Showing results 1 - 10 of 52
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,…
2020, Paper, "Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, small-firm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on accounting identities and actual data, quantifies potential job and income losses during the crisis and recovery for economies with different economic organization…
May 1, 2020, Paper, "In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google search terms. Combining these data with experimentally validated measures of social preferences at the regional level, we find that stringency measures matter less…
| 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…
Sticky Capital Controls. Laura Alfaro, April 3, 2020, Paper, "There is much ongoing debate on the merits of capital controls as effective policy instruments. The differing perspectives are due in part to a lack of empirical studies that look at the intensive margin of controls, which in turn has prevented a quantitative assessment of optimal capital control models against the data. We contribute to this debate by addressing both positive and…
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…