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Journal Article
Upstream capital flows: why emerging markets send savings to advanced economies
Emerging market economic growth during the global recovery has exceeded performance in advanced economies. This differential has triggered a rush of private capital inflows to the emerging markets from investors seeking to maximize returns. While capital flows typically benefit receiving economies, sudden surges or stops may pose challenges for economic development.[1] The recent revival of private inflows has put pressure on prices and currencies of some emerging economies, leading them to impose capital controls. Moreover, some observers have argued that accommodative monetary policies in ...
Journal Article
Financial crisis revives interest in special drawing rights
The financial crisis that began in mid-2007 brought renewed calls for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the dominant reserve currency in international transactions. Several developing countries suggested greater use of special drawing rights (SDRs). ; SDRs were created in 1969 under the first amendment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Articles of Agreement to supplement member countries' international reserves. Nine years later, the IMF set the long-term objective of making the SDR "the principal reserve asset in the international monetary system." To date, the SDR hasn't ...
Working Paper
Transitional dynamics of output and factor income shares: lessons from East Germany
I evaluate the quantitative implications of technology change and government policies for output and factor income shares during East Germany's transition since 1990. I model an economy that gains access to a high productivity technology embodied in new plants. As existing low productivity plants decrease production, the capital income share varies due to variation in the profit share of these plants. Two policies - transfers and government-mandated wage increases - have opposite effects on output growth, but both contribute to reducing the capital share during the transition. The model's ...
Working Paper
Trends in U.S. hours and the labor wedge
From 1980 until 2007, U.S. average hours worked increased by thirteen percent, due to a large increase in female hours. At the same time, the U.S. labor wedge, measured as the discrepancy between a representative household's marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure and the marginal product of labor, declined substantially. We examine these trends in a model with heterogeneous households: married couples, single males and single females. Our quantitative analysis shows that the shrinking gender wage gaps and increasing labor income taxes observed in U.S. data are key ...
Journal Article
Seeking stability: what's next for banking regulation?
Despite improvements over the years, capital regulation failed to ensure stability of the financial system in the crisis that flared in the summer of 2007. The billions of dollars of write-downs on assets related to subprime mortgages raised fears of insolvency and led to lending freezes and liquidity problems at many institutions. ; Some banks heavily reliant on short-term funding, such as Britain's Northern Rock, experienced runs. Others found themselves with a need to replenish rapidly deteriorating capital positions. All in all, the recent events underscore the need for further revisions ...
Working Paper
Driving forces of the Canadian economy: an accounting exercise
This paper analyzes the Canadian economy for the post-1960 period. It uses an accounting procedure developed in Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2006). The procedure identifies accounting factors that help align the predictions of the neoclassical growth model with macroeconomic variables observed in the data. The paper finds that total factor productivity and the consumption-leisure trade-off?the productivity and labor factors?are key to understanding the changes in output, labor supply and labor productivity observed in the Canadian economy. The paper performs a decomposition of the labor ...