Real Effects of Sovereign Debt Inflow Shocks

By Lorenzo Pandolfi and Tomas Williams

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper analyzes the real effects on firms of sovereign debt inflow shocks in emerging countries. We follow Broner et al. (2019) and exploit six episodes of country inclusions into two major local currency sovereign debt indexes. We complement their ev...

Do Sounder Banks Make Calmer Waters? The Link between Bank Regulations and Capital Flow Waves

By Kristin J. Forbes

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper tests if prudential and macroprudential regulations have meaningfully reduced the incidence of capital flow "waves," that is, of sudden stops and surges of capital flows from abroad. The results support other work documenting changes since 20...

The Global Financial Cycle after Lehman

By Silvia Miranda-Agrippino and Hélène Rey

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Did the effect of US monetary policy on the global financial cycle change after the crisis? We analyze the international transmission of the Fed's policy shocks since 2009. We find similar effects for the policies that act mostly on the short end of the U...

The Dollar, Bank Leverage, and Real Economic Activity: An Evolving Relationship

By Burcu Erik, Marco J. Lombardi, Dubravko Mihaljek, and Hyun Song Shin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The interest in how financial conditions affect real economic activity has grown since the great financial crisis (GFC), not least because some of the mechanisms at play in the financial sector may have changed. We shed light on this issue by examining th...

Impact of Foreign Official Purchases of US Treasuries on the Yield Curve

By Erin L. Wolcott

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Foreign governments went from owning a tenth of publicly available US Treasury notes and bonds in 1985 to over half in 2008. Recently, foreign governments have reduced their positions. I find foreign official purchases have depressed medium-term yields, d...

Who's Paying for the US Tariffs? A Longer-Term Perspective

By Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David E. Weinstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Using another year of data including significant escalations in the trade war, we find that the costs of the US tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by US firms and consumers. We show that the response of import values to the tariffs increases in ...

The Looming Threat of Tariff Hikes: Entry into Exporting under Trade Agreement Renegotiation

By Meredith A. Crowley, Oliver Exton, and Lu Han

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We examine how the looming threat of tariff hikes under a trade agreement renegotiation impacts firm entry into a trading partner's market by exploiting uncertainty over the future UK-EU trade relationship brought about by the June 2016 Brexit referendum....

Brexit Uncertainty: Trade Externalities beyond Europe

By Alejandro G. Graziano, Kyle Handley, and Nuno Limão

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We examine if Brexit uncertainty has trade externalities beyond Europe. Using detailed data on export values and participation, tariffs, and Brexit probabilities prior to the referendum, we estimate ongoing negative trade-uncertainty elasticities between ...

Theory and Measurement of Common Ownership

By Matthew Backus, Christopher Conlon, and Michael Sinkinson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The common ownership hypothesis, that the presence of diversified investors with holdings in competing firms distorts behavior away from own-firm profit maximization, has generated substantial controversy. Here, we focus on the problem of measuring common...

Diversification, Common Ownership, and Strategic Incentives

By Albert Banal-Estañol, Jo Seldeslachts, and Xavier Vives

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We argue that within-industry investor diversification is directly related to common ownership incentives (profit loads on rival firms by the manager of a firm) in product markets. Because of their respective investment strategies, passive investors are n...

Active Investors, Passive Investors, and Common Ownership

By Oz Shy and Rune Stenbacka

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Recent studies have extensively examined the hypothesis that a higher degree of common ownership relaxes competition. This approach has typically conducted comparative statics analysis based on exogenously given rates of common ownership. This study const...

The Anticompetitive Effects of Common Ownership: The Case of Paragraph IV Generic Entry

By Jin Xie and Joseph Gerakos

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Brand-name pharmaceutical companies often file lawsuits against generic drug manufacturers that challenge the monopoly status of patent-protected drugs. Institutional horizontal shareholdings, measured by the generic shareholders' ownership in the brand-n...

Split Apart: Differentiation, Diversion, and Coordination in the Market for Superpremium Ice Cream

By Christopher Sullivan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

I explore recent behavior in the market for superpremium ice cream. I first document that the flavors offered in supermarkets by Ben & Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs became increasingly differentiated from 2006–2013. Using an estimated model of demand, I show ...

Countervailing Market Power and Consumer Surplus: An Empirical Examination

By Jorge Alé-Chilet and Juan Pablo Atal

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

A current debate in antitrusts analyzes whether to allow horizontal agreements that counteract large imbalances of power in vertical negotiations. We leverage detailed data to empirically assess the consequences for patients of a recent case in which a gr...

Improving Financial Inclusion through Digital Savings and Credit

By Prashant Bharadwaj and Tavneet Suri

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper examines the effects of promotions to increase participation in digital banking and improve financial inclusion. M-Shwari, Kenya's most popular digital banking platform, ran a promotion called Stawisha Na M-Shwari from mid-April 2016 to early J...

Migration, Money Transfers, and Mobile Money: Evidence from Niger

By Jenny C. Aker, Silvia Prina, and C. Jamilah Welch

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Mobile money can reduce the cost of sending remittances as compared with traditional money transfer systems. Despite remittances being a crucial part of the West African economy, mobile money is failing to take off. We use supply and demand data for money...

Adopting Mobile Money: Evidence from an Experiment in Rural Africa

By Catia Batista and Pedro C. Vicente

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Who uses mobile money, and what do people do with it? This paper describes mobile money adoption patterns following the experimental introduction of mobile money for the first time in rural areas of Southern Mozambique. We use administrative and household...

Cashing In (and Out): Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Mobile Money in Malawi

By Shilpa Aggarwal, Valentina Brailovskaya, and Jonathan Robinson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We present results from a randomized control trial on access to mobile money with 480 entrepreneurs in Malawi. Treated individuals received account opening assistance and basic training on mobile money and were encouraged to save. Withdrawal fees were wai...

Is Community-Based Targeting Effective in Identifying Intimate Partner Violence?

By Jorge M. Agüero, Úrsula Aldana, Erica Field, Veronica Frisancho, and Javier Romero

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We measure the effectiveness of community-based targeting to identify victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Peru. In 254 villages, we collected self-reported data on IPV via a DHS-style questionnaire and compared it to a listing of women eli...

Women Empowerment Programs and Intimate Partner Violence

By Manuela Angelucci and Rachel Heath

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Women empowerment programs may reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) by improving autonomy, increasing bargaining power, and reducing socioeconomic stress. Yet, this might not happen if partners increase violence to either control the woman's resources o...