 : Public Economics→National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
- 2022
- Journal of International Economics
- 2020
- Economic Policy
- 2016
- Journal of Banking and Finance
- 2016
- Journal of Financial Intermediation