We develop a baseline model of monetary and fiscal transmission in interdependent economies. The welfare effects of expansionary policies are related to monopolistic supply in production and monopoly power of a country in trade. An unanticipated exchange rate depreciation can be beggar-thyself rather than beggar-thy-neighbor, as gains in domestic output are offset by deteriorating terms of trade. Smaller and more open economies are more prone to suffer from inflationary shocks. Larger economies benefit from moderate demand-led expansions, but may be worse off if policy-makers attempt to close the output gap. Fiscal shocks are generally beggar-thy-neighbor in the long run; in the short run they raise domestic demand at given terms of trade, thus reducing the welfare benefits from monetary expansions. Analytical tractability makes our model uniquely suitable as a starting point to approach the recent "new open-economy macroeconomic" literature.
A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to efficient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with crosscountry consumption ratios. This paper shows that a standard international business cycle model with incomplete asset markets augmented with distribution services can account quantitatively for these properties of real exchange rates. Distribution services, intensive in local inputs, drive a wedge between producer and consumer prices, thus lowering the impact of terms-of-trade changes on optimal agents' decisions. This reduces the price elasticity of tradables separately from assumptions on preferences. Two very different patterns of the international transmission of positive technology shocks generate the observed degree of risk-sharing: one associated with improving, the other with deteriorating terms of trade and real exchange rate. In both cases, large equilibrium swings in international relative prices magnify consumption risk due to country-specific shocks, running counter to risk sharing. Suggestive evidence on the effect of productivity changes in U.S. manufacturing is found in support of the first transmission pattern, questioning the presumption that terms-of-trade movements in response to supply shocks invariably foster international riskpooling.
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