Essays in international macroeconomics

Structural economic shocks are the central theme of my dissertation. I focus on monetary policy (MP) and oil shocks, which are among most remarkable. Chapter 1 investigates the ability of structural shocks to forecast nominal exchange rates (ER's) out-of-sample. A widely documented empirical finding that, in response to a monetary surprise, ER's tend to overshoot their new long-run levels in the short term, implies that estimated MP shock should have a non-trivial forecasting content. I examine this conjecture empirically. The MP shock is identified and estimated in a multi-country Factor Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR) using a block-recursive identification scheme. No evidence is found that forecasts with the US MP shock tend to robustly outperform a random walk at any horizons. However, partially identified group of shocks that contemporaneously affect mostly financial market variables are shown to be good predictors for ER's of commodity exporters. I interpret these shocks as news about future prospects of the US economy. Chapter 2 re-examines the role of systematic MP in amplification of oil shocks using a structural FAVAR for the US. Unlike most of the literature, my identification procedure distinguishes between oil demand and supply shocks. Contrary to earlier studies based on conventional VAR's, I find that the systematic MP response has been contractionary for positive oil demand shocks and accommodating for adverse supply shocks. This implies that holding interest rates fixed in response to OPEC I and II shocks would have produced even deeper recessions in the 1970's. Chapter 3 addresses investment pauses created by the interaction of uncertainty and irreversibility of investments as a potential amplification channel of the effect of oil shocks. Uncertainty about future oil supply caused by an oil shock can make firms postpone their investments until more information is revealed. Numerical solution to a calibrated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model suggests that this mechanism cannot magnify the effect of oil shocks sufficiently. A primary reason is that the optimal amount of capital invested into a given technology does not vary too much across different random states.