Search Results
Working Paper
R* and the Global Economy
This paper provides a synthesis of explanations for why the natural rate of interest, r*, has fallen over the last several decades. Demographic factors, declining productivity, slower output growth, and increasing inequality likely all have been important factors. Perhaps less recognized is the role of increasing global demand for safe assets, particularly by foreign investors. Suggestive empirical evidence is presented showing that foreign demand for U.S. safe assets, particularly government-provided assets, has increased dramatically, and may now be playing a much larger role in the ...
Working Paper
Corporate Yields and Sovereign Yields
We document that positive association between corporate and sovereign cost of funds borrowed on global capital markets weakens during periods of unusually high sovereign yields, when corporate borrowers are able to issue debt that is priced at lower rates than sovereign debt. This state-dependent sensitivity of corporate yields to sovereign yields has not been previously documented in the literature. We demonstrate that this stylized fact is observed across countries and industries as well as for a given borrower over time and is not explained by a different composition of borrowers issuing ...
Working Paper
The role of jumps in volatility spillovers in foreign exchange markets: meteor shower and heat waves revisited
This paper extends the previous literature on geographic (heat waves) and intertemporal (meteor showers) foreign exchange volatility transmission to characterize the role of jumps and cross-rate propagation. We employ heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models to capture the quasi-long-memory properties of volatility and the Shapley-Owen R2 measure to quantify the contributions of components. We conclude that meteor showers are more influential than heat waves, that jumps play a modest but significant role in volatility transmission and that significant, bidirectional cross-rate volatility ...
Working Paper
Domestic Lending and the Pandemic: How Does Banks' Exposure to Covid-19 Abroad Affect Their Lending in the United States?
Shortly after the onset of the pandemic, U.S. banks cut their term lending to businesses–but little is known about how much, and why, banks' choice to ration credit contributed to this contraction. Afforded by a unique combination of several highly granular bank regulatory datasets, we identify the role of banks' exposure to Covid-related restrictions abroad – a balance sheet "shock" that affects only banks' credit supply, but not their US borrowers' demand for loans. We find that US banks with higher foreign Covid exposure cut their lending to US firms, and tightened terms on such loans, ...
Working Paper
Bad Bad Contagion
Bad contagion, the downside component of contagion in international stock markets, has negative implications for financial stability. I propose a measure for the occurrence and severity of global contagion that combines the factor-model approach in Bekaert et al. (2005) with the model-free or co-exceedance approach in Bae et al. (2003). Contagion is measured as the proportion of international stock markets that simultaneously experience unexpected returns beyond a certain threshold. I decompose contagion into its downside or bad component (the co-exceedance of low returns) and its upside or ...
Journal Article
Home currency issuance in global debt markets
Historically, businesses in most countries have not been able to sell bonds denominated in their home currencies to foreign investors. In recent decades this trend has been changing. Research shows that bonds denominated in currencies other than the major global currencies have increased, particularly following the global financial crisis. However, not all countries were affected equally. Countries that were able to take advantage of the temporary disruption and near-zero interest rates in global financial markets were the ones with a combination of low government debt and a history of stable ...
Report
Measuring Global Financial Market Stresses
We propose measures of financial market stress for forty-six countries and regions across the world. Our measures indicate that worldwide financial market stresses rose significantly in March following the widespread economic shutdowns in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, hardly anywhere in the world did these March peaks in financial stresses reach those seen during the trough of the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis. Since March, financial market conditions normalized rapidly with financial market stresses around average levels. We also show that our financial stress measures ...
Working Paper
International Financial Spillovers to Emerging Market Economies: How Important Are Economic Fundamentals?
We assess the importance of economic fundamentals in the transmission of international shocks to financial markets in various emerging market economies (EMEs), covering the so-called taper-tantrum episode of 2013 and seven other episodes of severe EME-wide financial stress since the mid-1990s. Cross-country regressions lead us to the following results: (1) EMEs with relatively better economic fundamentals suffered less deterioration in financial markets during the 2013 taper-tantrum episode. (2) Differentiation among EMEs set in relatively early and persisted through this episode. (3) During ...
Working Paper
Breaking Up: Fragmentation in Foreign Direct Investment
Rising geopolitical tensions and supply chain vulnerabilities have driven recent fragmentation of foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper provides systematic evidence of FDI fragmentation along ideological and geographic lines across five dimensions: shifting away from ideologically distant countries (ideological sorting), prioritizing politically aligned countries (friendshoring), reducing exposure to specific high-risk countries (derisking), moving production closer to the home country (nearshoring), and returning investment to the home country (reshoring). Measures of FDI based on ...
Working Paper
Quantities and Covered-Interest Parity
Studies of intermediated arbitrage argue that bank balance sheets are an important consideration, yet little evidence exists on banks’ positioning in this context. Using confidential supervisory data (covering $25 trillion in daily notional exposures) we examine banks’ positions in connection with covered-interest parity (CIP) deviations. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in CIP deviations that have largely challenged existing theories, we document three novel forces that drive bases: 1) foreign safe asset scarcity, 2) market power and segmentation of banks specializing in different ...