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Working Paper
The effects of government spending on real exchange rates: evidence from military spending panel data
Using panel data on military spending for 125 countries, we document new facts about the effects of changes in government purchases on the real exchange rate, consumption, and current accounts in both advanced and developing countries. While an increase in government purchases causes real exchange rates to appreciate and increases consumption significantly in developing countries, it causes real exchange rates to depreciate and decreases consumption in advanced countries. The current account deteriorates in both groups of countries. These findings are not consistent with standard ...
Working Paper
Output Spillovers from U.S. Monetary Policy: The Role of International Trade and Financial Linkages
We estimate that U.S. monetary policy has sizable spillover effects on global economic activity. In response to a surprise increase in the federal funds rate of 25 basis points, real output in our sample of 44 countries declines on average by 0.9% after three years. We find that international trade is a more important factor than international finance in explaining these spillovers. In particular, countries with a high share of exports and imports in output have 79% larger responses than countries with a low share, whereas we do not find significant heterogeneity depending on a country’s ...
Report
Sectoral inflation and the Phillips curve: what has changed since the Great Recession?
Using sectoral data at a medium level of aggregation, we find that price changes became less responsive to aggregate unemployment around 2009?2010. The slopes of the disaggregated Phillips curves diminished in many sectors, including housing and some services. We also document a decrease in sectoral inflation persistence, suggesting an increase in the weight of the forward-looking inflation expectation component and a decrease in the weight of the backward-looking component.
Working Paper
The Transmission Mechanisms of International Business Cycles: Output Spillovers through Trade and Financial Linkages
We study the transmission channels through which shocks affect the global economy and the cross-country comovement of real economic activity. For this purpose, we collect detailed data on international trade and financial linkages as well as domestic macro and financial variables for a large set of countries. We document significant international output comovement following U.S. monetary shocks, and find that openness to international trade matters more than financial openness in explaining cross-country spillovers. In particular, output in countries with a high share of exports and imports ...
Report
The Historical Effects of Banking Distress on Economic Activity
The failures of several U.S. regional banks have stimulated discussions about the macroeconomic effects of a likely credit contraction triggered by the recent banking turmoil. Drawing on historical evidence from advanced economies, this study documents a sizable and persistent decline in output and rise in unemployment following non-systemic financial distress. The effects of a systemic banking crisis are two to four times as large. High corporate leverage exacerbates banking turmoil, whereas high bank capitalization and a relatively large share of market financing in corporate debt mitigate ...
Working Paper
Fiscal multipliers in advanced and developing countries: evidence from military spending
Using novel data on military spending for 129 countries in the period 1988?2013, this paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending on output in advanced and developing countries. Identifying government-spending shocks with an exogenous variation in military spending, we estimate one-year fiscal multipliers in the range 0.75-0.85. The cumulative multipliers remain significantly different from zero within three years after the shock. We find substantial heterogeneity in the multipliers across groups of countries. We then explore three potential sources leading to ...
Working Paper
Inflation expectations and nonlinearities in the Phillips curve
This paper shows that a simple form of nonlinearity in the Phillips curve can explain why, following the Great Recession, inflation did not decrease as much as predicted by linear Phillips curves, a phenomenon known as the missing disinflation. We estimate a piecewise-linear specification and document that the data favor a model with two regions, with the response of inflation to an increase in unemployment slower in the region where unemployment is already high. Nonlinearities remain important, even when we account for other factors proposed in the literature, such as consumer expectations ...
Working Paper
The Aggregate Effects of Sectoral Shocks in an Open Economy
We study the aggregate effects of sectoral productivity shocks in a multisectoral New Keynesian open-economy model that allows for asymmetric input-output linkages, both within and between countries, as well as for heterogeneity in sectoral Calvo-type price stickiness. Asymmetries in the international production network play a key role in the model’s ability to produce large domestic effects of foreign sectoral supply shocks and large differential effects of domestic shocks and global shocks. Larger trade openness and substitutability between domestic inputs and foreign inputs can also ...
Report
The Drivers of Inflation Dynamics during the Pandemic: (Early) Evidence from Disaggregated Consumption Data
What explains inflation dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic? This brief focuses on the relative roles of demand and supply factors. Prices and quantities of consumed goods and services are positively correlated following demand changes and negatively correlated in response to supply disturbances. Employing disaggregated indexes from personal consumption expenditures data, this brief documents a positive relationship between prices and quantities during the early stages of the pandemic, followed by a negative relationship in the later period. Thus, while the short deflation episode in March ...
Working Paper
Price setting in online markets: does IT click?
Using a unique dataset of daily U.S. and U.K. price listings and the associated number of clicks for precisely defined goods from a major shopping platform, this paper explores how prices are set in online markets, which have a number of special properties such as low search costs, low costs of monitoring competitors' prices, and low costs of nominal price adjustment. High-quality data are not only useful to estimate price rigidity and other properties of price adjustment in online commerce but also allow comparing the behavior of those properties with estimates available from ...