creator: Rebucci, Alessandro
description- – We compare the performance of a currency board arrangement, inflation targeting, and dollarization in a small open, developing economy with liberalized capital account. We focus explicitly on the transmission of shocks to currency and country risk premia in international financial markets and on the role of fluctuations in premia in the propagation of other shocks. We calibrate our model on Argentina. The framework fits the data relatively well in that it matches the second moments of several key macro variables. Welfare analysis suggests that dollarization is preferable to the alternative regimes we consider because it removes the volatility that originates from the currency premium. However, a currency board can match dollarization if the central bank holds a sufficiently large stock of foreign reserves on average.
subjectcollectiondatepublishercreatorformat description- – We develop a two-country, dynamic general equilibrium model that links cross-country differences in net foreign asset and consumption dynamics to differences in discount factors and steady-state levels of productivity. We compare the results of the model to those of VARs for the G3 economies. We identify country-specific productivity shocks by assuming that productivity does not respond contemporaneously to other variables in these VARs. We identify global productivity shocks by estimating the VARs in common trend representation after testing for and imposing model-based, long-run cointegration restrictions. We then compare the model's predictions for net foreign asset and consumption dynamics in response to productivity shocks with the estimated VAR impulse responses. We find that the two sources of heterogeneity we consider go some way toward reconciling the consumption smoothing hypothesis with the data and explaining variations in net foreign asset and consumption dynamics across countries.
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