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Report
Does exchange rate stability increase trade and capital flows?
On the eve of a major change in the world monetary system, the adoption of a single currency in Europe, our theoretical understanding of the implications of the exchange rate regime for trade and capital flows is still limited. We argue that two key model ingredients are essential to address this question: a general equilibrium setup and deviations from purchasing power parity. By developing a simple benchmark monetary model that contains these two ingredients, we find the following main results. First, the level of trade is not necessarily higher under a fixed exchange rate regime. Second, ...
Journal Article
Macro markets and financial security
Uncertainty about national income growth poses significant macroeconomic risk to households all over the world. To help reduce investors' exposure, researchers have proposed a controversial new set of security markets called macro markets. These international markets would trade long-term claims on the income of an entire country or region. For example, in a macro market for the United States, an investor could buy a claim on the U.S. national income and then receive dividends equal to a fraction of national income for as long as the claim is held. Although many barriers stand in the way of ...
Report
International capital flows
The sharp increase in both gross and net international capital flows over the past two decades has prompted renewed interest in their determinants. Most existing theories of international capital flows are based on one-asset models, which have implications only for net capital flows, not for gross flows. Moreover, because there is no portfolio choice, these models allow no role for capital flows as a result of assets? changing expected returns and risk characteristics. In this paper, we develop a method for solving dynamic stochastic general equilibrium open-economy models with portfolio ...
Report
Borders and business cycles
We document that business cycles of U.S. Census regions are substantially more synchronized than those of European Union countries, both over the past four decades and the past two decades. Data from regions within the four largest European countries confirm the presence of a European border effect ? within-country correlations are substantially larger than cross-country correlations. These results continue to hold after controlling for exogenous factors such as distance and size. We consider the role of four factors that have received a lot of attention in the debate about EMU: sectoral ...
Report
Growth uncertainty and risksharing
We propose a new methodology to evaluate the gains from global risksharing that is closely connected to the empirical growth literature. We obtain estimates of residual risk (growth uncertainty) at various horizons from regressions of country-specific deviations from world growth on a wide set of variables in the information set. Since this residual risk can be entirely hedged, we use it to obtain a measure of welfare gain that can be achieved by a representative country. We find that nations can reap very large benefits from engaging in such risksharing arrangements. Using post-war data, the ...
Discussion Paper
Alternative specifications for consumption and the estimation of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution
This paper documents several advantages associated with using state level consumption data to examine consumption behavior and especially to estimate the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES). In contrast to the results of Hall (1988) and Campbell and Mankiw (1989), we provide substantial evidence indicating that the IES is significantly different from zero and probably close to one. Since the overidentifying restrictions of the standard Euler equation are generally rejected, we use these data to explore the nature of these rejections and evaluate an alternative specification of ...
Working Paper
Borders and business cycles
We document that business cycles of U.S. Census regions are substantially more synchronized than those of European Union countries, both over the past four decades and the past two decades. Data from regions within the four largest European countries confirm the presence of a European border effect --within-country correlations are substantially larger than cross-country correlations. These results continue to hold after controlling for exogenous factors such as distance and size. We consider the role of four factors that have received a lot of attention in the debate about EMU: sectoral ...
Journal Article
Asia crisis postmortem: where did the money go and did the United States benefit?
The Asia crisis was originally expected to affect the U.S. economy adversely, mainly through reduced exports to, and increased imports from, the crisis countries. However, U.S. GDP growth in 1998, at 4.3 percent, was surprisingly strong. This article examines the effect of the crisis on the U.S. economy, using a quantitative approach that focuses on capital outflows from Asia. It finds that banks were the primary mechanism by which the funds left Asia, and that these funds did not flow directly to the United States. Rather, they went first to offshore banking centers and then to European ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Gross and Net Capital Flows over the Global Financial Cycle
We develop a theory to account for changes in gross and net capital flows over the global financial cycle (GFC). The theory relies critically on portfolio heterogeneity among investors within and across countries, related to risky portfolio shares and portfolio shares allocated to foreign assets. A global drop in risky asset prices during a downturn of the GFC changes relative wealth within and across countries due to portfolio heterogeneity. This leads to changes in gross and net capital flows that are consistent with the stylized facts: all countries experience a decline in gross capital ...
Report
How big are potential welfare gains from international risksharing?
There is extensive evidence that the degree of risksharing accomplished by international financial markets is low. Some have argued that this is the result of small potential benefits from risksharing. The gains from riskpooling that have been reported in the literature range from negligible to enormous. This paper documents to what extent the results are sensitive to the parameterization of preferences, and assumptions about the stochastic process and measurement of the endowment. We find that for realistic assumptions about the underlying factors, the potential gains from risksharing are ...