Macro developments leading up to the 2008 crisis displayed an unprecedented degree of international synchronization. Before the crisis, all G7 countries experienced credit growth and, around the time of the Lehman bankruptcy, they all faced sharp and large contractions in both real and financial activity. Using a two-country model with financial frictions, we show that a global liquidity shortage induced by pessimistic self-fulfilling expectations can quantitatively generate patterns like those observed in the data. The model also suggests that crises are less frequent with more international financial integration but, when they hit, they are larger and more synchronized across countries. (JEL E23, E32, E44, F44, G01)

Between 2007 and 2013, U.S. households experienced a large and persistent decline in net worth. The objective of this article is to study the business cycle implications of such a decline. We first develop a tractable monetary model in which households face idiosyncratic unemployment risk that they can partially self-insure using savings. A low level of liquid household wealth opens the door to self-fulfilling fluctuations: if wealth-poor households expect high unemployment, they have a strong precautionary incentive to cut spending, which can make the expectation of high unemployment a reality. Monetary policy, because of the zero lower bound, cannot rule out such expectations-driven recessions. In contrast, when wealth is sufficiently high, an aggressive monetary policy can keep the economy at full employment. Finally, we document that during the U.S. Great Recession wealth-poor households increased saving more sharply than richer households, pointing towards the importance of the precautionary channel over this period.

Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we first document that the recent increase in income inequality in the U.S. has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality. Much of this divergence is due to different trends in within-group inequality, which has increased significantly for income, but little for consumption. We then develop a simple framework that allows us to characterize analytically how within-group income inequality affects consumption inequality in a world in which agents can trade a full set of contingent consumption claims, subject to endogenous constraints emanating from the limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Finally, we quantitatively evaluate, in the context of a calibrated general equilibrium production economy, whether this set-up, or alternatively a standard incomplete markets model, can account for the documented stylized consumption inequality facts from the U.S. data.

In this paper we do two things. First we document that over the last 40 years the U.S. business cycle has become less synchronized with the cycle in the rest of the world. Second we try to explain why this has happened. We use a general-equilibrium model as a tool to discriminate between two alternative explanations: (i) a change in the nature of real shocks, and (ii) an increase in U.S. financial integration with the rest of the world. Our results indicate that financial integration has played the major role in producing the observed changes in international co-movement.

Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992), Baxter and Crucini (1995), and Stockman and Tesar (1995) find two major discrepancies between standard international business cycle models with complete markets and the data: In the models, cross-country correlations are much higher for consumption than for output, while in the data the opposite is true; and cross-country correlations of employment and investment are negative, while in the data they are positive. This paper introduces a friction into a standard model that helps resolve these anomalies. The friction is that international loans are imperfectly enforceable; any country can renege on its debts and suffer the consequences for future borrowing. To solve for equilibrium in this economy with endogenous incomplete markets, the methods of Marcet and Marimon (1999) are extended. Incorporating the friction helps resolve the anomalies more than does exogenously restricting the assets that can be traded.

The international diversification puzzle is the fact that country portfolios are on average biased toward domestic assets, while one-good international macro models with nondiversifiable labor income risk predict the opposite pattern of diversification. This paper embeds a portfolio choice decision in a two-good international business cycle model and provides a closed-form solution for equilibrium country portfolios. Equilibrium portfolios are biased toward domestic assets because endogenous international relative price fluctuations make domestic assets a good hedge against labor income risk. Evidence from developed economies in recent years is qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the mechanisms highlighted by the theory.

The US net foreign asset position declined sharply after 2007, reaching negative 60 percent of GDP by the third quarter of 2023. This deterioration primarily reflects a US-specific rise in corporate asset values that inflated the value of US equity liabilities to the rest of the world. To interpret these trends, we develop an international macrofinance model of flows, stocks, asset valuations, the current account, and the net foreign asset position. We find that the welfare impact of rising asset values for a representative US household has been quite negative given extensive foreign ownership of US corporate equity. (JEL F32, F21, F40, G15)

We study the problem of a monetary authority pursuing an exchange rate policy that is inconsistent with interest rate parity because of a binding zero lower bound constraint. The resulting violation in interest rate parity generates an inflow of capital that the monetary authority needs to absorb by accumulating foreign reserves. We show that these interventions by the monetary authority are costly, and we derive a simple measure of these costs: they are proportional to deviations from the covered interest parity (CIP) condition and the amount of accumulated foreign reserves. Our framework can account for the recent experiences of “safe-haven” currencies and the sign of their observed deviations from CIP.