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Working Paper
Terms-of-trade uncertainty and economic growth: are risk indicators significant in growth regressions?
This paper examines a neoclassical stochastic endogenous growth model in which terms-of-trade uncertainty affects savings and consumption growth. The model explains the positive link between growth and the average rate of change of terms of trade found in recent empirical studies. In addition, terms-of-trade variability, as an indicator of risk, is found to be a key determinant of growth. This implies that welfare costs of uncertainty are much larger than conventional measures of costs of consumption instability. The model's key predictions are strongly supported by results of panel ...
Working Paper
Resource Curse or Blessing? Sovereign Risk in Resource-Rich Emerging Economies
In this paper we document the stylized facts about the relationship between international oil price swings, sovereign risk and macroeconomic performance of oil-exporting economies. We show that even though being a bigger oil producer decreases sovereign risk?because it increases a country?s ability to repay?having more oil reserves increases sovereign risk by making autarky more attractive. We develop a small open economy model of sovereign risk with incomplete international financial markets, in which optimal oil extraction and sovereign default interact. We use the model to understand the ...
Working Paper
An anatomy of credit booms: evidence from macro aggregates and micro data
This paper proposes a methodology for measuring credit booms and uses it to identify credit booms in emerging and industrial economies over the past four decades. In addition, we use event study methods to identify the key empirical regularities of credit booms in macroeconomic aggregates and micro-level data. Macro data show a systematic relationship between credit booms and economic expansions, rising asset prices, real appreciations, widening external deficits and managed exchange rates. Micro data show a strong association between credit booms and firm-level measures of leverage, firm ...
Working Paper
Mexico's balance-of-payments crisis: a chronicle of death foretold
This paper claims that the roots of Mexico's balance-of-payments crisis are found in the prevailing high degree of capital mobility and financial globalization. Under these circumstances, shifts in foreign capital flows and anticipation of a banking-system bailout may produce large imbalances between stocks of financial assets and foreign reserves, threatening the sustainability of currency pegs. Econometric analysis suggests that 1/2 of Mexico's reserve losses could be accounted for by these phenomena. Large financial imbalances are also fertile ground for self-fulfilling-prophesy crises ...
Working Paper
Sudden stops, financial crises and leverage: a Fisherian deflation of Tobin's Q*
This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of a DSGE model with an endogenous collateral constraint are consistent with key features of the emerging markets' Sudden Stops. Business cycle dynamics produce periods of expansion during which the ratio of debt to asset values raises enough to trigger the constraint. This sets in motion a deflation of Tobin's Q driven by Irving Fisher's debt-deflation mechanism, which causes a spiraling decline in credit access and in the price and quantity of collateral assets. Output and factor allocations decline because the collateral constraint limits ...
Working Paper
Do taxes matter for long-run growth?: Harberger's superneutrality conjecture
Harberger's supemeutrality conjecture contends that, although in theory the mix of direct and indirect taxes affects investment and growth, in practice growth effects of taxation are negligible. This paper provides evidence in support of this view by testing the predictions of endogenous growth models driven by human capital accumulation. Theoretical analysis highlights implications of different taxes for growth and investment in these models. The empirical work is based on cross-country regressions and numerical simulations, using a new methodology for estimating aggregate effective tax ...
Discussion Paper
The syndrome of exchange-rate-based stabilizations and the uncertain duration of currency pegs
This paper shows that some key stylized facts of exchange-rate-based stabilization plans can be explained by the uncertain duration of the plans themselves. Uncertain duration is modeled to reflect evidence showing that devaluation probabilities are higher when the plans are introduced and abandoned than in the period in between. If contingent-claims markets are incomplete, this uncertain duration distortion introduces temporary fiscal cuts with large wealth effects. Investment and employment are also distorted, and the resulting supply-side effects play a critical role. Stabilizations of ...
Conference Paper
Putting the brakes on Sudden Stops: the financial frictions - moral hazard tradeoff of asset price guarantees
The hypothesis that Sudden Stops to capital inflows in emerging economies may originate in frictions inherent to global capital markets, such as collateral constraints and trading costs, suggests that Sudden Stops could be prevented by an international organization that offers exante price guarantees on the emerging-markets asset class. Providing these guarantees is a risky endeavor, however, because they introduce a moral-hazard-like incentive similar to those that are viewed as another culprit behind emerging markets crises. This paper studies this financial frictions-moral hazard tradeoff ...
Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model of Healthcare Saturation, Inequality and the Output-Pandemia Tradeoff
Covid-19 became a global health emergency when it threatened the catastrophic collapse of health systems as demand for health goods and services and their relative prices surged. Governments responded with lockdowns and increases in transfers. Empirical evidence shows that lockdowns and healthcare saturation contribute to explain the cross-country variation in GDP drops even after controlling for Covid-19 cases and mortality. We explain this output-pandemia tradeoff as resulting from a shock to subsistence health demand that is larger at higher capital utilization in a model with ...