Journal of International Economics最新文献

I develop a two-country open economy model featuring asymmetric financial frictions to explain two puzzling observations during the 2008 global financial crisis: (1) real consumption growth declined more in foreign countries than in the US, despite the crisis originating in the US, and (2) the US dollar appreciated against foreign currencies despite a significant deterioration in the US net foreign asset position. Subject to a less stringent financial constraint, the US tends to hold more risky assets relative to foreign countries in tranquil times, thereby exposing itself more to financial risks. As the crisis unfolds, the US incurs greater capital losses and is forced to liquidate its risky asset holdings to deleverage. This deleveraging process triggers a capital retrenchment in the US, thereby smoothing US consumption and prompting a US dollar appreciation. Consequently, this model challenges the “exorbitant duty” hypothesis and provides insights into the “reserve currency paradox”.

We present a model of trade, global innovation, and diffusion, inspired by Eaton and Kortum (1999). The specific structure for innovation and diffusion we propose, which leverages general results developed in our previous work (Lind and Ramondo, 2023a), allows us to measure the flow of ideas across countries and over time. By deriving tractable expressions for productivity and expenditure, we can use easily-available international trade data to estimate both innovation and diffusion rates across countries and over time. We find that, although innovation is correlated with economic growth, there are many high income countries that primarily produce using diffused ideas from foreign sources.

To study inflation expectations and associated risk premia in emerging bond markets, we provide estimates for Mexico based on an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of nominal and real bond prices that accounts for their liquidity risk. Beyond documenting the existence of large and weakly correlated liquidity premia in nominal and real bond prices, our results indicate that long-term inflation expectations in Mexico are well anchored close to the Bank of Mexico’s inflation target. Furthermore, Mexican inflation risk premia are larger and more volatile than those in Canada and the United States.

I jointly study the optimal bailout policy and monetary policy in open economies that borrow in foreign currency from international lenders. A policy dilemma emerges during financial crises. Policymakers trade off the benefit of more bailouts alleviating firms’ financial constraints against the cost of larger currency devaluation, which tightens firms’ financial constraints. I embed the optimal bailout in an otherwise standard “sudden stop” model with nominal rigidities. The model sheds light on the role of bailouts and currency mismatch in driving the exchange rate dynamics, firms’ balance sheets and economic recovery. Quantitatively, the model matches key business cycle moments. A welfare evaluation shows that there are in general welfare gains from the systemic bailout policy despite ex ante moral hazard problems of firms.

While recent work has documented a nexus between international trade and firm innovation, the underlying mechanisms explaining firms’ innovation in response to import competition are, thus far, poorly understood. To identify the mechanism of labor adjustments and its economic relevance, we use longitudinal linked employer–employee data from Denmark (1995–2012). We first show that import competition triggers a significant increase in the share of R&D workers at the firm level. The majority of the increase in the share of R&D workers is explained by between-firm, not within-firm, worker reallocation. The significance of this reallocation becomes evident when we show that innovation improvements are observed only among firms that experience a large increase in the share of R&D workers, especially if this increase is achieved through between-firm worker reallocation. We then extend our analysis to Portugal where the labor market is more rigid and find contrasting yet consistent results: labor reallocation occurs only within firms and it does not result in increased innovation.

We study the economics of international joint ventures using administrative data for China. We first show that foreign investors choose Chinese partners that are relatively large, productive, and more innovative to set up their joint venture. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we then provide evidence that joint ventures lead to domestic benefits in the form of productivity and technological spillovers to both the Chinese partners in joint ventures as well as other domestic Chinese firms. Exploiting the easing of joint venture requirements as China entered the WTO in the year 2001, we further show that intraindustry spillovers from joint ventures to other domestic firms increased in the wake of China’s WTO accession, consistent with gains from foreign technology rising due to enhanced commitment through the rules-based WTO system. Our results shed new light on the efficacy of FDI performance requirements as well as on claims regarding international technology transfer that underpinned the China–US trade war.

During a downturn in the global financial cycle there is a simultaneous retrenchment in gross capital flows and a fall in risky asset prices. The global financial cycle is closely related to fluctuations in risk appetite. We develop a model that can simultaneously produce a fall in gross outflows, inflows, and asset prices following an increase in global risk aversion. There is heterogeneity across investors within a country in the willingness to hold risky assets and to hold foreign assets. The fall in the asset price after a rise in global risk aversion shifts the wealth distribution towards investors that are less willing to hold foreign assets. This leads a drop in gross flows. We calibrate the within country heterogeneity in the model to match heterogeneity observed in micro data of household portfolios. The retrenchment in the calibrated model is quantitatively similar to what we observe in the macro data.

The H-1B program allows firms in the United States to temporarily hire high-skilled foreign citizens. The government restricts inflows of new H-1B workers and therefore creates potential rents typical of a quota. Importantly, however, the US allocates H-1B status by random lottery. We develop a theoretical model demonstrating that this lottery creates a negative externality that destroys quota rents by incentivizing firms to search for more workers than can actually be hired. Some firms specialize in hiring foreign labor and contracting out those workers’ services to third-party sites. These outsourcing firms exacerbate the search externality. Numerical exercises suggest that these processes result in an annual economic loss exceeding $10,000 per new H-1B worker hired relative to what would occur in the absence of lottery allocation.

This paper examines the patterns of macroeconomic recovery following natural disasters. In a panel with global coverage from 1960 to 2011, we make use of insurer-assessed losses to estimate growth responses conditional on risk transfer. We find that major disasters reduce growth by 1 to 2 percentage points on impact, and over time produce an output cost of 2$\text{\%}$ to 4$\text{\%}$ of GDP, on top of the initial damage to property and infrastructure. Akin to wars and financial crises, natural disasters have permanent effects, in the sense that output losses are not fully recovered over time. But it is the uninsured losses that drive the macroeconomic cost; insured losses are less consequential in the aggregate, and can even stimulate growth. By helping to finance the recovery, insurance mitigates the macroeconomic cost of disasters. Many countries lack the capacity to (re)insure themselves and would stand to benefit from more international risk sharing.

Central banks across the globe introduced large-scale asset purchase programs to address the unprecedented circumstances experienced during the pandemic. Many of these programs were announced as open-ended to shock-and-awe market participants and restore confidence in financial markets. This paper examines whether these whatever-it-takes announcements had larger effects than announcements with explicit limits on scale. We use a narrative approach to categorize announcements made by twenty-two central banks, and event study, propensity-score-matching, and local projection methods to measure the short-term effects of policy announcements on exchange rates and sovereign bond yields. We find that on average a central bank’s first whatever-it-takes announcement lowers 10-year bond yields by an additional 47 basis points relative to size-limited announcements, suggesting that communication of potential policy scale matters. Our results for yields hold for both advanced and emerging economies, while exchange rates go in opposing directions, muting their response when we group all countries together.