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Working Paper
Capital Controls and Income Inequality
We examine the distributional implications of capital account policy in a small open economy model with heterogeneous agents and financial frictions. Households save through deposits in both domestic and foreign banks. Entrepreneurs finance investment with borrowed funds from domestic banks and foreign investors. Domestic banks engage in costly intermediation of deposits from households and loans to entrepreneurs. Government capital account policy consists of taxes on outflows and inflows. Given policy, a temporary decline in the world interest rate leads to a surge in inflows, benefiting ...
Working Paper
Commodity Exports, Financial Frictions and International Spillovers
This paper offers a solution to the international co-movement puzzle found in open-economy macroeconomic models. We develop a small open-economy (SOE) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model describing three endogenous channels that capture spillovers from the world to a commodity exporter: a world commodity price channel, a domestic commodity supply channel and a financial channel. We estimate our model with Bayesian methods on two commodity-exporting SOEs, namely Canada and South Africa. In addition to explaining international business cycle synchronization, the new model ...
Working Paper
Capital Controls and Monetary Policy Autonomy in a Small Open Economy
Is there a link between capital controls and monetary policy autonomy in a country with a floating currency? Shocks to capital flows into a small open economy lead to volatility in asset prices and credit supply. To lessen the impact of capital flows on financial instability, a central bank finds it optimal to use the domestic interest rate to "manage" the capital account. Capital account restrictions affect the behavior of optimal monetary policy following shocks to the foreign interest rate. Capital controls allow optimal monetary policy to focus less on the foreign interest rate and more ...
Working Paper
Reaction functions in a small open economy: What role for non-traded inflation?
I develop a structural general equilibrium model and estimate it for New Zealand using Bayesian techniques. The estimated model considers a monetary policy regime where the central bank targets overall inflation but is also concerned about output, exchange rate movements, and interest rate smoothing. Taking the posterior mean of the estimated parameters as representing the characteristics of the New Zealand economy, I compare the consequences that two alternative reaction functions have on the central bank's loss, for different specifications of its preferences. I obtain conditions under ...
Working Paper
Foreign Exchange Reserves as a Tool for Capital Account Management
Many recent theoretical papers have argued that countries can insulate themselves from volatile world capital flows by using a variable tax on foreign capital as an instrument of monetary policy. But at the same time many empirical papers have argued that only rarely do we observe these cyclical capital taxes used in practice. In this paper we construct a small open economy model where the central bank can engage in sterilized foreign exchange intervention. When private agents can freely buy and sell foreign bonds, sterilized foreign exchange intervention has no effect. But we analytically ...