Person: Farhi, Emmanuel
Loading...
Email Address
AA Acceptance Date
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Farhi
First Name
Emmanuel
Name
Farhi, Emmanuel
10 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
Publication Sovereign Debt Booms in Monetary Unions(American Economic Association, 2014) Aguiar, Mark; Amador, Manuel; Farhi, Emmanuel; Gopinath, GitaWe propose a continuous time model to investigate the impact of inflation credibility on sovereign debt dynamics. At every point in time, an impatient government decides fiscal surplus and inflation, without commitment. Inflation is costly, but reduces the real value of outstanding nominal debt. In equilibrium, debt dynamics is the result of two opposing forces: (i) impatience and (ii) the desire to conquer low inflation. A large increase in inflation credibility can trigger a process of debt accumulation. This rationalizes the sovereign debt booms that are often experienced by low inflation credibility countries upon joining a currency union.Publication Fiscal Devaluations(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2014) Farhi, Emmanuel; Gopinath, Gita; Itskhoki, OlegWe show that even when the exchange rate cannot be devalued, a small set of conventional fiscal instruments can robustly replicate the real allocations attained under a nominal exchange rate devaluation in a dynamic New Keynesian open economy environment. We perform the analysis under alternative pricing assumptions—producer or local currency pricing, along with nominal wage stickiness; under arbitrary degrees of asset market completeness and for general stochastic sequences of devaluations. There are two types of fiscal policies equivalent to an exchange rate devaluation—one, a uniform increase in import tariff and export subsidy, and two, a value-added tax increase and a uniform payroll tax reduction. When the devaluations are anticipated, these policies need to be supplemented with a consumption tax reduction and an income tax increase. These policies are revenue neutral. In certain cases equivalence requires, in addition, a partial default on foreign bond holders. We discuss the issues of implementation of these policies, in particular, under the circumstances of a currency union.Publication Coordination and Crisis in Monetary Unions(National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014) Aguiar, Mark; Amador, Manuel; Farhi, Emmanuel; Gopinath, GitaWe characterize fiscal and monetary policy in a monetary union with the potential for rollover crises in sovereign debt markets. Member-country fiscal authorities lack commitment to repay their debt and choose fiscal policy independently. A common monetary authority chooses inflation for the union, also without commitment. We first describe the existence of a fiscal externality that arises in the presence of limited commitment and leads countries to over borrow; this externality rationalizes the imposition of debt ceilings in a monetary union. We then investigate the impact of the composition of debt in a monetary union, that is the fraction of high-debt versus low-debt members, on the occurrence of self-fulfilling debt crises. We demonstrate that a high-debt country may be less vulnerable to crises and have higher welfare when it belongs to a union with an intermediate mix of high- and low-debt members, than one where all other members are low-debt. This contrasts with the conventional wisdom that all countries should prefer a union with low-debt members, as such a union can credibly deliver low inflation. These findings shed new light on the criteria for an optimal currency area in the presence of rollover crises.Publication How Much Would You Pay to Resolve Long-Run Risk?(American Economic Association, 2014) Epstein, Larry G.; Farhi, Emmanuel; Strzalecki, TomaszThough risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution have been the subjects of careful scrutiny, the long-run risks literature as well as the broader literature using recursive utility to address asset pricing puzzles have ignored the full implications of their parameter specifications. Recursive utility implies that the temporal resolution of risk matters and a quantitative assessment thereof should be part of the calibration process. This paper gives a sense of the magnitudes of implied timing premia. Its objective is to inject temporal resolution of risk into the discussion of the quantitative properties of long-run risks and related models.Publication Monetary Policy, Liquidity, and Growth(2012) Aghion, Philippe; Farhi, Emmanuel; Kharroubi, EnisseIn this paper, we use cross-industry, cross-country panel data to test whether industry growth is positively affected by the interaction between the reactivity of real short term interest rates to the business cycle and industry-level measures of financial constraints. Financial constraints are measured, either by the extent to which an industry is prone to being "credit constrained", or by the extent to which it is prone to being "liquidity constrained". Our