This Time Is (Mostly) Different: U.S. Tightening Cycles and Global Resilience in the 1980s vs 2020s

Drishan Banerjee, Galina Hale and Harrison Shieh

No 21874, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Post-pandemic inflation raised fears that U.S. monetary tightening would trigger a repeat of the 1982 sudden stop in capital flows to emerging economies. Yet as of 2026 no global recession has followed. We establish three stylized facts distinguishing the 1980s from the 2020s, beyond the shift to flexible exchange rates: monetary policy effectiveness, fiscal space, and external vulnerabilities. We rationalize them in a Mundell-Fleming framework with a fiscal space constraint, which predicts a central role for fiscal space in transmitting foreign currency risk-free rate increases. Cross-country evidence confirms that fiscal space shapes economic performance post-tightening.

Keywords: Emerging; markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F34 F42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21874 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21874

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21874

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().