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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
Inflation as a global phenomenon - some implications for policy analysis and forecasting
We evaluate the performance of inflation forecasts based on the open-economy Phillips curve by exploiting the spatial pattern of international propagation of inflation. We model these spatial linkages using global inflation and either domestic slack or oil price fluctuations, motivated by a novel interpretation of the forecasting implications of the workhorse openeconomy New Keynesian model (Martnez-Garca and Wynne (2010), Kabukcuoglu and Martnez-Garca (2014)). We find that incorporating spatial interactions yields significantly more accurate forecasts of local inflation in 14 advanced ...
Working Paper
Firm-Embedded Productivity and Cross-Country Income Differences
We measure the contribution of firm-embedded productivity to cross-country income differences. By firm-embedded productivity we refer to the components of productivity that differ across firms and that can be transferred internationally, such as blueprints, management practices, and intangible capital. Our approach relies on microlevel data on the cross-border operations of multinational enterprises (MNEs). We compare the market shares of the exact same MNE in different countries and document that they are about four times larger in developing than in high-income countries. This finding ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Economic Unions: A Comment
Gino Gancia, Giacomo Ponzetto and Jaume Ventura have written an extremely interesting paper on a topic that is very timely for the global economy. In this article, I will first argue that GPV have succeeded in formalizing their hypothesis, and that while providing very suggestive analytical results, additional work can and should be done with the model, especially with regards to relative changes in the relative weights of incumbent countries. Second, I will comment on the potential insights if the rest of the world is modeled more realistically. Third, I will call for extending the baseline ...
Journal Article
How Have Shanghai, Saudi Arabia, and Supply Chains Affected U.S. Inflation Dynamics?
Understanding and forecasting inflation has always been a key focus of macroeconomics and monetary policymaking. Historically, many macroeconomists and central banks have relied on the ?Phillips curve? framework for this purpose. Recently, however, the Phillips curve framework has not been performing well. This article examines a number of possible explanations for the breakdown of the ?Phillips curve? relationship between slack and inflation. These explanations include the possibility that the curve may have flattened or shifted, that standard measures may not be capturing key aspects of the ...
Working Paper
Global Trade and GDP Co-Movement
We revisit the association between trade and GDP comovement for 135 countries from 1970 to 2009. Guided by a simple theory, we introduce two notions of trade linkages: (i) the usual direct bilateral trade index and (ii) new indexes of common exposure to third countries capturing the role of similarity in trade networks. Both measures are economically and statistically associated with GDP correlation, suggesting an additional channel through which GDP fluctuations propagate through trade linkages. Moreover, high income countries become more synchronized when the content of their trade is ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Global Uncertainty on the Global Economy, and Large Developed and Developing Economies
Global uncertainty shocks are associated with a sharp decline in global inflation, global growth and in the global interest rate. Over 1981 to 2014 global financial uncertainty forecasts 18.26% and 14.95% of the variation in global growth and global inflation respectively. Global uncertainty shocks have more protracted, statistically significant and substantial effects on global growth, inflation and interest rate than U.S. uncertainty shocks. U.S. uncertainty lags global uncertainty by one month. When controlling for domestic uncertainty, the decline in output following a rise in global ...
Report
The competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing
We study the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing. For the period 1999?2012 we find little support for a significant offshoring reversal. We show that the share of domestic demand that is met by imports and the terms of trade show no signs of reversal, even in sectors dominated by imports from China. We do, however, find some evidence consistent with the U.S. shale-gas energy revolution raising the competiveness of U.S. energy-intensive sectors.
Working Paper
What Determines State Heterogeneity in Response to US Tariff Changes?
We develop a structural framework to identify the sources of cross-state heterogeneity in response to US tariff changes. We quantify the effects of unilaterally increasing US tariffs by 25 percentage points across sectors. Welfare changes range from −0.8 percent in Oregon to 2.1 percent in Montana. States gain more when their sectoral comparative advantage covaries negatively with that of the aggregate US. Consequently, “preferred” changes in tariffs vary systematically across states, indicating the importance of transfers in aligning state preferences over trade policy. Foreign ...
Working Paper
On the Distributional Effects of International Tariffs
We provide a quantitative analysis of the distributional effects of the 2018 increase in tariffs by the U.S. and its major trading partners. We build a trade model with incomplete asset markets and households that are heterogeneous in their age, income, wealth and labor skill. When tariff revenues are used to reduce distortionary taxes on consumption, labor and capital income, the average welfare loss from the trade war is equivalent to a permanent 0.1 percent reduction in consumption. Much larger welfare losses are concentrated among retirees and low-wealth households, while only wealthy ...