main findings are that: (i) the interaction between credit or liquidity constraints and monetary policy countercyclicality, has a positive, significant, and robust impact on the average annual rate of labor productivity in the domestic industry; (ii) these interaction effects tend to be more significant in downturns than in upturns.Publication A Theory of Liquidity and Regulation of Financial Intermediation(Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Farhi, Emmanuel; Golosov, Mikhail; Tsyvinski, AlehThis paper studies a Diamond–Dybvig model of providing insurance against unobservable liquidity shocks in the presence of unobservable trades. We show that competitive equilibria are inefficient. A social planner finds it beneficial to introduce a wedge between the interest rate implicit in optimal allocations and the economy's marginal rate of transformation. This improves risk sharing by reducing the attractiveness of joint deviations where agents simultaneously misrepresent their type and engage in trades on private markets. We propose a simple implementation of the optimum that imposes a constraint on the portfolio share that financial intermediaries invest in short-term assets.Publication Financial Crash, Commodity Prices, and Global Imbalances(Brookings Institution, 2008) Caballero, Ricardo J.; Farhi, Emmanuel; Gourinchas, Pierre-OliverThe current financial crisis has its origins in global asset scarcity, which led to large capital flows toward the United States and to the creation of asset bubbles that eventually burst. In its first phase the crash exacerbated the shortage of assets in the world economy, which triggered a partial re-creation of the bubble in commodities markets, and oil markets in particular. This bubble in turn led to an increase in petrodollars seeking financial assets in the United States, which became a source of stability for the U.S. external balance. The second phase of the crisis is more conventional and began to emerge in the summer of 2008, when it became apparent that the financial crisis would permeate the real economy and sharply slow global growth. This slowdown worked to reverse the tight commodity market conditions required for a bubble to develop, ultimately destroying the commodity bubble.Publication An Equilibrium Model of "Global Imbalances" and Low Interest Rates(American Economic Association, 2008) Caballero, Ricardo J.; Farhi, Emmanuel; Gourinchas, Pierre-OlivierThree of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics — the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolios — appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional wisdom and models. Instead, in this paper we provide a model that rationalizes these facts as an equilibrium outcome stemming from the heterogenity in different regions of the world in their capacity to generate financial assets from real investments. In extensions of the basic model, we also generate exchange rate and FDI excess returns which are broadly consistent with the recent trends in these variables. Beyond the specific sequence of events that motivate our analysis, the framework is flexible enough to shed light on a range of scenarios in a global equilibrium environment.Publication Inequality and Social Discounting(University of Chicago Press, 2007) Farhi, Emmanuel; Werning, IvanWe explore steady-state inequality in an intergenerational model with altruistically linked individuals who experience privately observed taste shocks. When the welfare function depends only on the initial generation, efficiency requires immiseration: inequality grows without bound and everyone’s consumption converges to zero. We study other efficient allocations in which the welfare function values future generations directly, placing a positive but vanishing weight on their welfare. The social discount factor is then higher than the private one, and for any such difference we find that consumption exhibits mean reversion and that a steady-state, cross-sectional distribution for consumption and welfare exists, with no one trapped at misery.Publication Optimal Taxation with Behavioral Agents(2017) Farhi, Emmanuel; Gabaix, XavierThis paper develops a theory of optimal taxation with behavioral agents. We use a general behavioral framework that encompasses a wide range of behavioral biases such as misperceptions, internalities and mental accounting. We revisit the three pillars of optimal taxation: Ramsey (linear commodity taxation to raise revenues and redistribute), Pigou (linear commodity taxation to correct externalities) and Mirrlees (nonlinear income taxation). We show how the canonical optimal tax formulas are modified and lead to a rich set of novel economic insights. We also show how to incorporate nudges in the optimal taxation frameworks, and jointly characterize optimal taxes and nudges. We explore the Diamond-Mirrlees productive efficiency result and the Atkinson-Stiglitz uniform commodity taxation proposition, and find that they are more likely to fail with behavioral agents.