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Working Paper
SIGMA: A New Open Economy Model for Policy Analysis
In this paper, we describe a new multi-country open economy SDGE model named "SIGMA" that we have developed as a quantitative tool for policy analysis. We compare SIGMA's implications to those of an estimated large scale econometric policy model (the FRB/Global model) for an array of shocks that are often examined in policy simulations. We show that SIGMA?s implications for the near-term responses of key variables are generally similar to those of FRB/Global. Nevertheless, some quantitative disparities between the two models remain due to certain restrictive aspects of SIGMA?s ...
Working Paper
Common Trade Exposure and Business Cycle Comovement
A large empirical literature has shown that countries that trade more with each other have more correlated business cycles. We show that previous estimates of this relationship are biased upward because they ignore common trade exposure to other countries. When we account for common trade exposure to foreign business cycles, we find that (1) the effect of bilateral trade on business cycle comovement falls by roughly 25 percent and (2) common exposure is a significant driver of business cycle comovement. A standard international real business cycle model is qualitatively consistent with these ...
Working Paper
Redistributive Fiscal Policies and Business Cycles in Emerging Economies
Government expenditures are pro-cyclical in emerging markets and counter-cyclical in developed economies. We show this pattern is driven by differences in social transfers. Transfers are more counter-cyclical and comprise a larger portion of spending in developed economies compared to emerging. In contrast, government expenditures on goods and services are quite similar across the two. In a small open economy model, we find disparate social transfer policies can account for more than a half of the excess volatility of consumption relative to output in emerging economies. We analyze how ...
Working Paper
The International Spillovers of Synchronous Monetary Tightening
We use historical data and a calibrated model of the world economy to study how a synchronous monetary tightening can amplify cross-border transmission of monetary policy. The empirical analysis shows that historical episodes of synchronous tightening are associated with tighter financial conditions and larger effects on economic activity than asynchronous ones. In the model, a sufficiently large synchronous tightening can disrupt intermediation of credit by global financial intermediaries causing large output losses and an increase in sacrifice ratios, that is, output lost for a given ...