This paper investigates the economic and social consequences of sovereign default on external debt. We focus on the crises' impact on real per capita GDP, infant mortality, life expectancy, poverty headcounts, and calorie supply per capita. After methodological exclusions, the sample covers 221...

We study the macroeconomic consequences of tariffs. We estimate impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963-2014. We find that tariff increases lead, in the medium term, to economically and statistically significant declines...

International macroeconomic models long have had difficulty explaining the surprisingly low volatility of the relative price between traded and nontraded goods compared to real exchange rates. This apparent puzzle may reflect a restrictive way of thinking about the nature of nontraded goods....

We document a new international stylized fact describing the relationship between real exchange rates and external asset holdings. Economists have long argued that the real exchange rate is associated with the net international investment position, appreciating as external wealth increases. This...

This paper investigates the implications of international financial sanctions for the reserve currency status of the US dollar. We propose a simple model of a reserve currency, demonstrate how the anticipation of financial sanctions can weaken the dollar's status, and evaluate the welfare...

We link the sustained appreciation of the U.S. dollar from 2011 to 2019 to international capital flows driven by primitive economic factors. We show that increases in foreign investors' net savings, increases in U.S. monetary policy rates relative to the rest of the world, and shifts in investor...

We study the effects of an anticipated dollarization, announced today but planned to be implemented at some future date, in a simple open-economy model. Motivated by the profile of countries considering dollarization we make the following assumptions. First, the government faces a scarcity of...

We study the consequences of "regime-induced" exchange rate depreciations by comparing outcomes for peggers versus floaters to the US dollar in response to a dollar depreciation. Pegger currencies depreciate relative to floater currencies and these depreciations are strongly expansionary. The...

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional...

This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify shocks to political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not...