Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of dollar's double role of national and international currency. This is the Triffin dilemma. The paper shows how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the...

We study the transmission of monetary policy through bank securities portfolios using granular supervisory data on U.S. bank securities, hedging positions, and corporate credit. Banks that experienced larger losses on their securities during the 2022-2023 monetary tightening cycle extended less...

This paper investigates the sources of output volatility by decomposing the international shocks into finance and trade shocks. Through structural Bayesian estimations of an open-economy DSGE model on 16 countries, on average, international shocks explain around 70% of output fluctuations.

Is government size the desirable response to macroeconomic risk, or it is the consequence of distorted political incentives with adverse effects on macroeconomic volatility? This paper reconsiders the mutual interdependence between government size and growth volatility in a large sample of...

The volatility of Chinese GDP growth has been markedly lower since the mid-1990s. We utilize frequency domain and vector autoregression (VAR) methods to investigate the origin of the observed volatility reduction in the Chinese economy. Our estimation indicates that lower volatility of random...

Improvements in the macroeconomic policy framework over the past two decades and prudent regulation of the financial system have contributed to reduce output volatility in Mexico relative to other OECD countries. The sharp recession in 2008-09 illustrated that output volatility has nonetheless...

This paper argues that output volatility depends on the degree of credit market imperfection. In the early stages of financial development, agents are constrained in their borrowing ability. As a result, the individual savings, affected by the labor supply, play a dual role in the economy,...

This Paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model...

Since the mid-1980s firm level financial volatility has increased, while the U.S. economy has experienced a sharp decline in the volatility of GDP growth. Do firms adjust their capital structure in response to higher idiosyncratic risk? And if so, could that affect the performance of the...

We use a simple model of a closed economy to study the recommendations of monetary policy-makers, attempting to respond optimally to an asset-price bubble whose stochastic properties they understand. We focus on the impact which the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates has on the...