Managing Director, Global Investment Research, Goldman Sachs International
My latest research is available for clients and subscribers of Goldman Sachs research only since October 2020.
Until September 2020
Associate Professor of the Practice in International Economics, SAIS - The Johns Hopkins University
PhD in Economics, Columbia University
Macroeconomic Risk and International Finance, SAIS - The Johns Hopkins University
Macroeconomics, SAIS - The Johns Hopkins University
International Monetary Theory, SAIS - The Johns Hopkins University
Curriculum Vitae, Google Scholar citations and my IDEAS-RePEc and SSRN pages.
E-mail: ftaddei@jhu.edu
Twitter: @taddei76
This paper studies how the currency composition of public debt affects debt sustainability in developing countries. We show empirically that the debt-to-GDP ratio tends to grow at a faster rate when countries with a high share of foreign currency debt face a currency depreciation. The paper also discusses the moral hazard problems associated with the presence of domestic currency debt and shows that, for the average country, there is no evidence of a positive correlation between local currency borrowing and inflation. However, moral hazard is a concern for countries with weak institutions where we find that a large share of domestic currency debt is associated with higher inflation. The paper also develops a stylized model that emphasizes the complementarities between foreign and local currency borrowing and highlights that they are complements rather than substitutes. The key intuition is that, while foreign currency debt reduces the incentives to debt monetization, local currency improves debt sustainability by providing a better hedge against external shocks. The paper concludes that the policy framework should consider encouraging a mix of foreign and domestic currency borrowing. This is likely to be particularly useful for low-income countries that are jointly characterized by weak institutions (hence, the importance of the commitment device associated with foreign currency debt) and large external shocks (hence, the importance of the insurance element associated with the presence of domestic debt).
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Lamfalussy Fellowship Paper, ECB Working Paper, No 2167
The connection between the financial crisis and global imbalances is controversial. This paper argues that this relationship is likely to be connected to the existence of heterogenous financial frictions in different domestic credit markets. By developing a general equilibrium model where adverse selection and limited pledgeability coexist, this work highlights why adverse selection may play a pivotal role in determining the different (often opposing) welfare effects of international capital flows on originating and destination countries. This perspective also advances an analytical framework that is flexible enough to analyze the global effects on investment allocation of the ”Saving Glut”, of the policies facilitating financial integration and macro-prudential policy.
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In recent years, some countries have issued sovereign bonds indexed to real variables such as GDP. Other countries are discussing the possibility of implementing similar instruments, especially in relationship to the persistent volatility in the Euro debt market. This paper analyzes the portfolio and welfare effects of introducing this type of debt contracts in a standard DSGE model with sovereign default risk. Our quantitative analysis, calibrated to the Argentine economy, shows that GDP-indexed sovereign debt contracts reduce the probability of default, decrease consumption volatility and increase welfare. More surprisingly, GDP-indexed debt makes the government more willing to hold non-contingent assets at the same time. We develop significant insights regarding the shape of the optimal contract under which the government minimizes defaults.
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The degree of intergenerational altruism is estimated in a benchmark Barro-type OLG framework with imperfect altruism, exploiting the exogenous variation generated by reforms of the tax treatment of bequests and inter vivos real estate donations enacted in Italy between 2000 and 2001. Using longitudinal information on the housing stock and house prices in 13 large Italian cities between 1993 and 2004, the structural parameter of interest is estimated via the effect of the reform on house prices. We estimate a degree of intergenerational altruism ranging between 0.2 and 0.3, a magnitude consistent with existing parametrization for the US economy. This suggests that intergenerational altruism may be similar across advanced economies.
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The financial crisis of 2007–08 has underscored the importance of adverse selection in financial markets. This friction has been mostly neglected by macroeconomic models of financial imperfections, which have focused almost exclusively on the effects of limited pledgeability. In this paper, we fill this gap by developing a standard growth model with adverse selection. Our main results are that, by fostering unproductive investment, adverse selection: (i) leads to an increase in the economy's equilibrium interest rate, and; (ii) it generates a negative wedge between the marginal return to investment and the equilibrium interest rate. Under international financial integration, we show how this translates into excessive capital inflows and endogenous cycles. We also extend our model to the more general case in which adverse selection and limited pledgeability coexist. We conclude that both frictions complement one another and show that limited pledgeability exacerbates the effects of adverse selection.
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In this paper we consider the problem of uncertainty related to growth through innovations. We study a stylized, although rich, growth model, in which the stochastic innovations follow a Bayesian nonparametric model, and provide the full taxonomy of the asymptotic equilibria. In most cases the variability around the average aggregate behaviour does not vanish asymptotically: this requires to accompany usual macroeconomic mean predictions with some measure of uncertainty, which is readily yielded by the adopted Bayesian nonparametric approach. Moreover, we discover that the extent of the asymptotic variability is the result of the interaction between the rate at which the economy creates new sectors and the concavity of returns in sector specific technologies.
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