International Credit Markets and Global Business Cycles

Patrick Pintus, Yi Wen and Xiaochuan Xing

No 2018-9, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: This paper stresses a new channel through which global financial linkages contribute to the co-movement in economic activity across countries. We show in a two-country setting with borrowing constraints that international credit markets are subject to self-fulfilling variations in the world real interest rate. Those expectation-driven changes in the borrowing cost in turn act as global shocks that induce strong cross-country co-movements in both financial and real variables (such as asset prices, GDP, consumption, investment and employment). When firms around the world benefit from unexpectedly low debt repayments today, they borrow and invest more, which leads to excessive supply of collateral and of loanable funds at a low interest rate, thus fueling a boom in both home and foreign economies. As a consequence, business cycles are synchronized internationally. Such a stylized model thus offers one way to rationalize both the existence of world business-cycle factor documented by recent empirical studies through dynamic factor analysis and such a factor?s intimate link to global financial markets.

Keywords: World Interest Rate; international comovement; Self-Fulfilling Equilibria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 E22 E32 E44 E63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2018-05-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-ifn, nep-mac and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: International credit markets and global business cycles (2019)
Working Paper: International credit markets and global business cycles (2019)
Working Paper: International Credit Markets and Global Business Cycles (2018)
Working Paper: International Credit Markets and Global Business Cycles (2018)
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DOI: 10.20955/wp.2018.009

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