Dollarization and the inflation threshold

Abstract.  Empirical evidence suggests non-linearity in the impact of inflation on financial intermediation and real activity. Evidence also suggests that high inflation affects financial intermediation through the substitution of dollars 'under the mattress' for savings in domestic banks. We model an economy where inflation and real activity are positively related at low levels of inflation. However, when the inflation rate exceeds a threshold, agents substitute dollars for deposits issued by domestic banks, reducing the scale of financial intermediation and investment. As a consequence, at high levels of inflation, capital stock and output become negatively related to the inflation rate.     

Global Imbalances and the Financial Crisis: Reassessing the Role of International Finance

Global current account imbalances have recently been singled out by many as a key factor contributing to the global financial crisis. Current account surpluses in several emerging market economies are said to have put significant downward pressure on world interest rates, thereby fueling a credit boom and risk taking in major advanced economies with current account deficits (the “excess saving” view). We argue that this perspective on global imbalances bears reconsideration. We highlight two conceptual problems: (i) explaining market interest rates through the saving-investment framework; and (ii) drawing inferences about a country's cross-border financing activity based on observations of net capital flows. We trace the shortcomings of this perspective to a failure to consider the distinguishing characteristics of a monetary (credit) economy. We conjecture that the main macroeconomic cause of the financial crisis was not “excess saving” but the “excess elasticity” of the international monetary and financial system.     

On the welfare benefits of an international currency

Is it beneficial for a country's currency to be used internationally? And, if so, can we quantify the benefit? Since the emergence of the euro, there has been great interest in the consequences of a transfer of the dollar's premier international role to the euro. This paper presents a novel model-based approach towards assessing the welfare benefits associated with the international use of a country's currency. Apart from the familiar benefits associated with seigniorage, residents of the issuing country experience an increase in the purchasing power of their currency both at home and abroad. In the calibration exercise carried out in this paper, we find the benefits of an international currency to be quantitatively significant. The welfare gain for the Euro area in having the euro internationally used ranges from 1.9% to 2.3% of consumption depending on relative inflation rates. The rest of the world is not indifferent as to which currency circulates as the dominant international currency. Conditional on their currency not being used internationally, their preference is for the dominant international currency to be the one with the lowest inflation rate.     

Two-period cycles in a three-period overlapping generations model

We study the properties of two-period monetary cycles in simple pure exchange overlapping generations economies in which the households live for three periods. We demonstrate that these economies can support cycles under a much broader—and, arguably, more plausible—range of assumptions than the analogous two-period economies. We show that economies that fail the well-known Grandmont (Econometrica 53 (1985) 995) condition can have cycles, and that economies that satisfy the condition can fail to have cycles. In addition, we show that economies can have monetary cycles when they do not have conventional monetary steady states, and when aggregate demand for assets is not decreasing in the real return rate at a gross real rate of unity.     

The Costs of Financial Crises: Resource Misallocation,Productivity, and Welfare in the 2001 Argentine Crisis

Financial crises in emerging market countries appear to be very costly: both output and a host of partial welfare indicators decline dramatically. The magnitude of these costs is puzzling both from an accounting perspective – factor usage does not decline as much as output, resulting in large falls in measured productivity – and from a theoretical perspective. With the aim of resolving this puzzle, we present a framework that allows us to do the following. First, we account for changes in a country's measured productivity during a financial crisis as the result of changes in the underlying technology of the economy, the efficiency with which resources are allocated across sectors, and the efficiency of the resource allocation within sectors, driven both by reallocation amongst existing plants and by entry and exit. Second, we measure the change in the country's welfare resulting from changes in productivity, government spending, the terms of trade, and a country's international investment position. We apply this framework to the Argentine crisis of 2001 using a unique establishment level dataset and we find that more than half of the, roughly, 10 percent decline in measured total factor productivity can be accounted for by deteriorations in the allocation of resources both across and within sectors. We measure the decline in welfare to be of the order of one‐quarter of one year's gross domestic product.     

Debt, interest rates, and integration of financial markets

It is commonly believed that higher budget deficits raise interest rates. However, these crowding out effects of increasing public debt have usually been found to be small or non-existent. One explanation is that on globalised bond markets interest rate differentials are offset due to financial integration. This paper tests crowding out, and measures the degree of integration of government bond markets, using spatial modelling techniques. Our main finding is that the crowding out effect of public debt on domestic long term interest rates is small: a 1% increase in the debt ratio pushes up domestic rates by 2 pp at most. Financial integration implies an important spillover effect via international bond markets, but only between OECD, and in particular EU, countries. The feedback effect from these markets on long term interest rates is as important as the domestic crowding out effect of higher public debt. Emerging markets are not as well integrated into international capital markets, causing a stronger crowding out effect.     

