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Working Paper
Dominant-Currency Pricing and the Global Output Spillovers from U.S. Dollar Appreciation
Different export-pricing currency paradigms have different implications for a host of issues that are critical for policymakers such as business cycle co-movement, optimal monetary policy, optimum currency areas and international monetary policy coordination. Unfortunately, the literature has not reached a consensus on which pricing paradigm best describes the data. Against this background, we test for the empirical relevance of dominant-currency pricing (DCP). Specifically, we first set up a structural three-country New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which nests DCP, ...
Working Paper
Financial Globalisation, Monetary Policy Spillovers and Macro-modelling: Tales from 1001 Shocks
Financial globalisation and spillovers have gained immense prominence over the last two decades. Yet, powerful cross-border financial spillover channels have not become a standard element of structural monetary models. Against this background, we hypothesise that New Keynesian DSGE models that do not feature powerful financial spillover channels confound the effects of domestic and foreign disturbances when confronted with the data. We derive predictions from this hypothesis and subject them to data on monetary policy shock estimates for 29 economies obtained from more than 280 monetary ...
Working Paper
A Flexible Finite-Horizon Identification of Technology Shocks
Recent empirical studies using in finite horizon long-run restrictions question the validity of the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis. These results have met with their own controversy, stemming from their sensitivity to changes in model specification and the general poor performance of long-run restrictions in Monte Carlo experiments. We propose an alternative identification that maximizes the contribution of technology shocks to the forecast-error variance of labor productivity at a long, but finite horizon. In small samples, our identification outperforms its in finite ...
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Congestion and cascades in payment systems
We develop a parsimonious model of the interbank payment system to study congestion and the role of liquidity markets in alleviating congestion. The model incorporates an endogenous instruction arrival process, scale-free topology of payments between banks, fixed total liquidity that limits banks' capacity to process arriving instructions, and a global market that distributes liquidity. We find that at low liquidity, the system becomes congested and payment settlement loses correlation with payment instruction arrival, becoming coupled across the network. The onset of congestion is evidently ...
Working Paper
Fast Locations and Slowing Labor Mobility
Declining internal migration in the United States is driven by increasing home attach-ment in locations with initially high rates of population turnover. These ?fast? locations were the population growth destinations of the 20th century, where home attachments were low, but have increased as regional population growth has converged. Using a novel measure of attachment, this paper estimates a structural model of migration that distinguishes moving frictions from home utility. Simulations quantify candidate explanations of the decline. Rising home attachment accounts for most of the decline not ...
Working Paper
Evidence on the Production of Cognitive Achievement from Moving to Opportunity
This paper performs a subgroup analysis on the effect of receiving a Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing voucher on test scores. I find evidence of heterogeneity by number of children in the household in Boston, gender in Chicago, and race/ethnicity in Los Angeles. To study the mechanisms driving voucher effect heterogeneity, I develop a generalized Rubin Causal Model and propose an estimator to identify transition-specific Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs) of school and neighborhood quality. Although I cannot identify such LATEs with the MTO data, the analysis demonstrates that ...
Working Paper
Drifts, Volatilities, and Impulse Responses Over the Last Century
How much have the dynamics of U.S. time series and in particular the transmission of innovations to monetary policy instruments changed over the last century? The answers to these questions that this paper gives are "a lot" and "probably less than you think," respectively. We use vector autoregressions with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility to tackle these questions. In our analysis we use variables that both influenced monetary policy and in turn were influenced by monetary policy itself, including bond market data (the difference between long-term and short-term nominal ...