Economics: Research Guide

In this paper we revisit the Canadian experience with floating exchange rates since 1950. Canada was a pioneer in successfully adopting a floating exchange rate during the Bretton Woods pegged exchange rate regime. Since then, most advanced countries have followed the Canadian example. A key finding of our paper based on historical narrative and econometric analysis is that economic performance under floating depended on its monetary policy performance as Milton Friedman originally argued in his seminal 1953 article making the case for floating exchange rates. Canadian monetary policy achieved low and stable inflation once it adopted inflation targeting as a nominal anchor. Also, Canadaâ€..

I study how, in the presence of default risk, the Dutch disease amplifies an inefficiency in the sectoral allocation of capital. I develop a sovereign default model with production of tradable and non-tradable goods, and endowments of commodities. Default incentives increase when more capital is allocated to non-traded production. Households do not internalize this effect, giving rise to over-investment in the non-traded sector. Commodity windfalls amplify this inefficiency through the classic Dutch disease mechanism and an increased desire to borrow. Policies that reduce the returns of non-traded capital, such as exchange rate sterilization, ameliorate the degree of over-investment during c..

We study how debt limits can be expansionary in economies facing sovereign risk. We develop a sovereign debt model with capital accumulation, long-term debt, and fiscal rules that features two distortions: debt dilution and a pecuniary externality of private investment on spreads. The optimal debt limit increases capital accumulation due to lower sovereign risk, generating an economic expansion in the long run. Welfare gains are a result of lower sovereign spreads due to expectations about future borrowing and investment. We present evidence of a positive (negative) relation between debt limits and investment (spreads), consistent with the predictions of the model.

Capital and its sectoral allocation affect default incentives. Under general assumptions, default risk is decreasing in the total stock of capital and increasing in the share of capital allocated to non-tradable production. This implies that when competitive households make all investment decisions capital has two externalities: a capital-stock externality and a portfolio externality. These hamper the ability of a benevolent government to make optimal borrowing and default decisions and are exacerbated during periods of distress. Competitive equilibria feature underinvestment, larger non-traded sectors, more default, and lower debt and consumption than a centralized planner's allocation. Sel..

I study the impact of giant oil field discoveries on default risk. I document that interest rate spreads of emerging economies increase by 1.3 percentage points following a discovery of median size. I develop a sovereign default model with investment, three-sector production, and oil discoveries. Following a discovery, borrowing and investment increase. Capital reallocates from manufacturing toward oil and non-traded sectors, increasing the volatility of tradable income. Borrowing increases default risk and higher volatility increases the risk premium, both of which increase spreads. Discoveries generate welfare gains of 0.44 percent. Insurance against low oil prices increases these gains to..

We estimate the causal effects of a shift in the expected future exchange rate of a local currency against the US dollar on a representative sample of firms in an open economy. We survey a nationally representative sample of firms and provide the one-year-ahead nominal exchange rate forecast published by the local central bank to a random sub-sample of firm managers. The treatment is effective in shifting exchange rate and inflation expectations and perceptions. These effects are persistent and larger for non-exporting firms. Linking survey responses with administrative census data, we find that the treatment affects the dynamics of export and import quantities and prices at the firm level, ..

This paper provides new evidence on the exchange rate passthrough to domestic inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using both bilateral US dollar exchange rate and the nominal effective exchange rate (NEER), and monthly data. We find that depreciations cause sizable increases in domestic inflation. The passthrough in SSA is higher than in other regions and its magnitude depends on the exchange rate regime, type of exchange rate (bilateral versus NEER), natural resource endowment and domestic market competitiveness. The passthrough is found to be disproportionately larger and more persistent for large depreciation shocks, and for exchange rate changes that are more persistent. We also find e..

Using administrative transactions data from the United Kingdom, we document a swift decline in sterling use among British exporters after the 2016 Brexit vote. Through a novel decomposition, we document most of this decline comes from two sources: (i) continuously-operating firms switching from sterling to dollars or local currencies and (ii) reductions in transactions for sterling-loyal firms. In contrast, new entrants into exporting primarily invoice in sterling before and after the Brexit vote. Our findings provide the first evidence on the quantitative relevance of new channels that contribute to changes in aggregate invoicing shares amidst political upheaval.

