Using a large international sample of corporate borrowers over the period 2014-22, we study the determinants of issuing green, sustainability and social (GSS) bonds. First, we document a remarkable growth of the GSS segment in the most recent years, possibly spurred by the public commitment towards financing a sustainable economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic. The results from a multinomial logit for the choice of bond type confirm that countries' sustainability stance acts as an incentive for corporate access to the sustainable bond segment. Moreover, borrowers in sectors that are green or can become green, as well as those that have already issued and committed to external assurance on the GSS segment, are more likely to raise funds with non-conventional securities.

Lockdowns imposed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic have cross-border effects. In this paper, we estimate the empirical magnitude of lockdown spillovers in a set of panel local projections. We use daily indicators of economic activity such as stock returns, effective exchange rates, NO emissions, mobility and maritime container trade. Lockdown shocks originating in the most important trading partners have a strong and significant adverse effect on economic activity in the home economy. For stock prices and exports, the spillovers can even be larger than the effect of domestic lockdown shocks. The results are robust with respect to alternative country weights used to construct foreign shocks, i.e. weights based on foreign direct investment or the connectedness through value chains. We find that lockdown spillovers have been particularly strong during the first wave of the pandemic. Countries with a higher export share are particularly exposed to lockdown spillovers.

Although state-owned enterprises are associated with less efficiency and lead to resource misallocation, they may have stabilizing effect in face of a crisis. Exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, we study the role of firm ownership in trade credit provision and find robust evidence that SOEs increase their trade credit to downstream firms more than non-SOEs after the outbreak of the pandemic. Moreover, we explore the underlying mechanism and find that better financing ability and multitask of the SOEs contribute to greater trade credit during the pandemic, and the latter plays a more active role. Further analyses show that SOEs' advantage in trade credit extension is more pronounced in industries with higher external financial dependence and provinces with a higher level of government involvement, suggesting that SOEs might have greater comparative advantage in screening due to its involvements in local economy during crisis periods. Our paper provides new insights into the real effects of SOEs on the economy.

This paper adopts quantile regressions to scrutinize the dynamics of green investment funds in relation to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data on three of the largest green investment funds (BNP PARIBAS Funds Climate Impact, Nordea Global Climate & Environment, and AMUNDI Funds Global Ecology ESG), whose proceeds finance environmental-focused projects. We consider explicitly how different types of COVID-19 measures impact on these green assets. We show evidence that economic support due to COVID-19 has a positive effect on the green assets. The effect is especially strong when the returns are negative. We further report that strigency owing to the pandemic is also positively associated with green investment funds, but again, for negative returns. On the other hand, the effect of confirmed deaths is not as strong shows up mainly at lower quantiles. A similar results applies to infectious disease equity market volatility. We account for the broader macroeconomic environment and subject our models to a battery of sub-sample robustness checks. Our research offers interesting insights in terms of investment and portfolio diversification, that can be applied to the analysis of asset management and policy making.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted global supply chains, leading to shipment delays and soaring shipping costs. We study the impact of global shipping costs-measured by the Baltic Dry Index (BDI)-on domestic prices for a large panel of countries during the period 1992-2021. We find that spikes in the BDI are followed by sizable and statistically significant increases in import prices, PPI, headline, and core inflation, as well as inflation expectations. The impact is similar in magnitude but more persistent than for shocks to global oil and food prices. The effects are more muted in countries where imports make up a smaller share of domestic consumption, and those with inflation targeting regimes and better-anchored inflation expectations. The results are robust to several checks, including an instrumental variables approach in which changes in shipping costs are instrumented with an indicator of closures of the Suez Canal.

In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with widespread shelter-in-place ("lockdown") policies and the associated considerable limits on economic activity. Using detailed regional variation in economic conditions, lockdown policies, and U.S. government spending, we document that the effects of government spending were stronger during the peak of the pandemic recession, but only in cities that were not subject to strong stay-at-home orders. We examine mechanisms that can account for our evidence and place our findings in the context of other recent evidence from microdata.

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a deep global recession, and with interest rates at very low levels, warrants consideration of the efficacy of different forms of fiscal stimulus in response. History reveals that deep recessions may cause output and total factor productivity (TFP) hysteresis, a permanent or highly persistent fall in the levels of output and TFP relative to pre-recession trends. This article analyses the output and welfare multipliers of fiscal stimulus during a recession using a macro model with TFP and output hysteresis. We find that transfer payments, public consumption and investment all have high output and welfare multipliers due to their positive effects on TFP in a recessionary environment. However, public investment has the highest output and welfare multipliers, because it has a more positive impact on labour productivity due to the increase in the public capital stock.

