Showing results 1 - 10 of 33
March 29, 2021, Video: "The Geneva Trade and Development Workshop (GTDW) is a seminar series, featuring invited speakers in the area of International Trade. It has been running for over ten years, with onsite meetings on a weekly basis in the Fall (September – December) and Spring (February – June) semesters. It is organized jointly by the Graduate Institute in Geneva (IHEID), the University of Geneva (UniGe), the World Trade Organization (WTO)…
December 16, 2020, Video: "This event was held as part of a series of high-level webinars that was part of the 19th BIS Annual Conference. The webinar "Global financial system and exchange rates" was delivered by Matteo Maggiori and followed by a discussion with Laura Alfaro and Linda Tesar on 16 December." Watch Via The Bank for International Settlements…
September 3, 2020, Paper: "In the past decade, foreign participation in local-currency bond markets in emerging countries increased dramatically. Additionally, emerging countries are increasingly deviating from inflation targeting regimes, managing their exchange rate and engaging in exchange-rate accumulation. In light of these trends, we revisit sovereign debt sustainability, and the choice of the optimal exchange-rate regime, under the…
July 8, 2020, Opinion, "Rising trade barriers, fluctuations in capital flows, financial volatility, and spillovers from industrialized countries’ monetary policies create a challenging global environment for emerging markets. These challenges are further complicated by low productivity growth and domestic vulnerabilities in the public sector, financial intermediaries and the private sector. Against this background, the IMF, IMF Economic Review,…
| Lawrence H. Summers | Robin Greenwood | Carmen Reinhart | Dani Rodrik | Juliette Kayyem | Herman B. (Dutch) Leonard
April 23, 2020, Video. "On Tuesday April 14th, Harvard Business School hosted the MBA Program’s COVID-19 Symposium. The symposium consisted of a series of fireside chats between HBS faculty and several of Harvard University’s leading thinkers, who help us better understand the challenges that COVID-19 poses to public health, to our economies and globalization, and to the way we live. Speakers included Ashish Jha of the Harvard Chan School of…
Pandemics Fragilities: Halt in Hyper-specialized GVC and the Big-Dollar-Hunger. Laura Alfaro, March 2020, Paper, "The risk of pandemics or natural disasters made clear the cascading damages of an un-diversified global value chain (trade fragilities), also for basic retail products. The halt in dollar-denominated payments to intermediate good firms from countries pivotal in the Global Value Chain (GVC) induced a big dollar hunger and the exorbitant…
Undisclosed Debt Sustainability. Laura Alfaro, 2019, Paper, "Over the past decade, non–Paris Club creditors, notably China, have become an important source of financing for low- and middle-income countries. In contrast with typical sovereign debt, these lending arrangements are not public, and other creditors have no information about their magnitude. We transform the traditional sovereign debt and default model to quantitatively study…
Corporate Debt, Firm Size and Financial Fragility in Emerging Markets. Laura Alfaro, January 2019, Paper, "The post-Global Financial Crisis period shows a surge in corporate leverage in emerging markets and a number of countries with deteriorated corporate financial fragility indicators (Altman’s Z-score). Firm size plays a critical role in the relationship between leverage, firm fragility and exchange rate movements in emerging markets. While…
Introduction to: the euro at twenty. Laura Alfaro, November 27, 2018, Book Chapter, "January 1, 2019 marks 20 years since the introduction of the euro. This anniversary presents an opportunity to reflect on lessons learned from the first 20 years of EMU in Europe, and consider prospects for the future. The last few years have demonstrated the strains possible when multiple countries engage together in the bold venture of monetary union. The…
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity: Regional Heterogeneity, Asymmetries and Hysteresis. Laura Alfaro, May 2018, Paper, "We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001-2010. We uncover the following stylized facts: In export-oriented emerging Asia, real depreciations are associated with faster growth of firm-…