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Journal Article
Financial development, productivity, and economic growth
Working Paper
North-South Technological Diffusion and Dynamic Gains from Trade
This paper studies the transitional dynamics in a quality ladder model of endogenous growth in which North-South trade leads to technological diffusion through reverse engineering of intermediate goods. The concept of learning-to-learn is incorporated into both imitative and innovative processes, which in turn drive domestic technological progress. International trade with imitation leads to feedback effects between Southern imitators and Northern innovators who compete for the world market. Consequently, both regions face transition paths dependent on their relative technologies. We solve ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Financial Frictions on a Small Open Economy: When Current Account Borrowing Hits a Limit
The evidence of the last 20 years of recurring output busts and rapid reversals of the current account in emerging markets indicates that domestic agents may not be able to borrow in international capital markets to fully insure themselves against internal and external shocks. This paper models this phenomenon as a form of excess volatility by introducing a financial friction into a stochastic model of a small open economy. The financial friction limits the current account deficit to a fixed fraction of gross domestic product. The paper shows that conditional volatility and asymmetry are ...
Journal Article
Fiscal sustainability and contingent liabilities from recent credit expansions in South Korea and Thailand
While South Korea and Thailand had relatively sustainable fiscal policies prior to the Asian crisis, the long-term cost of the bailout of their financial sectors amounted to an estimated 30 to 40 percent of output, which was largely financed by public borrowing. The recent credit expansions in South Korea and Thailand have created new contingent liabilities for the governments of the two countries. This paper evaluates the impact of these rapid credit expansions on the sustainability of fiscal policy in South Korea and Thailand. In Thailand, a rapid credit expansion preceded the currency ...
Working Paper
Currency Boards, Dollarized Liabilities, and Monetary Policy Credibility
The recent collapse of the Argentine currency board raises new questions about the desirability of formal fixed exchange rate regimes in modern developing economies. This paper examines the impact of dollarized liabilities with potential default for a currency board with costly abandonment. We compare the performance of a currency board to a central bank with full discretion in two environments: One with only idiosyncratic firm shocks, and one with both idiosyncratic shocks and shocks to the dollar-euro rate. We show that the possibility of default with peso-valued exports generates a risk ...
Journal Article
Are global imbalances due to financial underdevelopment in emerging economies?
This Economic Letter presents recent research on a new explanation for both the export of savings and the import of equity by emerging countries: their level of underdevelopment of the financial sector compared to that of more advanced countries. Specifically, financial underdevelopment in emerging markets can lead to both over saving by domestic agents and undervaluation of domestic firms, which encourages international investors to purchase equity there.
Working Paper
The composition of capital inflows when emerging market firms face financing constraints
The composition of capital inflows to emerging market economies tends to follow a predictable dynamic pattern across the business cycle. In most emerging market economies, total inflows are procyclical, with debt and portfolio equity flowing in first, followed later in the expansion by foreign direct investment (FDI). To understand the timing of these flows, we use a small open economy (SOE) framework to model the composition of capital inflows as the equilibrium outcome of emerging market firms' financing decisions. We show how costly external financing and foreign direct investment search ...
Working Paper
Nonlinearities in International Business Cycles
This paper documents the dynamic properties of national output, its components, and the current account for five OECD countries. There is strong evidence of conditional volatility for almost all time series as well as significant deviations from normality. The deviations are detected particularly in GDP, net exports, investment time series.
Journal Article
The U.S. productivity acceleration and the current account deficit
This Economic Letter reviews the current facts about the current account deficit and its determinants, and describes the channels through which it is affected by an increase in trend labor productivity growth.