The past decades have witnessed recurrent price discrepancies in cryptocurrency markets across countries. In addition to prior explanations that generally attribute this phenomenon to domestic capital controls during normal periods, we provide another explanation that investors perceive cryptocurrency as an alternative (hedging) investment, especially under uncertainty. Using the emerging of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the subsequent lockdown policies implemented by a group of countries as natural experiments, we adopt a difference-in-difference framework to examine how the nexus affects Bitcoin price discrepancies. We find that price discrepancies are larger in countries with confirmed cases of COVID-19 and rigorously implementing lockdown policies. We then verify our "alternative investment" hypothesis on the mechanism by showing that countries with intensified exposure to media hype on COVID-19 topics and with more panic emotion among citizens during the pandemic generally experienced larger Bitcoin price discrepancies than their counterparts. We also find that domestic capital control, sanitary policy stringency, uncertainty aversion, individualistic culture, and governmental power could moderate the general effect.

We use event study regressions to compare the impact of monetary versus fiscal policy announcements on euro area government bond spreads in the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout our specifications and robustness checks, we detect larger effects for monetary than for fiscal announcements. Among monetary policy instruments, the PEPP has the largest spread compressing effects. Comparing the announcement effects for fiscal crisis tools, Next Generation EU shows significant results in contrast to news on pure loan instruments. The relaxation of European fiscal rules through the activation of the emergency-escape clause under the Stability and Growth Pact is associated with rising spreads. We conclude that the stability of euro area bond markets in the presence of a severe solvency shock depends to a large extent on the Eurosystem's unconstrained sovereign bond purchases. Our results suggest that fiscal support can play a stabilizing role if it includes, like Next Generation EU, a significant transfer component.

Facing acute strains in the offshore dollar funding markets during the COVID-19 crisis, the Federal Reserve (Fed) provided US dollar liquidity to the global economy by reactivating or enhancing swap arrangements with other central banks and establishing a new repo facility for financial institutions and monetary authorities (FIMA). This paper assesses motivations for the Fed liquidity lines, and the effects and spillovers of US dollar auctions by central banks using these lines. We find that the access to the Fed liquidity arrangements was driven by the recipient economies' close financial and trade ties with the US. Access to dollar liquidity also reflected global trade exposure. We find that announcements of expansion of Fed liquidity facilities or of auctions using these facilities led to appreciation of partner currencies against the US dollar and reduced these currencies' deviations from covered interest parity (CIP). Dollar auctions by major central banks (BoE, ECB, BoJ and SNB) had spillovers: they led to temporary appreciation of other currencies against the US dollar, reduced CIP deviations, and persistently reduced sovereign bond yields of other economies. However, dollar auctions done by non-major central banks with access to Fed facilities did not have a meaningful impact on key domestic financial variables. The impact of major central bank auctions does not differ by the economies' financial or trade links with the US or their balance sheet currency exposure, i.e. the major central bank auctions benefitted even the more vulnerable economies.

This paper uses Call Report data to examine the impact of home country monetary policy on foreign bank subsidiary lending in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining a large sample of foreign bank subsidiaries and domestic U.S. banks, we find that foreign bank lending growth was positively associated with both lower home country policy rates and negative home country rates. Point estimates indicate that a one standard deviation decrease in home country policy rates was associated with a 3.5 percentage point increase in lending growth, while negative home country policy rates added an additional 3.0 percentage points on average. Disparities in sensitivity to home country rates also exist by bank size, as large banks exhibited more responsiveness to home country policy rate levels, but were less responsive to negative policy rates. Easier home country policy rates are also found to impact negatively on growth in capital ratios and bank income, in keeping with expanded foreign subsidiary activity. However, income responses to negative home country rates are mixed, in a manner suggesting balance sheet adjustment to changes in relative home and host country conditions. Overall, our findings confirm that the bank lending channel for global monetary policy spillovers was active during the pandemic crisis.

We compare the interventions conducted by the Federal Reserve in response to the subprime and COVID-19 crises with respect to their effectiveness in reducing disaster risk. Using model-free measures of disaster risk derived from daily options data, we document that interventions in response to both crises reduced tail risks in domestic equity markets. The spillover effects of the two crises have been markedly dissimilar. While subprime interventions are generally characterized by negative spillovers to international equity markets, policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis are generally associated with positive spillovers. We interpret these results as consistent with the different degrees of protagonism by central banks in the two episodes, emphasizing the importance of a broader participation of monetary authorities in expanding their balance sheets to counteract the effects of major crises.

Estimated DSGE models tend to ascribe a significant and often predominant part of a country's trade balance (TB) dynamics to domestic drivers ("shocks"), suggesting foreign factors to be only of secondary importance. This paper revisits the result based on more agnostic approaches to shock transmission and using "agnostic structural disturbances". We estimate multi-region models for Germany and Spain as countries with very distinct TB patterns since 1999. Results suggest that domestic drivers remain dominant when theory-based restrictions on shock transmission are relaxed, although the transmission of foreign shocks is strengthened.

