This thesis consists of three chapters. The first two are regarding the political economy of international trade, the third is about empirical banking.Chapter 1 is titled "Suspiciously Timed Trade Disputes" and it is the result a joint work with Paola Conconi, David DeRemer, Georg Kirchsteiger, and Maurzio Zanardi. This Chapter is already published in the Volume 105 of the Journal of International Economics and it shows that electoral incentives crucially affect the initiation of trade disputes. Focusing on WTO disputes filed by the United States during the 1995-2014 period, we find that U.S. presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re-election. Moreover, U.S. trade disputes are more likely to involve industries that are important in swing states. To explain these regularities, we develop a theoretical model in which re-election motives can lead an incumbent politician to file trade disputes to appeal to voters motivated by reciprocity. The second chapter, titled "Trade Policy and the China Syndrome", analyzes how trade policy can be used to smooth the effects of trade liberalizations. The recent backlash against free trade is partially motivated by the decline in manufacturing employment due to rising import competition from China. Politicians in high-income countries have extensively used antidumping (AD) measures and other temporary trade barriers to protect their economies from rising Chinese imports. To estimate the causal effect of trade protection on industry outcomes, I construct a new instrument for AD measures based on the importance of an industry in swing states and the industry's experience at filing AD petitions. In this paper, I first show that trade policy contained the rise of Chinese imports in protected sectors, decreasing the annual growth rate of US imports from China in a range between 3% and 14% compared to the non-protected sectors. Second, I show that these protectionist measures have contained the "China Syndrome". In manufacturing sectors protected by AD measures, the annual growth rate of employment was between 2% and 24% higher compared to non-protected sectors. I find that previous studies that neglect the moderating impact of AD have underestimated the negative effects of Chinese import competition on US manufacturing employment by between 5% and 15%.The third chapter, titled "Bank Lending Standards and Credit to Firms during the Great Recession", is a joint work with Lorenzo Ricci and Giovanni Soggia. This chapter investigates the impact of unforeseen shifts in lending standards on firm credit in Italy on the onset of the Great Recession, using data from the Regional Bank Lending Survey to disentangle the effects of loan supply and demand.We combine our measure of change in bank supply with bank-firm loans retrieved from the credit register. Our proposed empirical strategy presents several benefits: it allows us to (i) estimate the impact of credit supply in the absence of an exogenous shock to banks, (ii) analyze credit policy throughout the sample period, and (iii) disentangle the effect of geographical heterogeneity within Italy using the rich information from our survey data. The effect of supply shocks differs across types of loans. A firm with a revocable credit line from a bank that tightens its lending standards suffers a reduction in credit growth more than if it had borrowed from a bank with unchanged lending standard. On the extensive margin, a supply shock decreases the acceptance probability of a new loan with a pronounced effect for term loans. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The financial crisis that started in 2007 has seen central banks play an unprecedented role both to ensure financial stability and to support economic activity. While the importance of the central bank in ensuring financial stability is well known (see e.g. Padoa-Schioppa (2014)), the unprecedented nature of the financial crisis led central banks to resort to new instruments for which the literature offered little guidance. This thesis aims to bridge this gap, using both theory and data to better understand one of the main instruments used by central banks: collateralized loans. The general contribution of the thesis is thus both retrospective and forward looking. On a retrospective point of view, it helps understanding the actions of the central bank during the crisis and the mechanisms involved. Looking forward, a better understanding of the tools used during the crisis allows to better inform future policies.The first chapter starts from the observation that the literature, starting with Bagehot (1873), has generally assumed that the central bank should lend against high quality collateral. However in the 2007-2013 crisis central banks lent mostly against low quality collateral. In this chapter, we explore when it is efficient for the central bank to relax its collateral policy. In our model, a commercial bank funds projects in the real economy by borrowing against collateral from the interbank market or the central bank. While collateral prevents the bank from shirking (in the spirit of Holmstrom and Tirole (2011)), it is costly to use as its value is lower for investors and the central bank than for the bank. We find that when the bank has high levels of available collateral, it borrows in the interbank market against low collateral requirements so that the collateral policy of the central bank has no impact on banks' borrowing. However, when the amount of available collateral falls below a threshold, the lack of collateral prevents borrowing. In this case, the collateral policy of the central bank can affect lending, and it can therefore be optimal for the central bank to relax its collateral requirements to avoid the credit crunch.The second chapter focuses on collateralized loans in the context of the euro area. According to the literature on optimum currency area, one of the main drawbacks of currency unions is the inability for the central bank to accommodate asymmetric shocks with its interest rate policy. Suppose that there are 2 countries in an economy and one suffers a negative shock while the other has a positive shock. Theory would suggest an accommodative policy - low interest rates - in the first country and a restrictive policy - high interest rates - in the second one. This is however impossible in a currency union because the interest rate must be the same for both countries (Mundell 1961, McKinnon 1963, de Grauwe 2012). In this chapter I show that collateral policy can accommodate asymmetric shocks. I extend the model of collateralized lending of the first chapter to two banks A and B and two collateral types 1 and 2 .I also introduce a central bank deposit facility which allows the interest rate instrument to be compared with the collateral policy instrument in the context of a currency area hit by asymmetric shocks. Macroeconomic shocks impact the investment opportunities available to banks and the value of their collateral and the central bank seeks to steer economy rates towards a target level. I show that when banks have different collateral portfolios (as in a monetary union where banks invest in the local economy), an asymmetric shock on the quality and value of their collateral can increase interest rates in the country hit by the negative shock while keeping them unchanged in the country with a positive shock.The third chapter provides an empirical illustration of this “collateral channel” of open market operations. We use data on assets pledged by banks to the ECB from 2009 to 2011 to quantify the “collateral substitution / smoother transmission