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Working Paper
Foreign Exchange Reserves as a Tool for Capital Account Management
Many recent theoretical papers have argued that countries can insulate themselves from volatile world capital flows by using a variable tax on foreign capital as an instrument of monetary policy. But at the same time many empirical papers have argued that only rarely do we observe these cyclical capital taxes used in practice. In this paper we construct a small open economy model where the central bank can engage in sterilized foreign exchange intervention. When private agents can freely buy and sell foreign bonds, sterilized foreign exchange intervention has no effect. But we analytically ...
Working Paper
Capital Controls as Macro-prudential Policy in a Large Open Economy
The literature on optimal capital controls for macro-prudential policy has focused on capital controls in a small open economy. This ignores the spillover effects to the rest of the world. This paper re-examines the case for capital controls in a large open economy, where domestic financial constraints may bind following a large negative shock. There is a tension between the desire to tax inflows to manipulate the terms of trade and tax outflows for macro-prudential purposes. Non-cooperative capital controls are ineffective as macro-prudential policy. Cooperative policy will ignore ...
Working Paper
International real business cycles with endogenous markup variability
The aggregate impact of decisions made at the level of the individual firm has recently attracted a lot of attention in both the macro and trade literatures. We adapt the benchmark international real business cycle model to a game-theoretic environment to add a channel for the strategic interaction among domestic and foreign firms. We show how the sum of strategic pricing decisions made at the level of the individual firm can have significant effects on the volatility and cross country co-movement of GDP and its components. Specifically we show that the addition of this one channel for ...
Journal Article
Emerging-market debtor nations likely to follow Fed rate boosts
A Federal Reserve interest rate increase can lead to capital flows reversing and exiting emerging markets. Central banks in emerging markets that are highly dependent on outside capital will be tempted to match the Fed increase in an attempt to curb capital flight.
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Divergence, Net Capital Flows, and Exchange Rates: Accounting for Endogenous Policy Responses
This paper measures the effect of monetary tightening in key advanced economies on net capital flows and exchange rates around the world. Measuring this effect is complicated by the fact that the domestic monetary policies of affected economies respond endogenously to the foreign tightening shock. Using a structural VAR framework with quarterly panel data we estimate the impulse responses of domestic policy variables and net capital flows to a foreign monetary tightening shock. We find that the endogenous responses of domestic monetary policy depends on each economy?s capital account openness ...
Don’t Look to the 2013 Tantrum for the Effect of Tapering on Emerging Markets
Many emerging markets have improved their external balance sheets since the volatility evidenced during the "taper tantrum" of 2013 and would be much less vulnerable to Federal Reserve tapering today.
Working Paper
Globalization and the Increasing Correlation between Capital Inflows and Outflows
The correlation between capital inflows and outflows has increased substantially over time in a sample of 128 advanced and developing countries. We provide evidence that this is a result of an increase in financial globalization (stock of external assets and liabilities). This dominates the effect of an increase in trade globalization (exports plus imports), which reduces the correlation between capital inflows and outflows. In the context of a two-country model with 14 shocks we show that the theoretical impact of financial and trade globalization on the correlation between capital inflows ...
Working Paper
Central bank credibility and the persistence of inflation and inflation expectations
This paper introduces a model where agents are unsure about the central bank's inflation target. They believe that the central bank's inflation target could lie between two extremes, and their beliefs vary depending on the central bank's stock of credibility. They form the expectations used in price and wage setting using this perceived inflation target, and they use past observations of inflation to update their beliefs about the credibility of the central bank. Thus a series of high inflation observations can lead them to believe (incorrectly) that the central bank has adopted a high ...
Working Paper
Financial performance and macroeconomic fundamentals in emerging market economies over the global financial cycle
This paper explores the relationship between financial performance and macroeconomic fundamentals in emerging market economies not only in times of crises, but in general during crisis and non-crisis years over the global financial cycle. Using a panel framework with data for 119 emerging market economies at an annual frequency, we examine whether the relationship between performance and fundamentals varies in magnitude and/or switches sign between crisis and non-crisis years. We find that better macroeconomic fundamentals (such as a stronger net foreign asset positions and higher stocks of ...
Capital flowed from emerging markets as pandemic, economic cycle took hold
Fluctuations in the global financial cycle, reflecting impacts from the COVID crisis, account for roughly one-third of the movement in emerging-market inflows during 2020–23.