This paper analyzes alternative channels of adjustment to nominal exchange rate flexibility in response to shocks faced by countries and regions that are part of a monetary union. Over our full sample period of analysis (1977-2018), the results suggest a dominant role of interstate migration as an adjustment channel to labor demand shocks for the United States. In contrast, European countries tend to adjust to negative labor demand shocks mainly through changes in labor force participation and unemployment. Labor mobility is lower in the euro area, regardless of whether one is looking at cross-country migration or within-country mobility. Price flexibility is more important as a shock absorber to labor demand shocks in the EMU compared to the United States. We also document that risk-sharing mechanisms have been, on average, more effective in smoothing income fluctuations in the United States than in the EMU. The strength of these channels, however, has changed over time both for the EMU and in the United States. In particular, the results suggest that the pattern of regional adjustments to shocks in EMU and the United States is moving closer, partly because of strengthening of adjustment channels in the EMU and partly because of weakening of these channels in the United States.

We evaluate whether the changes in valuation of U.S. corporates during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic depend on their downstream or upstream industries' exposure to social distancing. Using a new dataset on sectoral dependence on the use and sale of intermediate goods, we find that firms whose downstream sectors are more affected by social distancing suffer from a greater decline in stock prices during the first quarter of 2020. Such an effect is mitigated for large firms.

This paper develops a threshold-augmented dynamic multi-country model (TGVAR) to quantify the macroeconomic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that there exist threshold effects in the relationship between output growth and excess global volatility at individual country levels in a significant majority of advanced economies and several emerging markets. We then estimate a more general multi-country model augmented with these threshold effects as well as long term interest rates, oil prices, exchange rates and equity returns to perform counterfactual analyses. We distinguish common global factors from trade-related spillovers, and identify the Covid-19 shock using GDP growth projection revisions of the IMF in 2020Q1. We account for sample uncertainty by bootstrapping the multi-country model estimated over four decades of quarterly observations. Our results show that, without policy support, the Covid-19 pandemic would cause a significant and long-lasting fall in world output, with outcomes that are quite heterogenous across countries and regions. While the impact on China and other emerging Asian economies are estimated to be less severe, the United Kingdom, and several other advanced economies may experience deeper and longer-lasting effects. Non-Asian emerging markets stand out for their vulnerability. We show that no country is immune to the economic fallout of the pandemic because of global interconnections as evidenced by the case of Sweden. We also find that long-term interest rates could temporarily fall below their pre-Covid-19 lows in core advanced economies, but this does not seem to be the case in emerging markets.

This speech highlights two channels through which globalization poses challenges for monetary policy. The first channel is through the global determination of the average world natural real rate of interest, which implies that saving and investment shifts abroad can influence the domestic interest rate setting consistent with price stability. The second channel is through global digital payments systems, which may compromise domestic policy sovereignty through effects on both monetary and financial stability.

We use information on new sovereign debt issues in the euro area to explore the drivers behind the debt maturity decisions of governments. We set up a theoretical model for the maturity structure that trades off the preference for liquidity services provided by short-term debt, roll-over risk and price risk. The average debt maturity is negatively related to both the level and the slope of the yield curve. A panel VAR analysis shows that positive shocks to risk aversion, the probability of non-repayment and the demand for the liquidity services of short-term debt all have a positive effect on the yield curve level and slope, and a negative effect on the average maturity of new debt issues. These results are partially in line with our theoretical framework. A forecast error variance decomposition suggests that changes in the probability of non-repayment as captured by the expected default frequency extracted from credit default spreads are the most important source of shocks.

This speech highlights two channels through which globalization poses challenges for monetary policy. The first channel is through the global determination of the average world natural real rate of interest, which implies that saving and investment shifts abroad can influence the domestic interest rate setting consistent with price stability. The second channel is through global digital payments systems, which may compromise domestic policy sovereignty through effects on both monetary and financial stability.

This paper examines the valuation effect of capital account liberalization. Using an event study approach and the policy announcement for RMB Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (short for RQFII) as the event date, we find that overall, the stock market responded positively to the capital account liberalization announcement. In addition, we provide some heterogeneity that firms with more stringent financing constraints earn higher returns than their counterparts. Finally, existing local institutions play an important role in determining announcement returns.

In this paper we explore the influence of the possibility to short stocks and/or borrow money in laboratory markets. A key innovation of our study is that subjects can simultaneously trade two risky assets on two double-auction markets, allowing us to differentiate between assets with relatively high versus low capitalization. Divergence of opinions is created by providing each trader with noisy information on the intrinsic values of both assets. We find that when borrowing money or shorting stocks is restricted prices are systematically distorted. Specifically, stocks with high (low) capitalization are traded at lower (higher) prices than their fundamental value. Lifting the restrictions leads to more efficient prices and more liquidity, thereby also lowering volatility and bid-ask spreads.