Search Results
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 ...
Discussion Paper
The Anatomy of Export Controls
Governments increasingly use export controls to limit the spread of domestic cutting-edge technologies to other countries. The sectors that are currently involved in this geopolitical race include semiconductors, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence. Despite their growing adoption, little is known about the effect of export controls on supply chains and the productive sector at large. Do export controls induce a selective decoupling of the targeted goods and sectors? How do global customer-supplier relations react to export controls? What are their effects on the productive sector? ...
Speech
Operating global, acting local
Remarks at Institute of International Bankers Seminar on Risk Management and Regulatory/Examinations Compliance Issues, New York City.
Report
Liquidity traps, capital flows
Motivated by debates surrounding international capital flows during the Great Recession, we conduct a positive and normative analysis of capital flows when a region of the global economy experiences a liquidity trap. Capital flows reduce inefficient output fluctuations in this region by inducing exchange rate movements that reallocate expenditure toward the goods it produces. Restricting capital mobility hampers such an adjustment. From a global perspective, constrained efficiency entails subsidizing capital flows to address an aggregate demand externality associated with exchange rate ...
Report
Fiscal Policy in Debt Constrained Economies
We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk and limited commitment to tax plans. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing the standard prediction of the Ramsey tax literature. The zero labor tax is an optimal long run outcome if the economy is subject to sovereign debt constraints and ...
Report
Optimal Policy for Macro-Financial Stability
There is a new and now large literature analyzing government policies for financial stability based on models with endogenous borrowing constraints. These normative analyses build upon the concept of constrained efficient allocation, where the social planner is constrained by the same borrowing limit that agents face. In this paper, we show that the same set of policy tools that implement the constrained efficient allocation can be used by a Ramsey planner to replicate the unconstrained allocation, thus achieving higher welfare. The constrained social planner approach may lead to inaccurate ...
Working Paper
The Effect of the China Connect
We document the effect on Chinese firms of the Shanghai (Shenzhen)-Hong Kong Stock Connect. The Connect was an important capital account liberalization introduced in the mid-2010s. It created a channel for cross-border equity investments into a selected set of Chinese stocks while China's overall capital controls policy remained in place. Using a difference-in-difference approach, and with careful attention to sample selection issues, we find that mainland Chinese firm-level investment is negatively affected by contractionary U.S. monetary policy shocks and that firms in the Connect are more ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Bretton Woods International Capital Controls on the Global Economy and the Value of Geopolitical Stability: A General Equilibrium Analysis
This paper quantifies the positive and normative impacts of Bretton Woods capital controls on global and regional economic activity. A three-region DSGE capital flows accounting framework consisting of the U.S., Western Europe, and the Rest of the World (ROW) is developed to quantify capital controls and evaluate their impact on the world economy. We conduct counterfactual analyses that eliminate Bretton Woods’ capital controls and find these controls substantially reduced global capital flows, had large negative welfare effects on the U.S., raised welfare substantially in the ROW, and ...
Working Paper
The Consequences of Bretton Woods’ International Capital Controls and the High Value of Geopolitical Stability
This paper quantifies the positive and normative effects of international capital controls on global and regional economic activity under The Bretton Woods international financial system and thereafter. A three region, open economy, DSGE capital flows accounting framework consisting of the U.S., Western Europe, and the Rest of the World, is developed to identify capital controls and quantify their impact. We find these controls had large positive and normative effects by restricting international capital flows. Counterfactual analyses show world output would have been 0.6% higher had there ...
Working Paper
A model of the Twin Ds: optimal default and devaluation
This paper characterizes jointly optimal default and exchange-rate policy in a small open economy with limited enforcement of debt contracts and downward nominal wage rigidity. Under optimal policy, default occurs during contractions and is accompanied by large devaluations. The latter inflate away real wages, thereby avoiding massive unemployment. Thus, the Twin Ds phenomenon emerges endogenously as the optimal outcome. In contrast, under fixed exchange rates, optimal default takes place in the context of large involuntary unemployment. Fixed-exchange-rate economies are shown to have ...