Borrowing constraints are a key component of modern macroeconomic models. The analysis of Emerging Markets (EM) economies generally assumes that firms' access to debt is constrained by the value of their collateral. Using credit-registry data and exploiting banking regulations from Argentina for the period 1998-2020 we show that less than 10% of firms' debt is based on asset values, with the remaining 90% based on firms' cash-flows. Exploiting Central Bank regulations over banks’ capital requirements and credit policies we argue that the most prevalent borrowing constraints is defined in terms of the ratio of their interest payments to a measure of their present and past cash flows, akin to the "interest coverage" borrowing constraint studied by the corporate finance literature. We argue that Argentina exhibits a greater share of interest sensitive borrowing constraints than the US and other Advanced Economies. We claim that this result can be extrapolated to other EMs by showing that firms' interest payments are strongly and positively correlated with their cash flows for a panel of firms from 13 EMs, a novel stylized fact to the literature. We show that in an otherwise standard small open economy DSGE model, an "interest coverage" borrowing constraints leads significantly stronger amplification of foreign interest rate shocks compared to the standard collateral constraints. This greater amplification provides a solution to the Spillover Puzzle of US monetary policy rates by which EMs experience greater negative effects than Advanced Economies after a US interest rate hike. In terms of policy implications, this greater amplification demonstrates how a managed exchange rate policy is more costly in the presence of an interest coverage constraint, given their greater interest rate sensitivity, compared to the standard collateral borrowing constraint.

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This paper quantifies the spillovers of US monetary policy in Emerging Market economies. By imposing sign restrictions on the high-frequency surprises of the Fed Fund Futures and the S\&P 500 I am able to identify two distinct FOMC shocks: a pure US monetary policy and an information disclosure shock. On the one hand, a US tightening caused by a pure US monetary policy shock produces a recession, an exchange rate depreciation and tighter financial conditions. On the other hand, a tightening of US monetary policy caused by the FOMC disclosing positive information about the state of the US economy produces an economic expansion, an exchange rate appreciation and laxer financial conditions. These results help explain atypical dynamics found by recent literature. Augmenting the benchmark model with additional variables I argue that the financial channel is the main propagation mechanism of US interest rates into Emerging Markets. Furthermore, the quantitative impact of these FOMC shocks appear to depend on the Emerging Market's exchange rate regime and its dependency on commodity good exports.

This paper studies the role of two dimensions of household heterogeneity in the transmission of foreign shocks in a small open economy: (i) limited access to financial markets, (ii) consumption exposure to commodity-based goods. First, I use survey data from Uruguay to show that low-income households have limited access to savings technologies and spend a significant share of their income on commodity-based goods while high-income households are more likely to save and spend a significantly lower share of their income on commodity-based goods. Second, I construct a Two-Agent New Keynesian model with two features inspired by Diaz Alejandro 1963's paper: (i) Ricardian and Hand-to-mouth households, and (ii) non-homothetic preferences over commodity goods. I show these features amplify foreign shocks and provide a rationale for Central Banks' fear-of-floating through a redistribution channel of monetary policy. I study the design of optimal policy regimes and find that households have opposing preferences over monetary and fiscal rules.

This paper examines the relationship between changes in the cost of imported inputs and export performance using a novel dataset from Argentina which identifies domestic firms' network of foreign suppliers. I construct a heterogeneous firm model to guide my empirical strategy and test its predictions by constructing firm-specific shocks using a shift-share analysis. This identification strategy exploits firms' lagged exposure to foreign suppliers and finely defined import price shifts. Evidence suggests the presence of significant adjustment cost in firms' foreign supplier linkages and strong complementarities between imported inputs and export performance, particularly for high-quality products. 

This paper presents evidence on the granular nature of firms' network of foreign suppliers and studies its implications for the impact of supplier shocks on domestic firms' performance. To demonstrate this, I use customs level information on transactions between Argentinean firms and foreign firms. I highlight two novel stylized facts: (i) the distribution of domestic firms' number of foreign suppliers is highly skewed with the median firm reporting linkages with only two, (ii) firms focus imported value on one top-supplier, even when controlling for firm size. Motivated by these facts I construct a theoretical framework of heterogeneous firms subject to search frictions in the market for foreign suppliers. Through a calibration exercise I study the framework’s predictions and test them in the data using a shift-share identification strategy. Results present evidence of significant frictions in the market for foreign suppliers and strong import-export complementarities.

This paper introduces a transparent framework to identify the informational content of FOMC announcements. We do so by modelling the expectations of the FOMC and private sector agents using state of the art computational linguistic tools on both FOMC statements and New York Times articles. We identify the informational content of FOMC announcements as the projection of high frequency movements in financial assets onto differences in expectations. Our recovered series is intuitively reasonable and shows that information disclosure has a significant impact on the yields of short-term government bonds. 

This paper studies the transmission of US monetary policy shocks into Emerging Markets emphasizing the role of investment and financial heterogeneity. First, we use a panel SVAR model to show that a US interest tightening leads to a persistent recession in Emerging Markets driven by a sharp reduction in aggregate investment. Second, we study the role of firms' financial heterogeneity in the transmission of US interest rate shocks by exploiting detailed balance sheet dataset from Chile. We find that more indebted firms experience greater drops in investment in response to a US tightening shock than less indebted firms. This result is at odds with recent evidence from US firms, even when using the same identification strategy and econometric methods. Third, we rationalize this finding using a stylized model of heterogeneous firms subject to a tightening leverage constraint. Finally, we present evidence in support of this hypothesis as well as robustness checks to our main results. Overall, our results suggests that the transmission channel of US monetary policy shocks within and outside the US differ, a result novel to the literature. 

This paper shows that disregarding the information effects around the European Central Bank monetary policy decision announcements biases its international spillovers. Using data from 23 economies, both Emerging and Advanced, I show that following an identification strategy that disentangles pure monetary policy shocks from information effects lead to international spillovers on industrial production, exchange rates and equity indexes which are between 2 to 3 times larger in magnitude than those arising from following the standard high frequency identification strategy. This bias is driven by pure monetary policy and information effects having intuitively opposite international spillovers. Results are present for a battery of robustness checks: for a sub-sample of ``close'' and ``further away'' countries, for both Emerging and Advanced economies, using local projection techniques and for alternative methods that control for ``information effects''. I argue that these biases may have led a previous literature to disregard or find little international spillovers of ECB rates.