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Coordination and Crisis in Monetary Unions
We study fiscal and monetary policy in a monetary union with the potential for rollover crises in sovereign debt markets. Member-country fiscal authorities lack commitment to repay their debt and choose fiscal policy independently. A common monetary authority chooses inflation for the union, also without commitment. We first describe the existence of a fiscal externality that arises in the presence of limited commitment and leads countries to over-borrow; this externality rationalizes the imposition of debt ceilings in a monetary union. We then investigate the impact of the composition of ...
Working Paper
The Economics of Sovereign Debt, Bailouts and the Eurozone Crisis
Despite a formal 'no-bailout clause; we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to a whopping 43% (Greece) of2010 output during the Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze and understand bailouts in a monetary union, and the large observed differences across countries. We characterize bailout size and likelihood as a function of the economic fundamentals (economic activity, debt-to-gdp ratio, default costs). Our model embeds a 'Southern view' of the crisis (transfers ...
Working Paper
Who is Afraid of Eurobonds?
The growing asymmetry in the size of fiscal imbalances poses a serious challenge to the macroeconomic stability of the Euro Area (EA). We show that following a contractionary shock, the current monetary and fiscal framework weakens economic growth even in low-debt countries because of the zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint. At the same time, the current framework also exposes the EA to the risk of fiscal stagflation if one country were to refuse to implement the necessary fiscal consolidations. We study a new framework that allows EA policymakers to separate the need for short-run ...
Working Paper
Monetary/Fiscal Interactions with Forty Budget Constraints
It is well known that monetary and fiscal policy are connected by a common budget constraint. In this paper, we study how this manifests itself in the context of the Eurozone, where that connection links the European Central Bank, the 19 national central banks, the Treasuries of 19 countries, and the European Union. Our goal is twofold. First, we wish to clarify how seigniorage flows from the monetary authority to the budget of each country. Second, we seek to answer the question of how the taxpayers of each country are affected by a default of one of the participants to the union. In ...
Working Paper
The Economics of Sovereign Debt, Bailouts and the Eurozone Crisis
Despite a formal 'no-bailout clause; we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to a whopping 43% (Greece) of2010 output during the Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze and understand bailouts in a monetary union, and the large observed differences across countries. We characterize bailout size and likelihood as a function of the economic fundamentals (economic activity, debt-to-gdp ratio, default costs). Our model embeds a 'Southern view' of the crisis (transfers ...
Working Paper
The Geographic Effects of Monetary Policy
We study the differential regional effects of monetary policy exploiting geographical heterogeneity in income across cities in the United States. We find that prices and employment in poorer cities react more to monetary policy shocks. The results for prices hold for a wide range of narrow consumer expenditure categories. The results are consistent with New Keynesian models that allow for a differential share of hand-to-mouth consumers across regions, but not with models in which regions have different slopes of the Phillips curve. We show that an increase in heterogeneity across cities ...
Working Paper
The Economics of Sovereign Debt, Bailouts and the Eurozone Crisis
Despite a formal 'no-bailout clause; we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to a whopping 43% (Greece) of2010 output during the Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze and understand bailouts in a monetary union, and the large observed differences across countries. We characterize bailout size and likelihood as a function of the economic fundamentals (economic activity, debt-to-gdp ratio, default costs). Our model embeds a 'Southern view' of the crisis (transfers ...
Working Paper
Financial Heterogeneity and Monetary Union
We analyze the economic consequences of forming a monetary union among countries with varying degrees of financial distortions, which interact with the firms' pricing decisions because of customer-market considerations. In response to a financial shock, firms in financially weak countries (the periphery) maintain{{p}}cashflows by raising markups--in both domestic and export markets--while firms in financially strong countries (the core) reduce markups, undercutting their financially constrained competitors to gain market share. When the two regions are experiencing different shocks, common ...