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Working Paper
Sharing Asymmetric Tail Risk: Smoothing, Asset Prices and Terms of Trade
Crises and tail events have asymmetric effects across borders, raising the value of arrangements improving insurance of macroeconomic risk. Using a two-country DSGE model, we provide an analytical and quantitative analysis of the channels through which countries gain from sharing (tail) risk. Riskier countries gain in smoother consumption but lose in relative wealth and average consumption. Safer countries benefit from higher wealth and better average terms of trade. Calibrated using the empirical distribution of moments of GDP-growth across countries, the model suggests non-negligible ...
Working Paper
The Elusive Gains from Nationally-Oriented Monetary Policy
The consensus in the recent literature is that the gains from international monetary cooperation are negligible, and so are the costs of a breakdown in cooperation. However, when assessed conditionally on empirically-relevant dynamic developments of the economy, the welfare cost of moving away from regimes of explicit or implicit cooperation may rise to multiple times the cost of economic fluctuations. In economies with incomplete markets, the incentives to act non-cooperatively are driven by the emergence of global imbalances, i.e., large net-foreign-asset positions; and, in economies with ...
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Productivity spillovers, terms of trade, and the "home market effect"
This paper analyzes the welfare implications of international spillovers related to productivity gains, changes in market size, or government spending. We introduce trade costs and endogenous varieties in a two-country general-equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, drawing a distinction between productivity gains from manufacturing efficiency and those related to firms' lower cost of entry or product differentiation. Our model suggests that countries with lower manufacturing costs have higher GDP but supply a smaller number of goods at a lower international price. Countries with ...
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Self-validating optimum currency areas
A currency area can be a self-validating optimal policy regime, even when monetary unification does not foster real economic integration and intra-industry trade. In our model, firms choose the optimal degree of exchange rate pass-through to export prices while accounting for expected monetary policies, and monetary authorities choose optimal policy rules while taking firms' pass-through as given. We show that there exist two equilibria, each of which defines a self-validating currency regime. In the first, firms preset prices in domestic currency and let prices in foreign currency be ...
Working Paper
The international dimension of productivity and demand shocks in the U.S. economy
Identifying productivity and real demand shocks in the US with sign restrictions based on standard theory, we provide evidence on real and financial channels of their international propagation. Productivity gains in US manufacturing have substantial macroeconomic effects, raising US consumption, investment and the terms of trade, relative to the rest of the world, while lowering US net exports. Significant international financial adjustment occurs via a rise in the global value of the US stock market, portfolio shifts in US foreign assets and liabilities, and especially real dollar ...
Working Paper
Floats, pegs and the transmission of fiscal policy
According to conventional wisdom, fiscal policy is more effective under a fixed than under a flexible exchange rate regime. In this paper the authors reconsider the transmission of shocks to government spending across these regimes within a standard New Keynesian model of a small open economy. Because of the stronger emphasis on intertemporal optimization, the New Keynesian framework requires a precise specification of fiscal and monetary policies, and their interaction, at both short and long horizons. The authors derive an analytical characterization of the transmission mechanism of ...
Working Paper
Soverign risk and the effects of fiscal retrenchment in deep recessions
The authors analyze the effects of government spending cuts on economic activity in an environment of severe fiscal strain, as reflected by a sizeable risk premium on government debt. Specifically, they consider a "sovereign risk channel," through which sovereign default risk spills over to the rest of the economy, raising funding costs in the private sector. The authors' analysis is based on a variant of the model suggested by Crdia and Woodford (2009). It allows for costly financial intermediation and inter-household borrowing and lending in equilibrium, but maintains the tractability of ...
Working Paper
Social Distancing and Supply Disruptions in a Pandemic
Drastic public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns can reduce the loss of human life by keeping the number of infected individuals from exceeding the capacity of the health care system but are often criticized because of the social and the economic cost they entail. We question this view by combining an epidemiological model, calibrated to capture the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with a multisector model, designed to capture key characteristics of the U.S. Input Output Tables. Our two-sector model features a core sector that produces intermediate inputs not easily replaced ...
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The simple geometry of transmission and stabilization in closed and open economies
This paper provides an introduction to the recent literature on macroeconomic stabilization in closed and open economies. We present a stylized theoretical framework, illustrating its main properties with the help of an intuitive graphical apparatus. Among the issues we discuss are optimal monetary policy and the welfare gains from macroeconomic stabilization, the international transmission of real and monetary shocks and the role of exchange rate pass-through, and the design of optimal exchange rate regimes and monetary coordination among interdependent economies.
Working Paper
Macroeconomics of international price discrimination
This paper builds a baseline two-country model of real and monetary transmission under optimal international price discrimination. Distributing traded goods to consumers requires nontradables; because of distributive trade, the price elasticity of export demand depends on the exchange rate. Profit-maximizing monopolistic firms drive a wedge between wholesale and retail prices across countries. This entails possibly large deviations from the law of one price and incomplete pass-through on import prices. Yet, consistent with expenditure-switching effects, a nominal depreciation generally ...