Macroeconomics

This paper examines what we have learned about monetary policy strategy and considers how we should change our thinking in this regard in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis. It starts with a discussion of where the science of monetary policy stood before the crisis and how central banks viewed monetary policy strategy. It then examines how the crisis has changed the thinking of both macro/monetary economists and central bankers. Finally, it looks at what implications this change in thinking has had for monetary policy science and strategy.

This paper documents that intermediaries play an important role in facilitating international trade. We modify a heterogeneous firm model to allow for an intermediary sector. The model predicts that firms will endogenously select their mode of export-either directly or indirectly through an intermediary-based on productivity. The model also predicts that intermediaries will be relatively more important in markets that are more difficult to penetrate.

Building on his expertise in macroeconomic policymaking at the Federal Reserve, Mishkin's Macroeconomics: Policy and Practice text clearly provides a theoretical framework that illustrates the most current and relevant policy debates in the field.

During 2008 and 2009, the insurance industry experienced unprecedented volatility. The large swings in insurers' market valuations, and the significant role that financial reporting played in the uncertainty surrounding insurance companies during that period, highlight the importance of understanding insurers' financial information and its implications for the risk and value of insurance companies.

In the fall of 2008, fifteen of the world's leading economists — representing the broadest spectrum of economic opinion — gathered at New Hampshire's Squam Lake. Their goal: the mapping of a long-term plan for financial regulation reform.

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activities are almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We first show that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functional managers (who desire excessive standardization) and business-unit managers (who desire excessive local adaptation). We then study how the allocation of authority and tasks to functional and business-unit managers interacts with this endogenous incentive conflict.

This paper proposes a simple model to study how domestic institutions affect patterns of international capital flows. Inefficient financial system, and poor corporate governance, may be bypassed by two-way capital flows in which domestic savings leave the country in the form of financial capital outflows but domestic investment takes place via inward FDI. While financial globalization always improves the welfare of a developed country with a good financial system, its effect is ambiguous for a developing country with an inefficient financial sector or poor corporate governance.

This paper argues that an important institutional tool to accelerate the transition of the global economy towards greater reliance on renewable energy is the establishment of an International Green Fund (IGF). Such a fund would provide and coordinate financing of green investments and research and development on renewable energy around the world. With the support of such a fund, long-term investors who are already pursuing green investment projects on an ad-hoc basis would be able to scale up these investments and reap larger returns from learning-by-doing and scale economies.