Research

Published Works

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.

Time series analysis shows that a US monetary tightening leads to economic contractions in non-US countries. We develop small open economy (SOE) models that include standard frictions like balance sheet effects, UIP frictions, sticky-in-dollar export prices, etc. that capture these spillover effects quantitatively. We also include the VAR-estimated import decline that accompanies US monetary tightenings. Using counterfactual experiments, we identify the decline in US imports as the most important mechanism by which a US monetary contraction affects other economies. We also document that Emerging Market Economies (EME) exhibit more pronounced contractions compared with Advanced Economies (AE). Additional counterfactual experiments attribute the limited contraction in AEs primarily to relatively high home bias in AE production. Finally, our findings suggest that FX interventions are relatively ineffective in mitigating the effects of a US monetary contraction that is accompanied by reductions in US imports and inflation. FX interventions are relatively more effective in the face of pure ‘noise’ shocks in financial markets and in the scenario in which a US monetary policy contraction is not associated with a decline in US imports and inflation. 

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.

I analyze the sluggish response of exports during and after financial crises using firm level data for two countries-episodes: Argentina 2001 and Peru 1998 crises. I find that both incumbent exporting firms do not expand and that there’s no significant entry of new exporting firms. Furthermore, I present evidence that suggests that the export elasticity to the real exchange rate is asymmetric, smaller for depreciations than for appreciations. I build and estimate a DSGE model for a small open economy where exporting entrepreneurs are subject to financial frictions and balance sheet effects in order to try and explain these stylized facts. Although these frictions decrease the response of exports to movements in the exchange rate, I use computational exercises to show that they are not enough to explain the empirical results. 

Earlier version of this paper was Awarded the Julio H. G. Olivera Prize

We study the role of financial frictions in explaining firm level export performance during episodes of financial crisis. In particular, we use the Great Recession and the Argentina 2018 Sudden Stop crisis to analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact export behavior in Latin American economies. Using firm level data for a panel of countries, we find that firms that export goods more intensive in financial needs suffer a greater impact during the Great Recession and had a higher probability of exiting foreign markets and not re-entering during the aftermath. Next, we estimate the elasticity of exports to credit in dollars using matched customs and firm-level bank credit data from Argentina. We control for firms' exposure to foreign currency debt and find that firms with higher exposure experienced a lower export growth after large exchange rate fluctuations. We construct an heterogeneous firm model in which entrepreneurs face both a working capital and borrowing constraint. We parametrize our analytical framework using our empirical results and do numerical simulations of export performance during the recovery of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Working Papers

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 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.