Search Results
Journal Article
Terrorism and the resilience of cities
The September 11 attacks in New York and Washington have forced Americans to confront the fact that to live or work in a large city is to be at greater risk of large-scale terrorism. What do these risks, and the public perception of them, imply for cities in general and the future of New York City in particular? In this article, the authors begin their exploration of this issue by examining why cities exist in the first place. To conduct their analysis, they simulate two key theoretical models of economic geography, using data that approximate the characteristics of a major U.S. city as well ...
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 ...
Report
Productivity spillovers, terms of trade, and the "home market effect"
This paper analyzes the welfare implications of international spillovers related to productivity gains, changes in market size, or government spending. We introduce trade costs and endogenous varieties in a two-country general-equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, drawing a distinction between productivity gains from manufacturing efficiency and those related to firms' lower cost of entry or product differentiation. Our model suggests that countries with lower manufacturing costs have higher GDP but supply a smaller number of goods at a lower international price. Countries with ...
Working Paper
The Economics of Sovereign Debt, Bailouts and the Eurozone Crisis
Despite a formal 'no-bailout clause; we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to a whopping 43% (Greece) of2010 output during the Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze and understand bailouts in a monetary union, and the large observed differences across countries. We characterize bailout size and likelihood as a function of the economic fundamentals (economic activity, debt-to-gdp ratio, default costs). Our model embeds a 'Southern view' of the crisis (transfers ...