Firms’ Management of Infrequent Shocks

We examine businesses’ financial management of a rare, severe event using detailed firm-level data collected following Hurricane Sandy in the New York area. Credit played a prominent role in financing recovery; more negatively affected firms took on debt because of Sandy (39%) than received insurance payments (15%) in our data. Negatively affected firms were frequently credit constrained after the shock. We also find that the most credit-constrained firms after the event, younger firms, and smaller firms, were the least likely to insure before it. Our findings align with the predictions of dynamic risk management theory (Rampini and Viswanathan 2010, 2013).     

大变局下的能源之路——“2020国际能源发展高峰论坛”综述

世界正经历大发展大变革大调整,变与不变相互交织。中美贸易摩擦作为全球地缘政治紧张局势的组成部分,长期性、严峻性日益凸显,加强中美能源行业合作有助于破解两国贸易摩擦僵局。国际能源治理格局继续深刻调整,美国、沙特阿拉伯、俄罗斯将成为能源治理体系实际权力掌控者,但需求方提升话语权的诉求亦将日益强烈。气候变化压力推动能源向绿色低碳转型,但化石能源在能源结构中的主体地位2050年前不会改变。全球油气供需格局趋于宽松,未来5年国际油气价格有望保持中低位运行。中国营商环境持续改善,朝着更加市场化、法治化、国际化的方向发展,为能源合作创造良好环境。为适应能源转型和技术变革,未来石油公司发展将呈现"归核化"和综合性的特点。     

Financial Frictions,Financial Shocks,and Aggregate Volatility

The Great Moderation was accompanied by an increase in financial volatility. We explore the sources of these divergent patterns in volatilities by estimating a model with time‐varying financial rigidities subject to structural breaks in the size of shocks, the monetary policy rule coefficients, and the average size of the financial rigidity. Institutional changes are key in accounting for the Great Moderation and in shaping the transmission mechanism of financial shocks. The increase in financial volatilities is accounted for by larger financial shocks, but the vulnerability of the economy to these shocks is significantly alleviated by the estimated changes in institutions.     

Listing and financial constraints

We confirm, with a twist, that listing to a stock exchange can mitigate financial constraints of firms, using Japanese firm-level data of 20 years, 1995–2014, controlling for the main-bank relationship and majority owner influence. Compared to a similar unlisted firm, a listed firm has a lower marginal product of capital on average and more new borrowings during recessions. Theoretically, we argue that these are the key pieces of evidence that indicate less tight financial constraints for the listed firms than the unlisted firms. However, the listed firms do not borrow more on average over time. They rather maintain a lower leverage so that they can mitigate the borrowing constraints. We also find that the listed firms do not face lower interest rates.     

Labor market participation,unemployment and monetary policy

Models of unemployment and monetary policy usually assume constant participation. Incorporating a participation decision into a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions, we show that market tightness becomes endogenously more volatile because both the opportunity cost of home production and the reservation wage vary with participation. The model can simultaneously explain the low volatility of participation, the high volatility of unemployment, and a procyclical workers׳ outside option of working. A policy of strict inflation targeting is close to optimal, and increasing the response of the interest rate to inflation does not have a large impact on the volatility of unemployment because of the endogenous response of participation.     

Financial distress and fiscal inflation

Is inflation ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ or is it fundamentally a fiscal phenomenon? The answer hinges crucially on the underlying monetary–fiscal policy regime. Scant attention has been directed to the role of credit market frictions in discerning the policy regime, despite its growing importance in empirical macroeconomics. We augment a standard monetary model to incorporate fiscal details and credit market imperfections. These ingredients allow for both interpretations of the inflation process in a financially constrained environment. We find that introducing financial frictions to the model and adding financial variables to the dataset generate important identifying restrictions on the observed pattern between inflation and measures of financial and fiscal stress, to the extent that it overturns existing findings about which monetary–fiscal policy regime produced the U.S. data. To confront policy regime uncertainty, we propose the use of dynamic prediction pools and find strong cyclical patterns in the estimated historical regime weights.     

Foreign Direct Investment and Debt Financing in Emerging Economies

The rich dynamics of capital flows is an important characteristic of business cycles in emerging market economies. In the data external debt is always procyclical, while FDI is procyclical only in normal times. We provide a microfounded rationale for this pattern by linking financial shocks to capital flows. For this purpose, we build a small open economy model in which firms are subject to borrowing constraints, and are either owned domestically or by foreign investors who purchase firms through FDI. During a financial crisis, the valuation gap per unit net worth between foreign and domestic investors widens, which triggers more FDI inflow. Our model produces business cycle moments consistent with empirical observations.     

Financial intermediation and real estate prices impact on business cycles: A Bayesian analysis

How do financial intermediation and real estate prices impinge on the business cycle? I develop a two-sector stochastic general equilibrium model with financial intermediation and real estate collateral to assess the impact of financial conditions and land prices on aggregate fluctuations. I estimate the model with Bayesian methods using a novel data set that includes U.S. macro and financial variables during the period 1975–2010. The results from the estimated model show that financial conditions have a sizable effect on the variability of investment spending, while productivity shocks are the main source of consumption fluctuations. Specifically, on the macro side, (1) financial shocks explain about three quarters of investment spending variability and one third of the variance in hours worked. On the financial side, (2) financial shocks explain most of the variability in land prices, credit spread, and aggregate net worth of the financial sector. The model also accounts for observed unconditional moments of macro and financial variables. Our quantitative results are suggestive of the impact of diverse sources of financial instability, and as such relevant for macro prudential policy analysis.     

微观基础的李嘉图模型及其比较利益分配——兼论中美贸易摩擦

本文将消费者偏好和国家规模引入李嘉图模型,通过一般均衡的方法分析了均衡的产量和价格,并探讨了国际贸易发生的条件及各种因素变化对参加贸易的各国国民福利的影响.在微观模型的基础上,通过一个博弈、谈判模型具体分析了国际比较利益的分割及其各国贸易模式的选择,较好的解释了国际贸易得益的分配问题.政策涵义是中美贸易争端不能采取报复性的关税或人为设置贸易壁垒来解决,而应当通过协商与对话来获得互利双赢.     

Screening and Labor Market Flows in a Model with Heterogeneous Workers

We construct a model in which screening of heterogeneous workers by employers plays a central role in determining both the flows into and out of unemployment. Following a negative productivity shock, the share of low‐efficiency workers in the pool of unemployed rises, and this composition effect reduces the incentive of firms to post vacancies, lowering job opportunities for all workers. Heterogeneity in workers’ efficiency amplifies unemployment fluctuations in economies with small gross labor flows and leads to persistent buildups of unemployment and slow recoveries. The composition effect worsens the unemployment–inflation trade‐off faced by the monetary authority, leading to very large sacrifice ratios when a fall in productivity primarily affects low‐efficiency workers.