Book Description

As the world economy becomes rapidly integrated through the globalization of markets for goods and services, it is crucial to understand how cross-country linkages through goods and financial markets explain observed business cycles in data. Furthermore, interdependent open economies imply that optimal policy is unlikely to be responding to domestic shocks only. This dissertation studies various aspects of open economies from a macroeconomic perspective and discusses related theoretical policy implications. Chapter 1 investigates the implication of intermediate goods on optimal monetary policy in open economies, and in particular, focusing on the welfare gains from monetary cooperation. In a relatively standard two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with input-output relations, I demonstrate that introducing intermediate goods can amplify the welfare gains caused by cost-push shocks by an order of magnitude larger. A detailed analysis on the equilibrium dynamics highlights a new channel that is absent in the previous literature: non-cooperative central banks respond differently to shocks in the intermediate goods market versus shocks in the final goods market, even if these shocks generate the same distortions when the two central banks cooperate. Furthermore, I find that increasing the degree of openness in the intermediate goods market can reduce the welfare gains from monetary cooperation. This casts doubt on whether the recent trend in international economic integration may justify the potential need for international monetary cooperation. Chapter 2 develops a simple framework for computing equilibrium shares of trade currency invoicing in open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The solution method follows closely to Devereux and Sutherland (2011)'s method in solving portfolio choice by applying information from second-order approximations of equilibrium conditions to solving zero-order portfolio shares. The framework is flexible enough to be extended to a Rotemberg sticky price model. To illustrate the approach, I use a simple symmetric two-country model and show that the results are consistent with existing theoretical findings on how monetary policy affects exchange rate pass-through. Chapter 3 investigates the interaction between inequality and financial development in determining the condition for rational asset bubbles to emerge in general equilibrium. I develop a simple overlapping generations model (OLG) with a production economy and financial frictions, which shows that wage inequality can cause dynamic inefficiency in an economy with an underdeveloped financial sector. Furthermore, the model developed in the chapter indicates that trade integration can create asset bubbles through the channel of increasing inequality. The result is consistent with observations where developing countries with export-led growth seem to experience episodes of bubble-like asset price booms and busts in the last three decades.