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Journal Article
Transmission of Sovereign Risk to Bank Lending
Banks hold a significant exposure to their own sovereigns. An increase in sovereign risk may hurt banks' balance sheets, causing a decrease in lending and a decline in economic activity. We quantify the transmission of sovereign risk to bank lending and provide new evidence about the effect of sovereign risk on economic outcomes. We consider the 1999 Marmara earthquake in Turkey as an exogenous shock leading to an increase in Turkey's default risk. Our empirical estimates show that, for banks holding a higher amount of government securities, the exogenous change in sovereign default risk ...
Working Paper
Spoils of War: Trade Shocks and Segmented Labor Markets in Spain during WWI
How does intranational factor mobility shape the welfare effects of a trade shock? I provide evidence that during WWI, a demand shock emanated from belligerent countries and affected neutral Spain. Within Spain, labor predominantly reallocated locally, while the most affected provinces experienced drastic increases in wages and consumer prices. Embedding imperfect labor mobility in an economic geography model, I show that external demand shocks can improve allocative efficiency, but asymmetric shocks cause localized increases in wages and consumer prices instead of reallocation. Adjusting an ...
Working Paper
Sovereign Risk and Bank Lending: Theory and Evidence from a Natural Disaster
We quantify the sovereign-bank doom loop by using the 1999 Marmara earthquake as an exogenousshock leading to an increase in Turkey’s default risk. Our theoretical model illustrates that for banks withhigher exposure to government securities, a higher sovereign default risk implies lower net worth andtightening financial constraint. Our empirical estimates confirm the model’s predictions, showing that theexogenous change in sovereign default risk tightens banks’ financial constraints significantly for banks thathold a higher amount of government securities. The resulting tighter bank ...
Working Paper
When Trade Compresses: The Impact of Liberalization on Wage Inequality
We study the effects of trade liberalization on the full wage distribution, exploiting Spain's 1993 entry into the European Single Market. Using employer-employee data, we identify the causal effects of trade across the entire wage distribution, using a novel shift-share instrument embedded in an unconditional quantile regression. We find that the liberalization reduced wage inequality, leading to wage compression through earnings gains at the bottom of the distribution and wage losses at the top. We trace this compression to two asymmetric channels: import competition disproportionately ...
Working Paper
Trade linkages and the globalisation of inflation in Asia and the Pacific
Some observers argue that increased real integration has led to greater co-movement of prices internationally. We examine the evidence for cross-border price spillovers among economies participating in the pan-Asian cross-border production networks. Starting with country-level data, we find that both producer price and consumer price inflation rates move more closely together between those Asian economies that trade more with one another, ie that share a higher degree of trade intensity. Next, using a novel data set based on the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), we examine the importance of ...
Working Paper
The effect of trade with low-income countries on U.S. industry
When labor-abundant nations grow, their exports increase more in labor-intensive sectors than in capital-intensive sectors. We utilize this sectoral difference in how exports are affected by growth to identify the causal effect of trade with low-income countries (LICs) on U.S. industry. Our framework relates differences in sectoral inflation rates to differences in comparative advantageinduced import growth rates and abstracts from aggregate fluctuations and sector specific trends.> ; In a panel covering 325 manufacturing industries from 1997 to 2006, we find that LIC exports are associated ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate pass-through, domestic competition and inflation -- evidence from the 2005/08 revaluation of the Renminbi
How important is the effect of exchange rate fluctuations on the competitive environment faced by domestic firms and the prices they charge? To answer this question, this paper examines the 17 percent appreciation of the yuan against the U.S. dollar from 2005 to 2008. In a monthly panel covering 110 sectors, a 1 percent appreciation of the Yuan increases U.S. import prices by roughly 0.8 percent. It is then shown that import prices, in turn, pass through into producer prices at an average rate of roughly 0.7, implying that a 1 percent Yuan appreciation increases the average U.S. producer ...
Working Paper
The role of direct flights in trade costs
The role of direct flights in trade costs is investigated by introducing and using a micro price data set on 49 goods across 433 international cities covering 114 countries. It is shown that having at least one direct flight reduces trade costs by about 1,400 miles in distance equivalent terms, while an international border increases trade costs by about 14,907 miles; hence, the positive effects of having at least one direct flight between any two cities can compensate for about 10% of the negative effects of an average international border. Trade costs also decrease with the number of direct ...
Working Paper
Benefits of foreign ownership: evidence from foreign direct investment in china
To examine the effect of foreign direct investment, this paper compares the post-acquisition performance changes of foreign- and domestic-acquired firms in China. Unlike previous studies, we investigate the purified effect of foreign ownership by using domestic-acquired firms as the control group. After controlling for the acquisition effect that also exists in domestic acquisitions, we find no evidence in the data that foreign ownership can bring productivity gains to target firms. In contrast, a strong and robust finding is that foreign ownership significantly improves target firms' ...
Working Paper
The role of two frictions in geographic price dispersion: when market friction meets nominal rigidity
This paper empirically investigates and theoretically derives the implications of two frictions, market friction and nominal rigidity, on the dynamic properties of intra-national relative prices, with an emphasis on the interaction of the two frictions. By analyzing a panel of retail prices of 45 products for 48 cities in the U.S., we make two major arguments. First, the effect of each type of friction on the dynamics of intercity price gaps is quite different. While market frictions arising from physical distance and transportation costs contribute significantly to volatile and persistent ...