This paper shows that an income effect can drive expenditure switching between domestic and imported goods. We use a unique Latvian scanner-level dataset, covering the 2008–2009 crisis, to document several empirical findings. First, expenditure switching accounted for one-third of the fall in imports, and took place within narrowly defined product groups. Second, there was no corresponding within-group change in relative prices. Third, consumers substituted from expensive imports to cheaper domestic alternatives. These findings motivate us to estimate a model of nonhomothetic consumer demand, which explains two-thirds of the observed expenditure switching. Estimated switching is driven by income, not changes in relative prices.

Forward-looking behavior on the part of the monetary authority makes it difficult to estimate the effect of monetary policy interventions on output. We present instrumental variables estimates of the impact of interest rates on quarterly real output for several European countries, using German interest rates as the instrument. These estimates confirm a strong forward-looking bias in least squares estimates that persists even conditional on standard controls for the history of the system. Due to the potential for correlation of output shocks across countries, we interpret our estimates as lower bounds for the effect of monetary policy on real output.

We quantify the role of global production linkages in explaining spillovers of U.S. monetary policy shocks on country‐sector stock returns. We estimate a structural spatial autoregression (SAR) model that is consistent with an open‐economy production network framework. Using the SAR model, we decompose the total impact of U.S. monetary policy on global stock returns into direct and network effects. Nearly 70% of the total impact is due to the network effect of global production linkages. Empirical counterfactuals show that shutting down global production linkages halves the total impact of U.S. monetary policy shocks.

This paper proposes a new mechanism by which country size and international trade affect macroeconomic volatility. We study a model with heterogeneous firms that are subject to idiosyncratic firm-specific shocks, calibrated to data for the 50 largest economies in the world. When the firm size distribution follows a power law with an exponent close to minus one, idiosyncratic shocks to large firms have an impact on aggregate volatility. Smaller countries have fewer firms and, thus, higher volatility. Trade opening makes the large firms more important, thus raising macroeconomic volatility. Trade can increase aggregate volatility by 15–20 percent in some small open economies.

This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business-cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added and international linkages over the period 1993–2007. At the micro level, trade and multinational linkages with a particular foreign country are associated with a significantly higher correlation between a firm and that foreign country. The impact of direct linkages on comovement at the micro level has significant macro implications. Without those linkages the correlation between France and foreign countries would fall by about 0.098, or one-third of the observed average correlation of 0.291 in our sample of partner countries.

This paper investigates the role of the top 100 firms in France in aggregate business cycle comovement. We establish that the top 100 firms (i) are important in aggregate; (ii) exhibit stronger international linkages than the rest of the economy; and (iii) contribute substantially to aggregate comovement.

International audience

This paper examines the mechanisms through which output volatility is related to trade openness using an industry-level panel data set of manufacturing production and trade. The main results are threefold. First, sectors more open to international trade are more volatile. Second, trade is accompanied by increased specialization. These two forces imply increased aggregate volatility. Third, sectors that are more open to trade are less correlated with the rest of the economy, an effect that acts to reduce overall volatility. The point estimates indicate that each of the three effects has an appreciable impact on aggregate volatility. Added together they imply that the relationship between trade openness and overall volatility is positive and economically significant.

This article studies the transmission of the Global Financial Cycle (GFC) to domestic credit market conditions in a large emerging market, Turkey, over 2003–13. We use administrative data covering the universe of corporate credit transactions matched to bank balance sheets to document four facts: (1) an easing in global financial conditions leads to lower borrowing costs and an increase in local lending; (2) domestic banks more exposed to international capital markets transmit the GFC locally; (3) the fall in local currency borrowing costs is larger than foreign currency borrowing costs due to the co-movement of the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) premium with the GFC over time; (4) data on posted collateral for new loan issuances show that collateral constraints do not relax during the boom phase of the GFC.