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Working Paper
International portfolios, capital accumulation and foreign assets dynamics
Despite the liberalization of capital flows among OECD countries, equity home bias remains sizable. We depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias: transaction costs that impede international diversification, and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk sharing, so that there is little incentive to hold diversified portfolios. We show that the interaction of the following ingredients generates a realistic equity home bias: capital accumulation, shocks to the efficiency of physical investment, as well as international trade in stocks and bonds. In our ...
Discussion Paper
Fiscal policy, productivity shocks, and the U.S. trade balance deficit
A two-country Real Business Cycle (RBC) model is used to study the behavior of the United States trade balance. In this model, economic fluctuations are driven by productivity shocks and by variations in government purchases and in distorting taxes. The model is simulated using quarterly data on total factor productivity, government purchases, and the average tax rate in the seven major industrial countries during the period 197591. A version of the model that postulates complete international asset marketsas frequently assumed in the International RBC literature (see, e.g., Backus, Kehoe, ...
Working Paper
Liquidity Traps in a Monetary Union
The closed economy macro literature has shown that a liquidity trap can result from the self-fulfilling expectation that future inflation and output will be low (Benhabib et al. (2001)). This paper investigates expectations-driven liquidity traps in a two-country New Keynesian model of a monetary union. In the model here, country-specific productivity shocks induce synchronized responses of domestic and foreign output, while country-specific aggregate demand shocks trigger asymmetric domestic and foreign responses. A rise in government purchases in an individual country lowers GDP in the rest ...
Working Paper
Limited asset market participation and the consumption-real exchange rate anomaly
Under efficient consumption risk sharing, as assumed in standard international business cycle models, a country's aggregate consumption rises relative to foreign consumption, when the country's real exchange rate depreciates. Yet, empirically, relative consumption and the real exchange rate are essentially uncorrelated. I show that this "consumption-real exchange rate anomaly" can be explained by a simple model in which a subset of households trade in complete financial markets, while the remaining households lead hand-to-mouth (HTM) lives. HTM behavior also generates greater volatility of ...
Working Paper
Explaining International Business Cycle Synchronization: Recursive Preferences and the Terms of Trade Channel
The business cycles of advanced economies are synchronized. Standard macro models fail to explain that fact. This paper presents a simple model of a two-country, two-traded good, complete-financial-markets world in which country-specific productivity shocks generate business cycles that are highly correlated internationally. The model assumes recursive intertemporal preferences (Epstein-Zin-Weil), and a muted response of labor hours to household wealth changes (due to Greenwood-Hercowitz-Huffman period utility and demand-determined employment under rigid wages). Recursive intertemporal ...
Working Paper
Rational Bubbles in Non-Linear Business Cycle Models: Closed and Open Economies
This paper studies rational bubbles in non-linear dynamic general equilibrium models of the macroeconomy. The term ‘rational bubble’ refers to multiple equilibria due to the absence of a transversality condition (TVC) for capital. The lack of TVC can be due to an OLG population structure. If a TVC is imposed, the macro models considered here have a unique solution. Bubbles reflect self-fulfilling fluctuations in agents’ expectations about future investment. In contrast to explosive rational bubbles in linearized models (Blanchard (1979)), the rational bubbles in non-linear models here ...
Working Paper
Euro Area and U.S. External Adjustment: The Role of Commodity Prices and Emerging Market Shocks
The trade balances of the Euro Area (EA) and of the U.S. have improved markedly after the Global Financial Crisis. This paper quantifies the drivers of EA and U.S. economic fluctuations and external adjustment, using an estimated (1999-2017) three-region (U.S., EA, rest of world) DSGE model with trade in manufactured goods and in commodities. In the model, commodity prices reflect global demand and supply conditions. The paper highlights the key contribution of the post-crisis collapse in commodity prices for the EA and U.S. trade balance reversal. Aggregate demand shocks originating in ...
Working Paper
Global banks, financial shocks and international business cycles: evidence from an estimated model
This paper estimates a two-country model with a global bank, using U.S. and Euro area (EA) data, and Bayesian methods. The estimated model matches key U.S. and EA business cycle statistics. Empirically, a model version with a bank capital requirement outperforms a structure without such a constraint. A loan loss originating in one country triggers a global output reduction. Banking shocks matter more for EA macro variables than for U.S. real activity. During the Great Recession (2007?09), banking shocks accounted for about 20 percent of the fall in U.S. and EA GDP, and for more than half of ...
Working Paper
Tractable latent state filtering for non-linear DSGE models using a second-order approximation
This paper develops a novel approach for estimating latent state variables of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models that are solved using a second-order accurate approximation. I apply the Kalman filter to a state-space representation of the second-order solution based on the ?pruning? scheme of Kim, Kim, Schaumburg and Sims (2008). By contrast to particle filters, no stochastic simulations are needed for the filter here--the present method is thus much faster. In Monte Carlo experiments, the filter here generates more accurate estimates of latent state variables than the ...
Working Paper
What drives the German current account? and how does it affect other EU member states?
We estimate a three-country model using 1995-2013 data for Germany, the Rest of the Euro Area (REA) and the Rest of the World (ROW) to analyze the determinants of Germany?s current account surplus after the launch of the Euro. The most important factors driving the German surplus were positive shocks to the German saving rate and to ROW demand for German exports, as well as German labour market reforms and other positive German aggregate supply shocks. The convergence of REA interest rates to German rates due to the creation of the Euro only had a modest effect on the German current account ...