Three essays on international macroeconomics

Abstract

This dissertation presents three essays on international macroeconomics. The first article is a literature review of three separate, and often disconnected, strands of the economic literature that has addressed pairs of linkages between foreign indebtedness, economic growth, and macroeconomic volatility during the last three decades. The article surveys the main findings of the theoretical and the empirical literature, with an emphasis on findings relevant to macroeconomic policymakers. We find that endogeneity and nonlinearity are the central econometric in estimating each of the bivariate relationships due primarily to institutionally related, debt overhang, and credit rationing problems. Motivated by these findings, we propuse a parsimonious empirical model, called the "debt-growth-volatility nexus" , which unites these strands of inquiry. The second article uses a GVAR approach to address the endogeneity issue in the relations among public debt, economic growth and macroeconomic volatility. Based on a sample of 81 developed and developing countries over the 1970-2011 period, we find strong evidence supporting bidirectional links between debt and growth, debt and volatility, and growth and volatility. Our setup of country groups indicates that negative and positive effects can coexist in the world economy. The third article addresses the nonlinearity issue using a disequilibrium approach. We disentangle the credit rationing effect from the nonlinear relation between debt and growth commonly known as debt overhang. Using a sample of 28 developing countries over the period from 1970 to 2010, we estimate a switching model with unknown sample separation and a set of proxies for credit rationing that we next introduce into a growth model. Our estimates indicate that credit rationing can explain the negative effect of high debt levels on growth rates