Sudden stops: Determinants and output effects in the first era of globalization, 1880-1913

We study the determinants and output effects of sudden stops in capital inflows during an era of intensified globalization from 1880 to 1913. Higher levels of exposure to foreign currency debt and large current account deficits associated with reliance on foreign capital greatly increased the likelihood of experiencing a sudden stop. Trade openness and strong reserve positions had the opposite effect. Sudden stops accompanied by financial crises are associated with drops in output per capita below trend equal to three to four percent. Frictions in the international capital markets of the day are a likely candidate for these output losses. Sudden stops connected with crises do not seem to bring trend growth downwards. Sudden stops not connected with crises appear to be associated with significant declines in trend growth.     

Status Preference, Wealth and Dynamics in the Open Economy

Abstract. The implications of status preference in a simple open economy model are investigated in this paper. The open economy is modeled as a continuum of identical representative agents who have preferences over consumption and status. In the paper status is identified as relative wealth, which takes the form of relative holdings international financial assets. A symmetric macroeconomic equilibrium is derived in which status is the source of transitional dynamics for domestic consumption and the current account balance. This result illustrates another way to combine transitional dynamics with interior equilibria in the small open economy Ramsey model with perfect capital mobility. We also show that status preference plays a critical role in influencing the open economy's adjustment to government expenditure and world interest rate shocks.     

Bankruptcy costs, liability dollarization, and vulnerability to sudden stops

Countries with intermediate levels of institutional quality suffer larger output contractions following sudden stops of capital inflows than less developed nations. However, countries with strong institutions seldom experience significant falls in output after capital flow reversals. We reconcile these two observations using a calibrated DSGE model that extends the financial accelerator framework developed in Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The model captures financial market institutional quality with creditors' ability to recover assets from bankrupt firms. Bankruptcy costs affect vulnerability to sudden stops directly but also indirectly by affecting the degree of liability dollarization. Simulations reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between bankruptcy costs and the output loss following sudden stops.     

新兴市场国家国际资本流动“突然停止”的影响因素分析--基于金融脆弱性的视角

在金融全球化的背景下,脆弱的国内金融体系会波及国际资本市场,导致国际资本流动发生剧烈波动甚至“突然停止”。运用面板Probit模型考察1976-2012年22个新兴市场国家国际资本流动“突然停止”的影响因素,着重探讨一国金融脆弱性对国际资本流动“突然停止”的影响。实证研究结果表明：一国的金融脆弱性对国际资本流动“突然停止”具有显著的负影响;金融开放会放大一国的金融脆弱程度,进一步提高国际资本流动“突然停止”的发生概率。     

Sudden stops, financial frictions, and labor market flows: Evidence from Latin America

While the aggregate effects of sudden stops and international financial crises are well known, the disaggregated channels through which they work are not well explored yet. In this paper, using job flows from a sectoral panel dataset for four Latin American countries, we find that sudden stops are characterized as periods of lower job creation and increased job destruction. Moreover, these effects are heterogeneous across sectors: we find that when a sudden stop occurs, sectors with higher dependence on external financing experience lower job creation. In turn, sectors with higher liquidity needs experience significantly larger job destruction. This evidence is consistent with the idea that dependence on external financing affects mainly the creation margin and that exposure to liquidity conditions affects mainly the destruction margin. Overall, our results provide evidence of financial frictions being an important transmission channel of sudden stops and in the restructuring process in general.     

How does global demand for financial services promote domestic growth in Luxembourg? A dynamic general equilibrium analysis

This paper studies the transmission of a change in the global demand for financial services on the domestic growth of an international financial center. To capture most of the possible interactions, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that we calibrate on Luxembourg data. Results show that the financial multiplier (ratio of a change in output to a change in the financial sector value added) is above 2 in the medium run and largely above 1 in the long run. The main transmission channels are net exports (expenditure approach) or capital income (income approach) in the medium run and investment in the long run. Moreover, the global demand for financial services has substantial implications for public finances. These findings also mean that a sudden loss of confidence towards a specific international financial center might have dramatic consequences for its whole economy.     

Taylor rules in the open economy

Taylor rules, which link short-term interest rates to fluctuations in inflation and output, have been shown to be a good guide (both positively and normatively) to the conduct of monetary policy. As a result they have been used extensively to model policy in the context of both closed and open economy models. Their determinacy properties have also been analysed in the context of closed and, to a more limited degree, in small open economy models. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the determinacy properties of Taylor rules to the case of a benchmark two-country model. When the rules are specified in terms of output-price inflation we confirm and extend the conventional results from the closed economy literature—satisfying the Taylor principle is the key to ensuring determinacy, although the presence of backward-looking price-setting can affect the determinacy properties of the two-country model. However, the conventional results do not hold when we replace output-price inflation with consumer price inflation in the specification of the rule. In this case, Taylor rules which satisfy the Taylor principle will be indeterminate, unless there is an unusually large home bias in consumption. Similar indeterminacy problems arise when one country targets CPI inflation and the other output-price inflation. In this case we show that, even if determinacy is achieved, large spillovers may occur between countries.     