This paper estimates the impact of external demand shocks on real income. We utilize a first order approximation to a wide class of small open economy models that feature sector-level gravity in trade flows, which allows us to measure foreign shocks and characterize their welfare impact in terms of reducedform elasticities. We use machine learning techniques to group 4-digit manufacturing sectors into a smaller number of clusters, and show that the cluster-level elasticities of income with respect to foreign shocks can be estimated using high-dimensional statistical techniques. Foreign demand shocks in complex intermediate and capital goods have large positive impacts on real income, whereas..

Many countries find themselves with elevated debt levels, increased debt vulnerabilities, and tight financing conditions, while also facing increased spending needs for development and transition to a greener economy. This paper aims to place the current debt landscape in a historical context and investigate the drivers of debt surges, to what degree they result in a crisis as well as examine post-surge debt trajectories and under what conditions debt follows a non-declining path. We find that fiscal policy and stock-flow adjustments play important roles in debt dynamics with the valuation effects arising from currency depreciation explaining more than half of stock flow adjustments in LICs...

This paper applies the two-country open-economy model with trade in stocks and bonds of Coeurdacier et al. (2010) to quantify the loss of international diversification benefits for major advanced economies, which have a significant presence in international financial markets, under geoeconomic fragmentation. We perform counterfactual simulations under different hypothetical fragmentation scenarios in which these economies are unable to trade with geopolitically distant countries, as measured by voting disagreement on foreign policy issues at the United Nations General Assembly meetings during 2012-2021. The simulation results imply a potentially significant loss of international diversificat..

We assess how within euro area labor mobility impacts economic dynamics in response to shocks. In the analysis we use an estimated two-region monetary union dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that allows for a varying degree of labor mobility across regions. We find that, in contrast with traditional optimal currency area predictions, enhanced labor mobility can either mitigate or exacerbate the extent to which the two regions respond differently to shocks. The effects depend crucially on the nature of shocks and variable of interest. In some circumstances, even when it contributes to aligning the responses of the two regions, labor mobility may complicate monetary policy tradeoffs..

This study explores the evolution of invoicing currency choice, focusing on inertia in invoicing currency and the role of export experience. We theorize that inertia in the producer fs currency pricing (PCP) weakens with lower forex risk management costs, whereas inertia in foreign currency pricing is more pronounced under similar conditions. For the export experience, exporters tend to adopt PCP when they start exporting if the costs are significant. Empirical analysis using firm-level export data in Thailand from 2007 to 2014 supports these predictions. Specifically, we show that the inertia in PCP diminishes with access to forward exchange contracts or when the importer fs currency has a ..

We construct a novel measure of technology adoption, the Embodied Technology Imports Indicator (ETI), available for 181 countries over the period 1970-2020. The ETI measures the technological intensity of imports of each country by leveraging patent data from PATSTAT and product-level trade data from COMTRADE. We use this index to assess the link between capital flows and the diffusion of new technologies across emerging economies and low-income countries. Through a local projection difference-in-differences approach, we establish that variations in statutory capital flow regulations increase technological intensity by 7-9 percentage points over 5 to 10 years. This increase is accompanied by..

The share of U.S. dollar assets in the official foreign exchange reserve portfolios of central banks is sometimes taken as an indicator of dollar status. We show that the observed decline in the aggregate share of U.S. dollar assets does not stem from a systematic shift in currency preferences away from holding dollar assets. Instead, a small group of countries with large foreign exchange reserve balances drive the dollar share decline observed in aggregate statistics. This arises either due to countries conducting monetary policy vis-à-vis the euro or due to preference shifts away from dollars. Regression analysis shows that interest rate differentials between traditional and nontraditiona..

