Essays on Macroeconomics and International Finance
This thesis addresses three topics in Macroeconomics and International Finance. Chapter 1 studies welfare implications of international financial integration in the presence of bank funding risks. Unregulated issuance of safe short-term liabilities by financial intermediaries leads to excessive reliance on this form of financing, which increases losses associated with financial crises. First, I show that integration increases the severity of potential financial crises in the countries that receive capital inflows. As a result, integration may reduce welfare for these countries. Second, I show that if macroprudential regulation of the banking sector is chosen by each country in an uncoordinated way, the outcome can be Pareto inefficient so that there is a role for global coordination of such policies. This effect arises because the macroprudential regulation that limits the overissuance of safe liabilities changes the international interest rate. The regulation may have an additional benefit from manipulating the interest rate. Third, the desire to manipulate the interest rate when regulating the local banking sector creates incentives to use two regulatory tools: macroprudential regulation of the banking sector and capital controls. Chapter 2, written jointly with Emi Nakamura and Jon Steinsson, quantifies the importance of long-run risks---persistent shocks to growth rates and uncertainty---in a panel of long-term aggregate consumption data for developed countries. We identify sizable and highly persistent world growth-rate shocks as well as less persistent country-specific growth rate shocks. The world growth-rate shocks capture the productivity speed-up and slow-down many countries experienced in the second half of the 20th century. We also identify large and persistent world shocks to uncertainty. Our world uncertainty process captures the large but uneven rise and fall of volatility that occurred over the course of the 20th century. We find that negative shocks to growth rates are correlated with shocks that increase uncertainty. Our estimates based on macroeconomic data alone line up well with earlier calibrations of the long-run risks model designed to match asset pricing data. We document how these dynamics, combined with Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences, help explain a number of asset pricing puzzles. Chapter 3, written jointly with Neil R. Mehrotra, investigates the relationship between sector-specific shocks, shifts in the Beveridge curve, and changes in the natural rate of unemployment. We document a significant correlation between shifts in the US Beveridge curve in postwar data and periods of elevated sectoral shocks relying on a factor analysis of sectoral employment to derive our sectoral shock index. We provide conditions under which sector-specific shocks in a multisector model augmented with labor market search generate outward shifts in the Beveridge curve and raise the natural rate of unemployment. Consistent with empirical evidence, our model also generates cyclical movements in aggregate matching function efficiency and mismatch across sectors. We calibrate a two-sector version of our model and demonstrate that a negative shock to construction employment calibrated to match employment shares can fully account for the outward shift in the Beveridge curve. We augment our standard multisector model with financial frictions to demonstrate that financial shocks or a binding zero lower bound can act like sectoral productivity shocks, generating a shift in the Beveridge curve that may be counteracted by expansionary monetary policy.
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