Search Results
Report
Financial Sanctions, SWIFT, and the Architecture of the International Payments System
Financial sanctions, alongside economic sanctions, are components of the toolkit used by governments as part of international diplomacy. The use of sanctions, especially financial, has increased over the last seventy years. Financial sanctions have been particularly important whenever the goals of the sanctioning countries were related to democracy and human rights. Financial sanctions restrict entities—countries, businesses, or even individuals—from purchasing or selling financial assets, or from accessing custodial or other financial services. They can be imposed on a sanctioned ...
Report
Navigating Geoeconomic Risk: Evidence from U.S. Mutual Funds
How do investors perceive and navigate the emerging geoeconomic risk? We identify firm-level geoeconomic risk using supply-chain links to Chinese firms targeted by U.S. export controls. Affected U.S. suppliers experience negative abnormal returns around policy announcements. These shocks propagate to mutual funds through portfolio holdings, raising volatility and lowering performance. Fund managers respond by reducing exposure to China-linked exporters, increasing portfolio concentration, and buying more lottery-like stocks. A long–short portfolio based on geoeconomic risk exposure earns ...
Working Paper
The Impact of the 2022 Oil Embargo and Price Cap on Russian Oil Prices
This paper documents the effect of the oil embargo and price cap on Russian oil exports in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. We show that the embargo forced Russia to accept a $32/bbl discount on its Urals crude in March 2023 relative to January 2022, nearly half of which is directly attributable to the higher cost of shipping crude oil over longer distances, as Russia diverted much of its crude oil exports to India. Based on a calibrated model of global oil supply and demand, the remainder ($17/bbl) can be explained by increased Indian bargaining power. We also ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty and Hyperinflation: European Inflation Dynamics after World War I
Fiscal deficits, elevated debt-to-GDP ratios, and high inflation rates suggest hyperinflation could have potentially emerged in many European countries after World War I. We demonstrate that economic policy uncertainty was instrumental in pushing a subset of European countries into hyperinflation shortly after the end of the war. Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary (GAPH) suffered from frequent uncertainty shocks ? and correspondingly high levels of uncertainty ? caused by protracted political negotiations over reparations payments, the apportionment of the Austro-Hungarian debt, and border ...
Working Paper
Forecast Performance in Times of Terrorism
Governments, central banks and private companies make extensive use of expert and market-based forecasts in their decision-making processes. These forecasts can be affected by terrorism, a factor that should be considered by decision-makers. We focus on terrorism as a mostly endogenously driven form of political uncertainty and assess the forecasting performance of market-based and professional inflation and exchange rate forecasts in Israel. We show that expert forecasts are better than market-based forecasts, particularly during periods of terrorism. However, the performance of both ...
Working Paper
On Wars, Sanctions and Sovereign Default
This paper explores the role of restrictions on the use of international reserves as economic sanctions. We develop a simple model of the strategic game between a sanctioning (creditor) country and a sanctioned (debtor) country. We show how the sanctioning country should impose restrictions optimally, internalizing the geopolitical benefits and the financial costs of a potential default from the sanctioned country.
Journal Article
Financial Market Reactions to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
This article analyzes financial market reactions to the Russia-Ukraine war with a focus on the opening weeks. Markets did not completely anticipate the war, and asset price reactions strengthened from the first week—when there were hopes for a quick resolution—to the second week, when prices generally peaked and began to partially revert to prewar values. Exposure to commodity trade and trade with Russia and Ukraine determined market perceptions of the riskiness of equity and foreign exchange assets. Credit default swap prices on sovereign debt and breakeven inflation rates indicate that ...
Working Paper
Financial market reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine
This article analyzes financial market reactions to the Russia-Ukraine war with a focus on the opening weeks. Markets did not completely anticipate the war and asset price reactions strengthened from the first week—when there were hopes for a quick resolution—to the second week, when prices generally peaked and began to partially revert to pre-war values. Exposure to commodity trade and trade with Russia-Ukraine determined market perceptions of the riskiness of equity and foreign exchange assets. Credit default swap prices on sovereign debt and breakeven inflation rates indicate that ...
Speech
Reflections on the new compliance landscape
Remarks at ?The New Compliance Landscape: Increasing Roles ? Increasing Risks? Conference, New York City.
Working Paper
The Impact of the 2022 Oil Embargo and Price Cap on Russian Oil Prices
This paper documents the effect of the oil embargo and price cap on Russian oil exports in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. We show that the embargo forced Russia to accept a $32/bbl discount on its Urals crude in March 2023 relative to January 2022, nearly half of which is directly attributable to the higher cost of shipping crude oil over longer distances, as Russia diverted much of its crude oil exports to India. Based on a calibrated model of global oil supply and demand, the remainder ($17/bbl) can be explained by increased Indian bargaining power. We also ...