Essays on Macro-Financial Linkages in the Open Economy ; Aufsätze zur Rolle der makro-finanziellen Verflechtungen in offenen Volkswirtschaften
The global financial crisis of 2007/08 uncovered the need to integrate financial- and credit market frictions into macroeconomic models. This dissertation contributes to this research agenda by modelling and quantifying the role of financial market frictions in different topics in open economy macroeconomics through three essays. The first essay provides a quantitative assessment of financial market frictions in emerging economies. It asks which frictions and which shocks are most suitable for the explanation of emerging market business cycle data? The contribution is to develop and estimate a quantitative business cycle model of a small-open economy with a leveraged and capital importing banking sector. Further, I model financial sector shocks which capture the idea of a sudden change in investor preferences in a reduced form. Using Mexican quarterly data in a Bayesian estimation approach, I find that financial sector shocks play a more important role compared to shocks to the foreign interest rate in the determination of investment and trade dynamics, in particular after the global financial crisis. Further, the financial accelerator related to bank balance sheets jointly with financial sector shocks contribute to the procyclicality of capital flows. The second essay, which is joint work with Philipp Engler, asks how some advanced economies have become vulnerable to a simultaneous banking and sovereign debt crisis? The contribution is that we analyse the liquidity role of government debt for bank funding in a quantitative framework. We find that dynamics in sovereign risk premia and secured interbank intermediation during the European sovereign debt crisis can be captured by the concept of strategic default. While the high default penalty from a credit crunch extends the endogenous borrowing limit of an advanced economy such that higher debt levels are achieved, the recession following an unorderly sovereign default are more persistent due to the subsequent necessary reparations of bank balance sheets. The ...