This paper introduces a novel database of text features extracted from the speeches of 53 central banks from 1996 to 2023 using state-of-the-art NLP methods. We establish four facts: (1) central banks with floating and pegged exchange rates communicate differently, and these differences are particularly pronounced in discussions about exchange rates and the dollar, (2) communication spillovers from the Federal Reserve are prominent in exchange rate and dollar-related topics for dollar peggers and in hawkish sentiment for others, (3) central banks engage in FX intervention guidance, and (4) more transparent institutions are less responsive to political pressure in their communication.

We study international trade and macroeconomic dynamics triggered by the imposition of sanctions. We begin with a tractable two-country model where Home and Foreign countries have comparative advantages in production of differentiated consumption goods and a commodity (e.g., gas), respectively. Home imposes sanctions on Foreign. Financial sanctions exclude a fraction of Foreign agents from the international bond market. Gas sanctions take the form of a ban on gas trade, equivalent to an appropriate price cap in our model. Differentiated goods trade sanctions exclude a fraction of Foreign and Home exporters from international trade. All sanctions lead to resource reallocation in both economie..

We study the fiscal policy response to a slowdown in trend growth using an estimated open economy stochastic growth model. For equilibria to exist, fiscal policy must respond to the slowdown ensuring that the government budget constraint holds in the low growth regime. The slowdown reduces welfare but sets off a significant endogenous response of the private sector that increases capital accumulation and operates as an automatic stabilizer. If fiscal policy keeps the provision of public goods per capita constant, the slowdown gives rise to a pleasant fiscal arithmetic which requires either tax cuts or a higher target debt-to-GDP ratio for the government budget constraint to hold in the long ..

We evaluate the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Combining reduced-form estimates from tax data with a global investment model, we estimate responses, identify parameters, and conduct counterfactuals. Domestic investment of firms with the mean tax change increases 20% versus a no-change baseline. Due to novel foreign incentives, foreign capital of U.S. multinationals rises substantially. These incentives also boost domestic investment, indicating complementarity between domestic and foreign capital. In the model, the long-run effect on domestic capital in general equilibrium is 7% and the tax revenue feedback from growth offsets only 2p.p. of the direct cost of 41% of pre-TCJA corporate revenue.

With climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, how should central banks respond to these catastrophic events? Looking at IMF reports for 34 disaster-years, which occurred in 16 disaster-prone countries from 1999 to 2017, what emerges is a non-negligible heterogeneity in central banks' responses to climate-related disasters. Using a standard small-open-economy New-Keynesian model with disaster shocks, we show that, consistently with textbook theory, inflation targeting remains the welfare-optimal regime. The best strategy for monetary authorities is to resist the impulse to accommodate in the face of catastrophic natural disasters, and rather to continue to f..

Commodity price fluctuations are a significant driver of business cycles in Emerging Economies (EMEs). While previous works have emphasized the link between commodity prices and financial conditions, none of them has explored empirically the potentially sign-dependent effects induced by commodity price shocks on domestic macro-financial conditions. Using a non-linear panel local projections model, we show that negative commodity price shocks induce stronger and faster effects on output and investment relative to positive shocks in EMEs. The trade balance improves after a negative shock due to the tightening of domestic financial conditions whereas it is unresponsive after a positive one. The..

We characterize how firms structure supply chains under climate risk. Using new data on the universe of firm-to-firm transactions from an Indian state, we show that firms diversify sourcing locations, and suppliers exposed to climate risk charge lower prices. Our event-study analysis finds that firms with suppliers in flood-affected districts experience a decline in inputs lasting two months, followed by a return to original suppliers. We develop a general equilibrium model of firm input sourcing under climate risk. Firms diversify identical inputs from suppliers across space, trading off the probability of a climate shock against higher input costs. We quantify the model using data on 271 I..

This study analyses the negative shock to Italy's terms of trade since the second half of 2021: the shock was less pronounced than the 1973-74 oil crisis, yet particularly sharp. The terms-of-trade deterioration was driven by energy goods and was greater than in the other euro-area economies due to a higher rise in energy import prices and to a greater share of energy products in total imports. The energy component was also the main driver both of the strong deterioration in the current account balance and of the large negative income effect. At any rate, Italy has successfully weathered the storm: the gradual recovery in the terms of trade since 2022 has led to the return to a positive curr..

