Transmission Of Aggregate Shocks Research Articles

Lemons Markets and the Transmission of Aggregate Shocks

I study a dynamic economy featuring adverse selection in asset markets. Borrowing constrained entrepreneurs sell past projects to finance new investment, but asymmetric information creates a lemons problem. I show that this friction is equivalent to a tax on financial transactions. The implicit tax rate responds to aggregate shocks, generating amplification in the response of investment and cyclical variation in liquidity. (JEL D82, D92, E32, E44, G31, L15)

Financial integration within Europe and the international transmission of business cycles among industrialized countries

We exploit a dataset on financial integration within Europe to answer a novel question in the international Real Business Cycle (RBC) literature. Does financial integration within Europe matter for the international transmission of business cycles between the United States and Europe? We find that it does, and that as European countries become more financially integrated among themselves, European business cycles start to ‘decouple’ from those in the United States. We show that this is true for three macro indicators of economic activity: Gross Domestic Product (GDP), consumption and investment, and for five alternative measures of the degree of financial integration. We also show that the effect of trade linkages becomes insignificant once financial factors are accounted for. Our work has interesting policy implications since it unveils the importance of further integration in the EU to slow down the transmission of aggregate shocks among industrialized nations.

Liberalization Policy: ‘Fits & Starts’ or Gradual Change in India

In this paper we assess the impact of external economic liberalization in India on the transmission of aggregate shocks. We examine the relative importance of domestic and external shocks and capture their feedback effects by estimating an eight variable vector autoregression (VAR) model. We also test two propositions regarding the nature of India's liberalization policy: 1) under intermittency (or ‘fits and starts’) the transmission of aggregate shocks in the post-reform period is compared with two pre-reform periods; and 2) under gradualism the transmission of aggregate shocks over three consecutive episodes of economic reform are compared. Our test first consists of a simple regression analysis using output, interest rates, and prices for India and its world counterparts. The analysis is extended to include dummy variables and distributed lags method. Finally, we apply the recursive regression method and Chow-tests to uncover breaks in the estimated parameters. The preponderance of evidence suggests that India's liberalization policy has followed a continuous and smooth path, at least since the mid 1970s.