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Working Paper
Capital Controls and the Global Financial Cycle
Capital flows into emerging markets are volatile and associated with risks. A common prescription is to impose counter-cyclical capital controls that tighten during economic booms to mitigate future sudden-stop dynamics, but it has been challenging to document such patterns in the data. Instead, we show that emerging markets tighten their capital controls in response to volatility in international financial markets and elevated risk aversion. We develop a model in which this behavior arises from a desire to manipulate the risk premium. When investors are more risk-averse or markets are ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy and global banking
Global banks use their global balance sheets to respond to local monetary policy. However, sources and uses of funds are often denominated in different currencies. This leads to a foreign exchange (FX) exposure that banks need to hedge. If cross?currency flows are large, the hedging cost increases, diminishing the return on lending in foreign currency. We show that, in response to domestic monetary policy easing, global banks increase their foreign reserves in currency areas with the highest interest rate, while decreasing lending in these markets. We also find an increase in FX hedging ...
Report
Stock Market Spillovers via the Global Production Network: Transmission of U.S. Monetary Policy
We quantify the role of global production linkages in explaining spillovers of U.S. monetary policy shocks to stock returns of fifty-four sectors in twenty-six countries. We first present a conceptual framework based on a standard open-economy production network model that delivers a spillover pattern consistent with a spatial autoregression (SAR) process. We then use the SAR model to decompose the overall impact of U.S. monetary policy on stock returns into a direct and a network effect. We find that up to 80 percent of the total impact of U.S. monetary policy shocks on average ...
Working Paper
Pre-Positioning and Cross-Border Financial Intermediation
The benefits of cross-border financial activity are wide-ranging, from greater competition and more efficient markets to broader and more stable access to capital. During normal economic times, the official sector and private sector share an incentive to foster such cross-border financial activities. During a financial crisis, however, the short-term alignment of official- and private-sector incentives can diverge—sometimes significantly. We present a game-theoretic model of the underlying trade-offs and discuss lessons for international financial regulators, placing them in the ...
Journal Article
The launch of the euro
The introduction on January 1, 1999, of the euro--the single currency adopted by eleven of the fifteen countries of the European Union--marked the beginning of the final stage of Economic and Monetary Union and the start of a new era in Europe. The creation of a single currency and a single monetary policy has provided both extraordinary challenges and exceptional opportunities within Europe. This article reviews the organization, objectives, and targets of the euro area's new central bank and discusses some of the early challenges it has faced in setting and implementing monetary policy with ...
Working Paper
The Euro and the Geography of International Debt Flows
Greater financial integration between core and peripheral EMU members had an effect on both sets of countries. Lower interest rates allowed peripheral countries to run bigger deficits, which inflated their economies by allowing credit booms. Core EMU countries took on extra foreign leverage to expose themselves to the peripherals. The result has been asset-price bubbles and collapses in some of the peripheral countries, area-wide banking crisis, and sovereign debt problems. We analyze the geography of international debt flows using multiple data sources and provide evidence that after the ...
Working Paper
What are the consequences of global banking for the international transmission of shocks?: a quantitative analysis
The global financial crisis of 2008 was followed by a wave of regulatory reforms that affected large banks, especially those with a global presence. These reforms were reactive to the crisis. In this paper we propose a structural model of global banking that can be used proactively to perform counterfactual analysis on the effects of alternative regulatory policies. The structure of the model mimics the US regulatory framework and highlights the organizational choices that banks face when entering a foreign market: branching versus subsidiarization. When calibrated to match moments from a ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Foreign Lending on Domestic Loans : An Analysis of U.S. Global Banks
This paper examines the effect of foreign lending on the domestic lending for US global banks. We show that greater foreign loan growth complements, rather than detracts from, domestic commercial lending. Exploiting a confidential data (FFIEC 009) on international loan exposure of US banks, we estimate that a 1% increase in foreign office lending is associated with a 0.6% growth in domestic commercial lending, suggesting complementarity across these lending channels. However, when capital raising is tight during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, we find that foreign lending did come at the ...
Working Paper
Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies
This paper explores the direct effects and spillovers of unconventional monetary and exchange rate policies. We find that official purchases of foreign assets have a large positive effect on a country's current account that diminishes considerably as capital mobility rises. There is an important additional effect through the lagged stock of official assets. Official purchases of domestic assets, or quantitative easing (QE), appear to have no significant effect on a country's current account when capital mobility is high, but there is a modest positive impact when capital mobility is low. The ...
Working Paper
Reversals in Global Market Integration and Funding Liquidity
This paper looks at the reversals in global financial integration through the funding liquidity lens. First, we construct a segmentation indicator based on differences in funding liquidity across countries as measured by the performance of betting-against-beta strategies. Second, we find that funding liquidity shocks help explain recent reversals in integration in the absence of explicit foreign investment barriers. These findings are consistent with tighter limits to arbitrage and increased home bias during funding distress periods. Our empirical analysis is guided by a margin-CAPM model ...