Book Description

This dissertation explores the nexus between asset and credit market cycles, short-run fluctuations, and growth. What factors contribute to slow and incomplete recoveries from major crises? Why are some economies more prone to such dynamics than others and what lessons does it offer for policymakers? These are among the questions that I explore in my research. In the first chapter, I document that persistent fluctuations in trend growth -- medium frequency cycles -- tend to be more volatile and negatively skewed in emerging as opposed to developed small open economies. I argue that this evidence can be understood as stemming from the non-linear interaction between credit cycles, occasionally binding collateral constraints, and innovation-driven endogenous growth. Negative shocks are highly detrimental to productivity growth in vulnerable economies that are prone to sudden stops, but this is not the case in economies with deep financial markets where agents are more often able to optimally borrow to offset temporary negative income shocks. The second chapter studies the long-term effects of housing market boom-and-bust cycles. I first examine the relationship between the dynamics of the housing market, household debt, and economic activity in a historical panel of 50 countries. I show that housing market crashes robustly predict slower future output growth, most of which is explained by slower total factor productivity growth. Notably, the magnitude of this relation is increasing in the measure of preexisting household debt. To interpret these stylized facts, I construct a two-agent (borrower-saver) dynamic general equilibrium model with an occasionally binding collateral constraint tied to housing equity. Productivity grows endogenously in the model through forward-looking innovation investment. When the preexisting level of debt is sufficiently high, negative housing demand shocks cause the collateral constraint to bind and trigger deleveraging. The endogenous slowdown in TFP growth emerges as one of the adjustment margins during this process, prolonging the real effects of a crisis. The initial shock is amplified by a negative feedback loop between deleveraging, borrowers' housing wealth, and growth. I use the calibrated model to identify implications for the policy response during episodes of household deleveraging. Measures that reduce the debt burden of borrowers are effective in alleviating the short-run and persistent effects of deleveraging. In terms of monetary policy, the endogenous response of productivity growth warrants a greater focus on short-run output stabilization as opposed to inflation stabilization. Finally, in the third chapter (joint with Fabio Ghironi) we study the macroeconomic consequences of trade policy uncertainty emphasizing its negative effects on productivity growth. To that end, we build a small open economy model with nominal rigidity, innovation-driven endogenous growth, and time-varying volatility of domestic import tariffs. Several conclusions emerge: import tariff uncertainty shocks act as aggregate supply shocks; they cause a temporary improvement of the current account along with the real exchange rate appreciation in the medium run. In addition, an increase in import tariff uncertainty causes a sharp decline in the introduction of new intermediate products, which is detrimental to productivity growth and prolongs the effect of the shock. The size of these persistent effects -- relative to short-term effects -- is much larger for tariff uncertainty shock than for tariff level shocks. We show that endogenous risk premia in equity and bond markets is the key channel transmitting the shock to the broader economy and study role monetary policy in shaping it.