Rodolfo Oviedo Moguel
I am a research economist at the Macroeconomics Analysis Division of the Central Bank of Mexico. Prior to that, I earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis. In my research and policy work, I study the following topics: i. the real effects of credit, ii. the evolution, drivers, and macro implications of the housing market, and iii. the distribution of income and wealth. On the policy side, I am responsible for constructing two house price indices for Mexico.
E-mail: macroviedo@gmail.com, roviedom@banxico.org.mx
Research:
Previously circulated as "The Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks During the COVID-19 Pandemic" (Banco de México Working Paper 2024-16). Winner of the 2024 Victor L. Urquidi Economics Prize.
joint with Carlo Alcaraz, Nicolás Amoroso, Alex Rivadeneira, Brenda Samaniego and Horacio Sapriza
This paper studies the drivers and real effects of credit supply shocks during a major non-financial recession in Mexico: the COVID-19 crisis. Using administrative data on the universe of bank commercial loans, we isolate the supply-driven component of credit variations. We find that, during this period, credit supply conditions deteriorated, primarily driven by banks’ heightened risk aversion rather than by liquidity constraints. Moreover, these negative credit supply shocks transmitted into the real sector. Using social security records, we find that negative credit supply shocks reduced firms' employment and increased their exit probability. These effects are larger among financially constrained firms and among workers with lower separation costs. The size of these effects accounts for between 28% and 30% of the employment decline for small firms in our sample. The magnitude of these effects was comparable to those observed during the Great Recession, despite this being a non-financial recession.
House Prices and the Distribution of Wealth Around the Great Recession (Banco de México Working Paper 2023-04).
joint with Richard Condor
This paper employs a calibrated model of the US economy to analyze the causes behind the housing market boom and bust and the shifts in wealth distribution around the Great Recession. We replicate the dynamics of the housing and mortgage markets using shocks to income (level and distribution), credit conditions, and expectations of future housing demand driven by irrational exuberance. According to our counterfactual exercises, irrational exuberance was the primary driver behind the dynamics of house prices. Additionally, the loosening and subsequent tightening of credit conditions are crucial to explain the behavior of mortgage debt, default rates, and housing holdings of the Bottom 80% of the net worth distribution. Swings in house prices explain most of the dynamics in net worth, and without its expansion, the concentration of wealth would have been higher.
The Role of Credit on the Evolution of Wealth Inequality in the USA (Banco de México Working Paper 2020-13).
In the USA, the share of total household wealth held by the richest 1% increased from 23.5% in 1980 to 41.8% in 2012. This paper contributes to understand the causes behind this increase. First, using an accounting exercise, we show that between 44% and 66% of the increase in the wealth share going to the top 1% can be accounted by a decrease in the saving rate of the bottom 99% wealth holders relative to its 1950-1980 levels. Second, we show that the observed pattern in savings cannot be rationalized by the reduction in the progressively of taxation and changes in the volatility and concentration of labor earnings in the context of a heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic model. While these two forces generated more wealth concentration, they imply an increase in the overall saving rate of the economy, a highly counterfactual result. Lastly, we show that introducing a shock to the credit market into our model in the form of a loosening in the borrowing constraints of the economy, is able to simultaneously match the increase in wealth concentration and the decrease of the saving rate of the overall economy in line with what is observed in the data.
An Hedonic House Price Index for Mexico
joint with Nicolás Amoroso, Robert Hill and Carlos Reyna
In this paper, we employ the Rolling Time Window methodology to develop house price indexes for Mexico from 2006 to 2023 at the national, regional, and city levels. Our study leverages a unique and extensive dataset, encompassing thousands of offering prices and detailed characteristics of houses and apartments developed by housing developers nationwide. The national house price index experienced a 5% drop in real terms between 2006 and 2012, attributed to the Great Recession and its subsequent slow recovery. This downturn was followed by an increase of 23% between 2012 and 2020 and was then succeeded by a phase of stagnation amid and post the COVID-19 pandemic. We also document important heterogeneity in the behavior of the indexes by location and property type. [draft coming soon]