Resilience of Nonprofit Serving or Led by People of Color During the COVID-19 Pandemic (with Guo Baorong and Nishesh Chalise) Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (2025) (NEW)
The nonprofit sector has experienced the first-hand impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to understand whether POC-serving or POC-led nonprofits (nonprofits serving or led by people of color) had disparate experiences during the pandemic. Data from the national COVID-19 Community Impact Survey are used to examine organizations’ perceived disruptions relative to the racial and ethnic characteristics in organizational leadership and communities served. We find that POC-serving and POC-led nonprofits were less likely to see an increase in government funds. In addition, POC-serving nonprofits were more likely to experience significant disruptions in service and an increase in demand. Nevertheless, they were less likely to report a decrease in ability to serve and staffing. Our findings reveal that inequities in funding exist in the nonprofit world. Yet, POC-serving or POC-led nonprofits were resilient and continued to meet the challenges arising from the pandemic.
Sovereign Debt Restructuring and Credit Recovery Economia LACEA Journal (2024) (NEW)
This paper focuses on the significant growth of domestic credit once the debt is restructured and shows that is not correlated with the size of the haircut. Second, it performs an event study around Ecuador's sovereign default and restructuring of 2008-2009 to study changes in domestic bank lending behavior. After external debt restructuring, private lending increased the most for banks highly exposed to public debt. Finally, it provides a simple model were uncertainty about the return on government external debt during default has spillover effects on the domestic economy by creating dispersion in beliefs across domestic banks, which leads to a misallocation of credit. External debt restructuring eliminates domestic belief heterogeneity by making the return on bonds observable to everyone. This simple framing is not only consistent with the substantial growth in domestic credit upon debt restructuring but also with its independence from the haircut size observed in the data.
Demographic disparities in COVID-19 disruptions: What has shaped them? Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review (Fourth Quarter 2023)
This paper uses the Community Impact Survey implemented by the Federal Reserve System in 2021 to identify COVID-19 disruptions on low-to-moderate-income communities. First, this work show that communities primarily of color were more likely to be significantly disrupted by COVID-19 than white communities. Second, it assesses the importance of certain challenges such as returning to work or unequal access to government relief in shaping observed demographic differences in disruption.
Sovereign Illiquidity and Recessions (Paper) - Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (2021)
This paper examines the importance of sovereign debt liquidity in a New Keynesian environment with wage rigidities and financial frictions a la Kiyotaki and Moore (2012). The analysis implies that, independently of credit risk, a decrease in the liquidity of government bonds has significant detrimental effects on output, employment and investment. A shutdown of sovereign debt market for one quarter generates a 7% drop in output and investment as well as a 2% increase in unemployment. In addition, in a framework where the only sources of variation are private and public liquidity shocks, sovereign bond market illiquidity can account for at least two thirds of the output drop in Italy between 2011q2 and 2013q1. This suggests that ECB's temporary policies taken in 2012 aimed at rising liquidity seem to have prevented a longer and deeper economic downturn.
Lockdown Responses to COVID-19 (Paper) - Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review (Second Quarter 2021)
This paper describes the relationship between lock-down responses to COVID-19 pandemic across countries with macroeconomics variables as well as country vulnerability to the virus. Countries with high contagion exposure due to water sanitation and weak health systems locked-down their economies as fast as possible to reduce contagion. However, countries which were vulnerable to Covid-19 due to large fraction of elderly population or smokers did not respond differently than less vulnerable countries. Macroeconomic variables such as debt to GDP, unemployment, the government expenditure to GDP ratio among other variables do not seem to have significant relevance at explaining differences in the timing of shutdowns. In addition, democracy measures and civil rights freedom do not seem to have a role in explaining these differences either.