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Working Paper
Housing and debt over the life cycle and over the business cycle
This paper describes an equilibrium life-cycle model of housing where nonconvex adjustment costs lead households to adjust their housing choice infrequently and by large amounts when they do so. In the cross-sectional dimension, the model matches the wealth distribution; the age profiles of consumption, homeownership, and mortgage debt; and data on the frequency of housing adjustment. In the time-series dimension, the model accounts for the procyclicality and volatility of housing investment, and for the procyclical behavior of household debt.
Working Paper
Financial Business Cycles
Using Bayesian methods, I estimate a DSGE model where a recession is initiated by losses suffered by banks and exacerbated by their inability to extend credit to the real sector. The event triggering the recession has the workings of a redistribution shock: a small sector of the economy -- borrowers who use their home as collateral -- defaults on their loans. When banks hold little equity in excess of regulatory requirements, the losses require them to react immediately, either by recapitalizing or by deleveraging. By deleveraging, banks transform the initial shock into a credit crunch, and, ...
Working Paper
The Inflationary Effects of Sectoral Reallocation
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift of consumption from services to goods. We study this demand reallocation in a multi-sector model featuring sticky prices, input-output linkages, and labor reallocation costs. Reallocation costs hamper the increase in the supply of goods, causing inflationary pressures. These pressures are amplified by the fact that goods prices are more flexible than services prices. We estimate the model allowing for demand reallocation, sectoral productivity, and aggregate labor supply shocks. The demand reallocation shock explains a large portion of ...
Working Paper
Banks, sovereign debt and the international transmission of business cycles
This paper studies the international propagation of sovereign debt default. We posit a two-country economy where capital constrained banks grant loans to firms and invest in bonds issued by the domestic and the foreign government. The model economy is calibrated to data from Europe, with the two countries representing the Periphery (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and the Core, respectively. Large contractionary shocks in the Periphery trigger sovereign default. We find sizable spillover effects of default from Periphery to the Core through a drop in the volume of credit extended by the ...
Working Paper
The International Spillovers of Synchronous Monetary Tightening
We use historical data and a calibrated model of the world economy to study how a synchronous monetary tightening can amplify cross-border transmission of monetary policy. The empirical analysis shows that historical episodes of synchronous tightening are associated with tighter financial conditions and larger effects on economic activity than asynchronous ones. In the model, a sufficiently large synchronous tightening can disrupt intermediation of credit by global financial intermediaries causing large output losses and an increase in sacrifice ratios, that is, output lost for a given ...
Working Paper
Taxonomy of Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility Measures
A large number of measures for monitoring risk and uncertainty surrounding macroeconomic and financial outcomes have been proposed in the literature, and these measures are frequently used by market participants, policy makers, and researchers in their analyses. However, risk and uncertainty measures differ across multiple dimensions, including the method of calculation, the underlying outcome (that is, the asset price or macroeconomic variable), and the horizon at which they are calculated. Therefore, in this paper, we review the literature on global risk, uncertainty, and volatility ...
Working Paper
Oil Prices and Consumption across Countries and U.S. States
We study the effects of oil prices on consumption across countries and U.S. states, by exploiting the time-series and cross-sectional variation in oil dependency of these economies. We build two large datasets: one with 55 countries over the years 1975-2018, and another with all U.S. states over the period 1989-2018. We then show that oil price declines generate positive effects on consumption in oil-importing economies, while depressing consumption in oil-exporting economies. We also document that oil price increases do more harm than the good afforded by oil price decreases both in the ...
Working Paper
Input and output inventories in general equilibrium
We build and estimate a two-sector (goods and services) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two types of inventories: materials (input) inventories facilitate the production of finished goods, while finished goods (output) inventories yield utility services. The model is estimated using Bayesian methods. The estimated model replicates the volatility and cyclicality of inventory investment and inventory-to-target ratios. Although inventories are an important element of the model's propagation mechanism, shocks to inventory efficiency or management are not an important source of ...
Working Paper
A Crisis of Missed Opportunities? Foreclosure Costs and Mortgage Modification During the Great Recession
We investigate the impact of Great Recession policies in California that substantially increased lender pecuniary and time costs of foreclosure. We estimate that the California Foreclosure Prevention Laws (CFPLs) prevented 250,000 California foreclosures (a 20% reduction) and created $300 billion in housing wealth. The CFPLs boosted mortgage modifications and reduced borrower transitions into default. They also mitigated foreclosure externalities via increased maintenance spending on homes that entered foreclosure. The CFPLs had minimal adverse side effects on the availability of mortgage ...
Working Paper
The Economic Effects of Trade Policy Uncertainty
We study the effects of unexpected changes in trade policy uncertainty (TPU) on the U.S. economy. We construct three measures of TPU based on newspaper coverage, firms' earnings conference calls, and aggregate data on tari rates. We document that increases in TPU reduce investment and activity using both firm-level and aggregate macroeconomic data. We interpret the empirical results through the lens of a two-country general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities and firms' export participation decisions. In the model as in the data, news and increased uncertainty about higher future ...