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Working Paper
Fiscal Stimulus Under Sovereign Risk
The excess procyclicality of fiscal policy is commonly viewed as a central malaise in emerging economies. We document that procyclicality is more pervasive in countries with higher sovereign risk and provide a model of optimal fiscal policy with nominal rigidities and endogenous sovereign default that can account for this empirical pattern. Financing a fiscal stimulus is costly for risky countries and can render countercyclical policies undesirable, even in the presence of large Keynesian stabilization gains. We also show that imposing austerity can backfire by exacerbating the exposure to ...
Working Paper
Global Flight to Safety, Business Cycles, and the Dollar
We develop a two-country macroeconomic model that we fit to a set of aggregate prices and quantities for the U.S. and the rest of the world. In addition to a standard array of shocks, the model includes time variation in agents’ preference for safe bonds. We allow for a component of this time variation to be common across countries and biased toward dollar-denominated safe assets, and refer to this component as global flight to safety (GFS). We find that GFS shocks are the most important shocks driving world business cycles, and are also important drivers of activity in the U.S. and ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Stimulus under Sovereign Risk
The excess procyclicality of fiscal policy is commonly viewed as a central malaise in emerging economies. We document that procyclicality is more pervasive in countries with higher sovereign risk and provide a model of optimal fiscal policy with nominal rigidities and endogenous sovereign default that can account for this empirical pattern. Financing a fiscal stimulus is costly for risky countries and can render countercyclical policies undesirable, even in the presence of large Keynesian stabilization gains. We also show that imposing austerity can backfire by exacerbating the exposure to ...
Working Paper
Sovereign default risk and uncertainty premia
This paper studies how foreign investors' concerns about model misspecification affect sovereign bond spreads. We develop a general equilibrium model of sovereign debt with endogenous default wherein investors fear that the probability model of the underlying state of the borrowing economy is misspecified. Consequently, investors demand higher returns on their bond holdings to compensate for the default risk in the context of uncertainty. In contrast with the existing literature on sovereign default, we explain the bond spreads dynamics observed in the data as well as other business cycle ...
Working Paper
Global Flight to Safety, Business Cycles, and the Dollar
We develop a two-country macroeconomic model that we fit to a set of aggregate prices and quantities for the U.S. and the rest of the world. In addition to a standard array of shocks, the model includes time variation in agents’ preference for safe bonds. We allow for a component of this time variation to be common across countries and biased toward dollar-denominated safe assets, and refer to this component as global flight to safety (GFS). We find that GFS shocks are the most important shocks driving world business cycles, and are also important drivers of activity in the U.S. and ...
Working Paper
Capital Controls and Monetary Policy Autonomy in a Small Open Economy
Is there a link between capital controls and monetary policy autonomy in a country with a floating currency? Shocks to capital flows into a small open economy lead to volatility in asset prices and credit supply. To lessen the impact of capital flows on financial instability, a central bank finds it optimal to use the domestic interest rate to "manage" the capital account. Capital account restrictions affect the behavior of optimal monetary policy following shocks to the foreign interest rate. Capital controls allow optimal monetary policy to focus less on the foreign interest rate and more ...
Working Paper
Inflation targeting and the anchoring of inflation expectations: cross-country evidence from consensus forecasts
Using survey data of inflation expectations across a 36 developed and developing countries, this paper examines whether the adoption of inflation targeting has helped to anchor inflation expectations. We examine the response of inflation expectations following a shock to inflation, inflation expectations, and oil prices. For the 13 countries that adopted inflation targeting midway through the time period used in this study, there is a significant difference in the responses between the earlier and the later subperiods. A shock leads to a positive, significant, and persistent increase ...
Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy under model uncertainty without commitment
This paper studies the design of optimal time-consistent monetary policy in an economy where the planner trusts its own model, while a representative household uses a set of alternative probability distributions governing the evolution of the exogenous state of the economy. In such environments, unlike in the original studies of time-consistent monetary policy, managing households' expectations becomes an active channel of optimal policymaking per se, a feature that the paternalistic government seeks to exploit. We adapt recursive methods in the spirit of Abreu, Pearce, and Stacchetti (1990) ...
Working Paper
Exchange Rate Disconnect and the Trade Balance
We propose a model with costly international financial intermediation that links exchange rate movements to shifts in the demand for domestically produced goods relative to the demand for imported goods (trade rebalancing). Our model is consistent with stylized facts of exchange rate dynamics, including those related to the trade balance, which is typically overlooked in the literature on exchange rate determination. In a quantitative assessment, trade rebalancing explains nearly 50 percent of exchange rate fluctuations over the business cycle, whereas exogenous deviations from the uncovered ...
Discussion Paper
Oil Price Shocks and Inflation in a DSGE Model of the Global Economy
The 2022 inflation surge has renewed interest in the drivers of inflation, with special attention on the role of oil and other commodity prices given the large increase in these prices post-pandemic. In this note, we use a DSGE model of the global economy to quantify the impact on U.S. inflation and output of the oil shocks that drove oil prices up by about $45 per barrel in the first half of 2022, around Russia's invasion of Ukraine.