Financial integration, entrepreneurial risk and global dynamics

How does financial integration impact capital accumulation, current-account dynamics, and cross-country inequality? We investigate this question within a two-country, general-equilibrium, incomplete-markets model that focuses on the importance of idiosyncratic entrepreneurial risk—a risk that introduces, not only a precautionary motive for saving, but also a wedge between the interest rate and the marginal product of capital. Our contribution is to show that this friction provides a simple explanation for the emergence of global imbalances, a resolution to the empirical puzzle that capital often fails to flow from the rich or slow-growing countries to the poor or fast-growing ones, and a set of policy lessons regarding the intertemporal costs and benefits of capital-account liberalization.     

Financial systems and the cost channel transmission of monetary policy shocks

We study the role of financial systems for the cost channel transmission of monetary policy in a calibrated business cycle model. We characterize financial systems by the share of bank-dependent firms and by the degree of the pass-through from policy to bank lending rates, for which we provide empirical estimates for the euro area and the US. For plausible calibrations of the dynamics of the lending rate we find that the cost effects directly related to interest rate movements have only a limited effect on the transmission mechanism.     

Securitization of mortgage debt,domestic lending,and international risk sharing

Abstract Securitization makes mortgage‐related risks internationally tradeable and thus contributes considerably to the international diversification of macroeconomic risk: in the years 2003–2008, the increase in international cross‐holdings of securitized mortgage debt has lowered industrialized countries’ conditional consumption volatility (relative to the United States) by about 10–15 percentage points. We turn to the role of domestic credit in explaining this result. Domestic credit leads to better international risk sharing only if debt is securitized and traded internationally. Conversely, the risk‐sharing benefits from securitization seem to evaporate if credit dries up – as it did in the recent financial crisis.     

A corporate balance-sheet approach to currency crises

This paper presents a general equilibrium currency crisis model of the ‘third generation’, in which the possibility of currency crises is driven by the interplay between private firms’ credit-constraints and nominal price rigidities. Despite our emphasis on microfoundations, the model remains sufficiently simple that the policy analysis can be conducted graphically. The analysis hinges on four main features (i) ex post deviations from purchasing power parity; (ii) credit constraints a la Bernanke-Gertler; (iii) foreign currency borrowing by domestic firms; (iv) a competitive banking sector lending to firms and holding reserves and a monetary policy conducted either through open market operations or short-term lending facilities. We derive sufficient conditions for the existence of a sunspot equilibrium with currency crises. We show that an interest rate increase intended to support the currency in a crisis may not be effective, but that a relaxation of short-term lending facilities can make this policy effective by attenuating the rise in interest rates relevant to firms.     

Pairwise trade and coexistence of money and higher-return assets

A new theory of coexistence of money and higher-return assets is set out. It applies to any setting in which some trade involves an exchange of goods for assets and occurs between two people—a buyer and a seller. We show that there exists a function mapping the portfolios of the buyer and the seller to the trade that occurs such that (i) the trade is in the buyer-seller core and (ii) some people are induced to enter the buyer-seller meeting with money.     

Openness can be good for growth: The role of policy complementarities

This paper studies how the effect of trade openness on economic growth may depend on complementary reforms that help a country take advantage of international competition. This issue is illustrated with a simple Harris–Todaro model where welfare gains after trade openness depend on the degree of labor market flexibility. The paper then presents cross-country, panel-data evidence on how the growth effect of openness may depend on a variety of structural characteristics. For this purpose, the empirical section uses a non-linear growth regression specification that interacts a proxy of trade openness with proxies of educational investment, financial depth, inflation stabilization, public infrastructure, governance, labor market flexibility, ease of firm entry, and ease of firm exit. The paper concludes that the growth effects of openness may be significantly improved if certain complementary reforms are undertaken.     

Financial globalization and debt maturity in emerging economies

This paper studies how financial globalization affects debt structure in emerging economies. We find that by accessing international markets, firms increase their long-term debt and extend their debt maturity. In contrast, with financial liberalization, long-term debt decreases and the maturity structure shifts to the short term for the average firm. These effects are stronger in economies with less developed domestic financial systems. The evidence is consistent with financial integration having opposite effects on the firms that are able to integrate with world markets and obtain financing globally, relative to the firms that rely on domestic financing only.