Higher uncertainty about government spending generates a persistent decline in the economic activity in the Euro Area. This paper emphasizes the transmission channels explaining this empirical fact. First, a Stochastic Volatility model is estimated on European government consumption to build a measure of government spending uncertainty. Plugging this measure into a SVAR model, we stress that government spending uncertainty shocks have recessionary, persistent and humped-shaped effects. Second, we develop a New Keynesian model with financial frictions applying to a portfolio of equity and long-term government bonds. We argue that a portfolio effect -- resulting from the imperfect substitutability among both assets -- acts as a critical amplifier of the usual transmission channels.

For most of the post WWII period, until recently, trade protectionism followed a downward trend, and was formulated in multilateral or bilateral agreements between countries. Recently however, there hasbeen a sharp shift towards unilateral, discretionary trade policy focused on short term macroeconomic objectives, and as a consequence, the use of trade policy has become entangled with that of monetary policy. This paper explores the consequences of this shift within a standard DSGE open economy macroeconomic model. We find that a discretionary non-cooperative approach to trade policy can significantly worsen macroeconomic conditions. Moreover, the stance of monetary policy has major implications for the degree of protection in a non-cooperative equilibrium. In particular, cooperative determination of monetary policy implies an increase in both equilibrium tariffs and inflation, and a significant fall in welfare. By contrast, when the exchange rate is pegged by one country, equilibrium rates of protection are generally lower, but in this case, there are multiple asymmetric equilibria in tariff rates which benefit one country relative to another. We also explore the determination of non-cooperative tariffs in a situation where monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.

In this paper, we measure the welfare costs/gains associated with financial market incompleteness in a monetary union. To do this, we build on a two-country model of a monetary union with sticky prices subject to asymmetric productivity shocks. For most plausible values of price stickiness, we show that asymmetric shocks under incomplete financial markets give rise to a lower volatility of national inflation rates, which proves welfare improving with respect to the situation of complete financial markets. The corresponding welfare gains are equivalent to an average increase of 1.8 percent of permanent consumption.

This paper shows that the outcome of trade wars for tariffs and welfare will be affected by the monetary policy regime. The key message is that trade policy interacts with monetary policy in a way that magnifies the welfare costs of discretionary monetary policy in an international setting. If countries follow monetary policies of flexible inflation targeting, trade wars are relatively mild, with low equilibrium tariffs and small welfare costs. Discretionary monetary policies imply much higher tariffs, high inflation rates, and substantially larger welfare costs. We quantify the effects of a global trade war among major economies using estimates of trade elasticities, economic size, net foreign assets and trade openness. We find large welfare benefits of an inflation targeting monetary policy for all countries.

This paper explores the relationship between exchange rate adjustment and trade policy in a simple New Keynesian open economy macro model. We show that movement in exchange rates have a direct implication for trade policy when governments choose tariffs endogenously. In particular, we show that the strategic incentive to impose trade restrictions is greater under flexible exchange rates than when exchange rates are fixed. This surprising result goes counter to conventional wisdom, which suggests that pressures to impose trade restrictions are greater when countries resist adjustments in exchange rates. But in fact, we show that the empirical evidence supports the model predictions. The paper goes on to characterize the path of equilibrium sustainable tariffs in the presence of sticky prices and flexible exchange rates. In our baseline model, tariff rates will rise in response to monetary policy shocks, but fall in response to productivity shocks. Estimating an SVAR model, we also find evidence in support of this prediction.