Paper

In economies with fixed exchange rates, the adjustment to government spending shocks is asymmetric. Expansionary shocks are absorbed by the real exchange rate, contractionary shocks by output. This result emerges in a small open economy model with downward nominal wage rigidity and is supported by new empirical evidence based on panel data from different exchange-rate regimes. The exchange-rate regime, economic slack, inflation, and how spending is financed all matter for the fiscal transmission mechanism in the way predicted by the model. Estimates that fail to distinguish between the effects of positive and negative shocks are subject to a “depreciation bias”.

Working Paper

Informality is pervasive in many developing economies and is often accompanied by low investment in human capital.  We study the effects of international trade through the lens of a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and workers, featuring labor market frictions. Complementarity between workers' human capital investment and firms' hiring decisions can give rise to multiple equilibria. We show that trade can act as a coordinating device that triggers a Big Push, shifting the economy from a "bad" equilibrium, with low human capital and high informality, to a "good" equilibrium, where firms have stronger incentives to formalize and workers invest more in human capital. The novel mechanism we uncover involves effort in human capital investment as a key margin of adjustment to trade shocks.