Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Author:Azzimonti-Renzo, Marina 

Working Paper
The political polarization index

American politics have become increasingly polarized in recent decades. To the extent that political polarization introduces uncertainty about economic policy, this pattern may have adversely affected the economy. According to existing theories, a rise in the volatility of fiscal shocks faced by individuals should result in a decline in economic activity. Moreover, if polarization is high around election dates, businesses and households may be induced to delay decisions that involve high reversibility costs (such as investment or hiring under search costs). Testing these theories has been ...
Working Papers , Paper 13-41

Discussion Paper
How Might Fifth District Firms React to Changing Tariff Policies?

In March 2025, the U.S. implemented a 20 percent tariff on all imports from China and an additional 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports. The administration has also announced additional 25 percent tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico to be implemented in April 2025 and proposed a set of tariffs targeting the European Union and automotive imports.In order to better understand how these implemented and proposed tariffs might affect firms in the Fifth District, we included questions about the impact of tariffs in our March business survey, which was fielded from Feb. ...
Regional Matters

Working Paper
Polarized business cycles

We are motivated by four stylized facts computed for emerging and developed economies: (i) business cycle movements are wider in emerging countries; (ii) economies in emerging countries experience greater economic policy uncertainty; (iii) emerging economies are more polarized and less politically stable; and (iv) economic policy uncertainty is positively related to political polarization. We show that a standard real business cycle (RBC) model augmented to incorporate political polarization, a `polarized business cycle' (PBC) model, is consistent with these facts. Our main hypothesis is that ...
Working Papers , Paper 13-44

Journal Article
Barriers to foreign direct investment under political instability

Economic Quarterly , Volume 93 , Issue Sum , Pages 287-315

Briefing
Tariffs: Estimating the Economic Impact of the 2025 Measures and Proposals

Tariffs are taxes imposed by a government on imported goods, typically calculated as a percentage of the import's value (known as an ad valorem tax). Governments use tariffs for various purposes, such as raising revenue, protecting domestic industries from foreign competition and influencing international trade patterns. By increasing the cost of imported products, tariffs encourage consumers to shift toward domestically produced goods, thus supporting local businesses and potentially stimulating domestic economic activity.However, the overall impact of tariffs depends critically on how much ...
Richmond Fed Economic Brief , Volume 25 , Issue 12

Briefing
Tariff Update: Incorporating the April 9 Announcements

This article updates our previous analysis covering the potential effects of announced tariffs by the U.S. As the analysis is quite similar to our previous analysis, much of the text of the article is drawn from the previous article.In our April 2 article examining recent tariff announcements, we constructed a benchmark measure of the average effective tariff rate (AETR) based on detailed trade data for 2024. The analysis quantified the fiscal and trade effects of newly proposed tariffs through a series of counterfactual scenarios. These included tariffs on aluminum and steel, renewed duties ...
Richmond Fed Economic Brief , Volume 25 , Issue 15

Working Paper
The dynamics of public investment under persistent electoral advantage

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted: Systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and overspending on targeted goods arise, above and beyond what is observed in symmetric environments. Because the party enjoying an electoral advantage is less short-sighted, it devotes a larger proportion of revenues to productive investment. Hence, ...
Working Papers , Paper 13-43

Briefing
Tariff Update: Incorporating Recent Decisions and Deals

In March, we introduced a benchmark measure of the average effective tariff rate (AETR), using detailed trade data for 2024. We subsequently updated this analysis to reflect the tariff announcements on April 2 (commonly referred to as "Liberation Day") and April 9. This article provides another update by incorporating recent court decisions involving these tariff announcements as well as trade agreements with the U.K. and China, described later in this article in more detail.As in our previous analysis, we report AETRs by country and industry. While the industry-level AETR reflects the direct ...
Richmond Fed Economic Brief , Volume 25 , Issue 23

Report
Pandemic Control in ECON-EPI Networks

We develop an ECON-EPI network model to evaluate policies designed to improve health and economic outcomes during a pandemic. Relative to the standard epidemiological SIR set-up, we explicitly model social contacts among individuals and allow for heterogeneity in their number and stability. In addition, we embed the network in a structural economic model describing how contacts generate economic activity. We calibrate it to the New York metro area during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis and show three main results. First, the ECON-EPI network implies patterns of infections that better match the data ...
Staff Report , Paper 609

Working Paper
The political economy of labor subsidies

We explore a political economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with median wealth is poorer than average, a politico-economic equilibrium will feature a subsidy to labor. The dynamic model does not have capital, but it has perfect markets for borrowing and lending. Because tax rates influence interest rates, another channel for redistribution appears, since a decrease in ...
Working Paper , Paper 06-09

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Series

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Jel Classification

D72 1 items

D85 1 items

E23 1 items

E43 1 items

E62 1 items

E65 1 items

show more (4)

FILTER BY Keywords

PREVIOUS / NEXT