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Working Paper
Industrial specialization and the asymmetry of shocks across regions
Economic integration, through greater capital market integration, will induce higher regional specialization in production, rendering regional shocks less symmetric. To support this claim empirically, we develop a utility based measure of shock asymmetry and calculate it for each U.S. state. We regress it (using both ordinary least squares and instrumental variables) on a state-by-state 1-digit industrial specialization index and a 2-digit manufacturing specialization index, controlling for relevant economic and demographic variables. The main empirical result is that both specialization ...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and SMEs: A 2021 "Time Bomb"?
This paper assesses the prospects of a 2021 time bomb in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) failures triggered by the generous support policies enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Policies implemented in 2020, on their own, do not create a 2021 time bomb for SMEs. Rather, business failures and policy costs remain modest. By contrast, credit contraction poses significant risk. Such a contraction would disproportionately affect firms that could have survived COVID-19 in 2020 without any fiscal support. Even in that scenario, most business failures would not arise from excessively ...
Report
Global Supply Chain Pressures, International Trade, and Inflation
We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on euro area inflation and how it compares to the experiences of other countries, such as the United States, over the two-year period 2020-21. Our model-based calibration exercises deliver four key results: (1) compositional effects, or the switch from services to goods consumption, are amplified through global input-output linkages, affecting both trade and inflation; (2) inflation can be higher under sector-specific labor shortages relative to a scenario with no such supply shocks; (3) foreign shocks and global supply chain bottlenecks played an ...
Report
Quantifying the Inflationary Impact of Fiscal Stimulus under Supply Constraints
This paper builds on Baqaee and Farhi (2022) and di Giovanni et al. (2022) to quantify thecontribution of fiscal policy to U.S. inflation over the December 2019-June 2022 period. Modelcalibrations show that aggregate demand shocks explain roughly two-thirds of total model-basedinflation, and that the fiscal stimulus contributed half or more of the total aggregate demand effect.
Working Paper
COVID-19 and SME Failures
We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost minimization and measure each firm’s liquidity shortfall during and after COVID-19. Our framework allows for a rich combination of sectoral and aggregate supply, productivity, and demand shocks. Accommodation and food services; arts, entertainment, and recreation; education; and other services are among the sectors most affected. The SME jobs at risk due to business ...
Report
Uncertainty Shocks, Capital Flows, and International Risk Spillovers
Foreign investors’ changing appetite for risk-taking has been shown to be a key determinant of the global financial cycle. Such fluctuations in risk sentiment also correlate with the dynamics of uncovered interest parity (UIP) premia, capital flows, and exchange rates. To understand how these risk sentiment changes transmit across borders, we propose a two-country macroeconomic framework. Our model features cross-border holdings of risky assets by U.S. financial intermediaries that operate under financial frictions and act as global intermediaries in that they take on foreign asset risk. In ...
Report
Uncertainty Shocks, Capital Flows, and International Risk Spillovers
Foreign investors’ changing appetite for risk-taking has been shown to be a key determinant of the global financial cycle. Such fluctuations in risk sentiment also correlate with the dynamics of uncovered interest parity (UIP) premia, capital flows, and exchange rates. To understand how these risk sentiment changes transmit across borders, we propose a two-country macroeconomic framework. Our model features cross-border holdings of risky assets by U.S. financial intermediaries that operate under financial frictions and act as global intermediaries in that they take on foreign asset risk. In ...
Working Paper
Leverage over the Firm Life Cycle, Firm Growth, and Aggregate Fluctuations
We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms' balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database for the period 2005-12. Public and private firms exhibit different leverage dynamics over their life cycles. Firm age and size are systematically related to leverage for private firms but not for public firms. We show that private firms, but not public ones, deleveraged during the Great Recession and ...
Working Paper
Risk sharing and industrial specialization ; regional and international evidence
We provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. To the best of our knowledge, this well-established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before. Our empirical procedure is summarized as follows. First, we construct a measure of specialization in production, and calculate an index of specialization for each of the European Community (EC) and non-EC OECD countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces, Japanese prefectures, Latin American countries, and regions of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Then, we estimate the degree of capital ...
Working Paper
How Big is the Wealth Effect? Decomposing the Response of Consumption to House Prices
We investigate the effect of declining house prices on household consumption behavior during 2006-2009. We use an individual-level dataset that has detailed information on borrower characteristics, mortgages and credit risk. Proxying consumption by individual-level auto loan originations, we decompose the effect of declining house prices on consumption into three main channels: wealth effect, household financial constraints, and bank health. We find a negligible wealth effect. Tightening householdlevel financial constraints can explain 40-45 percent of the response of consumption to declining ...