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Working Paper
Can the Public Carry Trade Restore Fiscal Sustainability? Evidence from Korea's Consolidated Balance Sheet
Can governments use a carry-trade strategy to offset the fiscal costs of population aging? We examine this question through the consolidated balance sheet of Korea’s public sector, combining the assets and liabilities of the government, public pension and investment funds, and the central bank. The consolidated balance sheet reveals increasing reliance on a carry trade in which risky, increasingly foreign assets are financed with safe, low-yielding domestic liabilities. This strategy has generated a favorable return spread and strengthened public net worth. However, present-value accounting ...
Journal Article
Accounting for the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks on Exchange Rates through Markup Dynamics
This study investigates how fiscal policy shocks affect the external sector through markup dynamics in advanced and developing economies. We focus on the role of markup dynamics as a channel through which fiscal policy has a distinct effect on real exchange rates. Using panel data from 32 countries, we employ a local projection to evaluate the impact of expansionary fiscal policy shocks on real exchange rates, markups, and current accounts. Our empirical findings show distinct responses to the shocks among advanced and developing countries regarding the real exchange rate, due to different ...
Working Paper
The Real Term Premium in a Stationary Economy with Segmented Asset Markets
This paper proposes an equilibrium model to explain the positive and sizable term premia observed in the data. We introduce a slow mean-reverting process of consumption growth and a segmented asset market mechanism with heterogeneous trading technology to otherwise a standard heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model. First, a slow mean-reverting consumption growth process implies that the expected consumption growth rate is only slightly countercyclical and the process can exhibit a near zero first-order autocorrelation as seen in the data. The very small countercyclicality of the ...
Journal Article
Credit Expansion and Markups
This article documents new empirical facts about the effects of credit expansion on the aggregate markup and markup dispersion in the United States. We use U.S. macroeconomic data and Jordà's local projection and single-equation estimation methods. The results for both methods show that the aggregate markup and markup dispersion increase in response to both a firm debt shock and a household debt shock. The previous literature mostly focused on the effect of firm debt financing on firm markups. Extending previous research, our study shows that household credit expansion also plays a role in ...
Journal Article
The Real Term Premium in a Stationary Economy with Segmented Asset Markets
This article proposes a general equilibrium model to explain the positive and sizable term premia implied by the data. The authors introduce a slow mean-reverting process of consumption growth and a segmented asset-market mechanism with heterogeneous trading technologies into an otherwise standard heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model. First, the slow mean-reverting consumption growth process implies that the expected consumption growth rate is only slightly countercyclical and the process can exhibit near-zero first-order autocorrelation, as observed in the data. This slight ...
Journal Article
Optimal Ramsey Capital Taxation with Endogenous Government Spending
The authors study optimal capital income taxation in heterogeneous agent economies featuring endogenous government spending. Similar to Aiyagari (1995), they find that the long-run optimal capital tax rate should not be zero as long as the competitive equilibrium risk-free interest rate differs from the subjective time discount rate. The authors first argue that this result holds in a wide range of economic environments and is not limited to only the standard incomplete market model with heterogeneous agents. As an example, a decentralized economy with limited commitment is considered. ...