The Mundell-Fleming IS-LM approach has guided generations of economists over the past 60 years. But countries have experienced new problems, the international finance literature has advanced, and the composition of the global economy has changed, so the scene is set for an updated approach. We propose an Integrated Policy Framework (IPF) diagram to analyze the use of multiple policy tools as a function of shocks and country characteristics. The underlying model features dominant currency pricing, shallow foreign exchange (FX) markets, and occasionally-binding external and domestic borrowing constraints. Our diagram includes the use of monetary policy, FX intervention, capital controls, and d..

In this paper I analyze the work on exchange rates and external imbalances by University of Chicago faculty members during the university’s first hundred years, 1892-1992. Many people associate Chicago’s views with Milton Friedman’s advocacy for flexible exchange rates. But, of course, there was much more than that, including the work of J. Laurence Laughlin on bimetallism, Jacob Viner on the balance of payments, Lloyd Metzler on transfers, Harry Johnson on trade and currencies, Lloyd Mints on exchange rate regimes, Robert Mundell on optimal currency areas, and Arnold Harberger on shadow exchange rates, among other. The analysis shows that, although different scholars emphasized differ..

We explore the role of sectoral debt dynamics in shaping business cycles in a sample of 52 Emerging Market Economies (EMEs) and Frontier Market Economies (FMEs) from 2005 to 2021. Higher household debt levels and growth are associated with significantly slower GDP growth in more developed EMEs but not in less developed EMEs and FMEs. We also examine the relationship between US dollar cycles, sectoral debt levels and growth, and economic activity. Among developed EMEs, higher expected household debt growth magnifies the impact of US dollar fluctuations on economic activity, with significant but less persistent effects on consumption and more persistent effects on investment. Our empirical fin..

We highlight the welfare effect of policies that balance global current accounts when households face uninsurable income risk and borrowing constraints. Subsidizing savings in debtor economies reduces current account imbalances and raises the welfare of almost all citizens by increasing world capital, raising wages, and improving insurance for low-wealth households. The same balancing of current accounts is achieved by taxing savings in lender economies; however, this policy hurts most households by reducing global capital. These results suggest that balancing global imbalances may be a positive byproduct of raising investment rates, especially in debtor countries.

Globalization is not over, but it is being reconfigured by events. Internationally, there are economic and political tensions between the United States and China. Both countries have responded with import tariffs, export controls, and foreign investment restrictions that have led to a decline in the relative importance of bilateral trade and the collapse of bilateral foreign direct investment. The paper concludes that globalization remains deeply entrenched despite the Global Financial Crisis, COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and U.S.-China tensions. At the same time, the landscape of globalization has been changing in response to these events and specifically in response to U.S.-..

Sovereigns issue debt on both domestic and foreign markets and the two debts are uncorrelated in the data. Sovereigns default mostly selectively. We propose a theory to rationalize these observations. A government chooses the optimal combination of two debts to smooth consumption, which is subject to output shock and volatile tax distortions. In equilibrium, it mostly relies on domestic debt to smooth the tax wedge and on foreign debt to smooth the output shock. Issuing either debt is less costly than raising taxes, but it is subject to default risk due to the government’s limited commitment. A quantitative, calibrated model with two shocks and two debts replicates well debt-to-GDP ra..

We build an arbitrage-based model of the yield curves in a heterogeneous monetary union with sovereign default risk, which can account for the asymmetric shifts in euro area yields during the Covid-19 pandemic. We derive an affine term structure solution, and decompose yields into term premium and credit risk components. In an extension, we endogenize the peripheral default probability, showing that it decreases with central bank bond-holdings. Calibrating the model to Germany and Italy, we show that a "default risk extraction" channel is the main driver of Italian yields, and that flexibility makes asset purchases more effective.