of monetary policy” trade-off faced by the central bank. We build an empirical model of collateral choice that is similar in spirit to the model on institutional demand for financial assets of Koijen (2014). We show how the haircut of the central bank can affect the relative cost of pledging collateral to the central bank and how this cost can be estimated using the amount of assets pledged by banks. Our model allows to perform a broad set of policy counterfactuals. For example, we use the recovered coefficient to assess how a 5% haircut increase on all collateral belonging to a specific asset class (e.g. government bonds or ABS) would affect the type of collateral used at the central bank. The final chapter focuses on the use of loans as collateral by banks in the euro area. While collateral is generally viewed as consisting of liquid and safe assets such as government bonds, we show that banks in Europe do use bank loans as collateral. We identify two purposes of bank loan collateral: funding and liquidity purposes. The main distinction between the two purposes is with respect to the maturity of the instruments involved: liquidity purposes refer to the use of bank loans as collateral to obtain short term liquidity and manage unexpected liquidity shocks. In practice the central bank is the main acceptor of these collateral. The second type of use is for funding purposes, in which case bank loans are used as collateral in ABSs or covered bonds. The collateral in these transactions allow banks to obtain a lower long-term funding cost. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis explores some different dimensions of business cycle analysis and monetary policy,in closed and open economies. In the first chapter, I develop a model to analyze the roleof research and development in the US business cycle, and its ability to produce macroeconomicfluctuations by generating expectations of future productivity gains. In the secondchapter, I empirically investigate how changes in central bank transparency affects financialmarkets response to central bank announcements in the United Kingdom. Finally, in thethird chapter, I analyze some heterogeneities in the international spillovers of central bankannouncements, focusing on the behavior of exchange rates and international capital flows.The first chapter studies the role of R&D-based innovation within the US business cycle. Thechapter builds on the idea that temporary business cycle frequency contractions can result inprolonged medium-run slowdowns, if an economy’s technological growth is generated by asector of profit-maximizing innovators. In order to analyse the business cycle spillovers oninnovation activity, this chapter analyzes the contribution of R&D-based innovation to USbusiness cycle dynamics combining techniques from the empirical and theoretical literature.First, using a Bayesian VAR identified with a Cholesky recursive formulation, the papershows that innovation shocks are generally inflationary and generate rises in hours worked.Second, the paper introduces a medium-scale New-Keynesian model of creative destructionthat can rationalize these facts. In the model, a sector of profit-maximizing innovators investsin R&D and endogenously generates productivity gains, ultimately determining theeconomy’s growth rate. The estimated responses to innovation shocks are characterized bypowerful wealth effects that offset the contractionary spillovers on the labour market conventionally associated with productivity increases. The estimation results suggest that thebulk of the productivity slowdown is due to a decrease in the innovation’s ability to generateproductivity gains. These findings support the view of the productivity slowdown as astand-alone phenomenon in the US business cycle as opposed to a byproduct of the GreatRecession.In the second chapter (jointly written with Andrzej Szczepaniak), we investigate the impactof monetary policy transparency measures on the relevance of the information effect channelof central bank communication. Our paper focuses on the switch in the Bank of England’scommunication strategy, occurred in August 2015, from a multi-day to a single-day releaseschedule. Before August 2015, the minutes of the monetary policy committee and the inflationreport (i.e. the Bank’s analysis of the economic outlook), were published only someweeks after the monetary policy decision. By contrast, after August 2015, the Bank of Englandstarted releasing all accompanying documents alongside the policy rate announcement,in the attempt to increase the transparency of its policy-making process.To this purpose, we construct a market surprise series for each one of the three communicationdocuments of the Bank of England (the monetary policy decision, the minutes of themonetary policy committee, and the economic outlook report) in order to evaluate the effectof central bank communication on agents’ expectations. The chapter builds on the idea thatmarket responses to central bank releases can be due either to unexpected deviations from thecentral bank’s policy rule (the policy component of the surprise), or to the revision of agents’expectations about future inflation (the informational component of the surprise). These twocomponents can be identified based on the associated reaction of equity prices. In the chapter,the policy component of the policy announcement is identified as an unexpected increasein the policy rate which results in a decline in equity prices, and the informational componentas an unexpected increase in the policy rate which results in a rise in equity prices, inaccordance with the methodology introduced by Jarocinski and Karadi (2020). We provideevidence that the informational component is a key driver of the financial market response tocentral bank communication. Before August 2015, according to our results, the informationeffect accounted for approximately two thirds of the interest rate surprise, the inflation expectations,and the equity price variation on the release days. However, we find that the switchfrom a multi-day release schedule to a single-day communication strategy markedly reducedthe importance of information effects. Our findings suggest that the degree of transparencyof a central bank’s policies significantly affects the quantitative relevance of the informationeffect and the associated asset price response.The third chapter (jointly written with Andrzej Szczepaniak), analyzes some of the internationalspillovers of central bank communication. The chapter highlights that the policy andthe informational component of central bank announcements entail different open economyspillovers. Namely, when unexpected increases in the US policy rate are associated withincreases in equity prices, the US dollar depreciates. We argue that this phenomenon occursbecause central bank information shocks affect investors’ risk perception. In response tofavorable central bank information shocks, we observe downward revisions of the level offinancial risk perceived by investors, which lead capital to flow towards emerging marketsand riskier asset classes. Conversely, in response to adverse central bank information shocks,we observe upward revisions of the level of financial risk perceived by investors, which leadcapital to flow towards the US and safer asset classes, causing an appreciation of the US dollar.In support to this hypothesis, we provide evidence of large spillover effects onto globalsafe-haven currencies, risk premia, cross-border credit, risky assets, and ultimately, on globaleconomic activity. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished