关键词:
International Finance
Macroeconomics
Monetary Economics
摘要:
This dissertation consists of three independent chapters analyzing the sources of business cycles and the role of monetary policy. Taking both closed- and open-economy perspectives, I study the importance of expectations for the empirical identification of economic and policy shocks, the nature of business cycle fluctuations, and the optimal conduct of monetary policy. The first chapter is titled "International Spillovers and the Exchange Rate Channel of Monetary Policy,'' and is joint work with Vito Cormun. Motivated by the observation that exchange rate fluctuations largely influence small open economies, we propose a novel approach to separately identify the effects of domestic and external shocks on exchange rates and other macroeconomic variables, thereby uncovering a set of new empirical findings. A first finding is that external shocks account for most of exchange rate fluctuations. Relatedly, the bulk of external shocks is strongly correlated with measures of global risk aversion and uncertainty (e.g. the VIX), and a country's net foreign asset position largely explains the exposure of its exchange rate to external disturbances. A second finding is that domestic and external disturbances generate very different comovement patterns between interest rates and exchange rates. In particular, unlike domestic shocks, external shocks are associated with large and significant deviations from uncovered interest parity. As a result, an econometrician that fails to properly distinguish between sources of exchange rate fluctuations is bound to obtain puzzling estimates of the exchange rate effects of domestic monetary policy shocks. These empirical findings have profound implications for models of small open economy and exchange rate determination. In particular, they favor theories in which exchange rates are jointly determined by the risk-bearing capacity in financial markets as well as the extent of a country's financial imbalances. For this reason, we develop a mode