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Working Paper
Sudden Stops and Optimal Foreign Exchange Intervention
This paper shows how foreign exchange intervention can be used to avoid a sudden stop in capital flows in a small open emerging market economy. The model is based around the concept of an under-borrowing equilibrium defined by Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (2020). With a low elasticity of substitution between traded and non-traded goods, real exchange rate depreciation may generate a precipitous drop in aggregate demand and a tightening of borrowing constraints, leading to an equilibrium with an inefficiently low level of borrowing. The central bank can preempt this deleveraging cycle through ...
Working Paper
The Role of U.S. Monetary Policy in Global Banking Crises
We examine the role of U.S. monetary policy in global financial stability by using a cross-country database spanning the period from 1870-2010 across 69 countries. U.S. monetary policy tightening increases the probability of banking crises for those countries with direct linkages to the U.S., either in the form of trade links or significant share of USD-denominated liabilities. Conversely, if a country is integrated globally, rather than having a direct exposure, the effect is ambiguous. One possible channel we identify is capital flows: If the correction in capital flows is disorderly (e.g., ...
Working Paper
External and Public Debt Crises
The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state government indebtedness was low, and the crisis had no spillovers to the private sector. We show theoretically and empirically that these different debt experiences result from the interplay between differences in the ability of governments to interfere in private external debt contracts and differences in ...
Report
Good news is bad news: leverage cycles and sudden stops
We show that a model with imperfectly forecastable changes in future productivity and an occasionally binding collateral constraint can match a set of stylized facts about ?sudden stop? events. ?Good? news about future productivity raises leverage during times of expansion, increasing the probability that the constraint binds, and a sudden stop occurs, in future periods. The economy exhibits a boom period in the run-up to the sudden stop, with output, consumption, and investment all above trend, consistent with the data. During the sudden stop, the nonlinear effects of the constraint induce ...
Discussion Paper
Good News, Leverage, and Sudden Stops
One of the major debates in open economy macroeconomics is the extent to which capital inflows are beneficial for growth. In principle, these flows allow countries to increase their consumption and investment spending beyond their income by enabling them to tap into foreign saving. Periods of such borrowing, however, are associated with large trade deficits, external debt accumulation, and, in some cases, overheating when these economies operate beyond their potential output level for an extended period of time. The relevant question in this context is whether the rate at which a country is ...
Working Paper
Interest Rate Volatility and Sudden Stops : An Empirical Investigation
Using a multi-country regime-switching vector autoregressive (VAR) model we document the existence of two regimes in the volatility of interest rates at which emerging economies borrow from international financial markets, and study the statistical relationship of such regimes with episodes of sudden stops. Periods of high volatility tend to be persistent and are associated with high interest rates, the occurrence of sudden stops in external financing, and large declines in economic activity. Most strikingly, we show that regime switches drive the countercyclicality of interest rates in ...
Working Paper
Inequality and Asset Prices during Sudden Stops
This paper studies the cross-sectional dimension of Fisher’s debt-deflation mechanism that triggers Sudden Stop crises. Analyzing microdata from Mexico, we show that this dimension has macroeconomic implications that operate via opposing effects. We propose a small open economy, asset-pricing model with heterogeneous-agents and aggregate risk to measure the effects of inequality during crises. In contrast to a representative-agent model, heterogeneity generates persistent current account reversals with smaller drops in asset prices and larger drops in consumption driven by the leveraged ...
Working Paper
Banks, Capital Flows and Financial Crises
This paper proposes a macroeconomic model with financial intermediaries (banks), in which banks face occasionally binding leverage constraints and may endogenously affect the strength of their balance sheets by issuing new equity. The model can account for occasional financial crises as a result of the nonlinearity induced by the constraint. Banks' precautionary equity issuance makes financial crises infrequent events occurring along with "regular" business cycle fluctuations. We show that an episode of capital infl ows and rapid credit expansion, triggered by low country interest rates, ...
Discussion Paper
Modeling the Global Effects of the COVID-19 Sudden Stop in Capital Flows
The COVID-19 outbreak has triggered unusually fast outflows of dollar funding from emerging market economies (EMEs). These outflows are known as “sudden stop” episodes, and they are typically followed by economic contractions. In this post, we assess the macroeconomic effects of the COVID-induced sudden stop of capital flows to EMEs, using our open-economy DSGE model. Unlike existing frameworks, such as the Federal Reserve Board’s SIGMA model, our model features both domestic and international financial constraints, making it well-suited to capture the effects of an outflow of ...
Working Paper
International Reserves, Credit Constraints, and Systemic Sudden Stops
Why do emerging market economies simultaneously hold very high levels of international reserves and foreign liabilities? Moreover, why, even with such huge amounts of international reserves, did countries barely use them during the Global Financial Crisis? I argue that including international reserves as an implicit collateral for external borrowing in a small open economy model subject to exogenous financial shocks can explain both of these puzzling facts. I find that the model can obtain ratios of international reserves and net foreign liabilities to GDP similar to those of Latin American ...