U.S. Monetary Policy Spillovers to Emerging Markets: Both Shocks and Vulnerabilities Matter

Using a macroeconomic model, we explore how sources of shocks and vulnerabilities matter for the transmission of U.S. monetary changes to emerging market economies (EMEs). We utilize a calibrated two-country New Keynesian model with financial frictions, partly-dollarized balance sheets, and imperfectly anchored inflation expectations. Contrary to other recent studies that also emphasize the sources of shocks, our approach allows the quantification of effects on real macroeconomic variables as well, in addition to financial spillovers. Moreover, we model the most relevant vulnerabilities structurally. We show that higher U.S. interest rates arising from stronger U.S. aggregate demand generate modestly positive spillovers to economic activity in EMEs with stronger fundamentals, but can be adverse for vulnerable EMEs. In contrast, U.S. monetary tightenings driven by a more-hawkish policy stance cause a substantial slowdown in activity in all EMEs. Our model also captures the challenging policy tradeos that EME central banks face. We show that these tradeoffs are more favorable when inflation expectations are well anchored.

Monetary Policy Spillovers Under Covid-19: Evidence from U.S. Foreign Bank Subsidiaries

This paper uses Call Report data to examine the impact of home country monetary policy on foreign bank subsidiary lending in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining a large sample of foreign bank subsidiaries and domestic U.S. banks, we find that foreign bank lending growth was positively associated with both lower home country policy rates and negative home country rates. Our point estimates indicate that a one standard deviation decrease in home country policy rates was associated with a 3.5 percentage point increase in lending growth while negative home country policy rates added an additional 3.0 percentage points on average. Disparities in sensitivity to home country rates also exist by bank size, as large banks exhibited more responsiveness to home country policy rate levels, but were less responsive to negative policy rates. Easier home country policy rates are also found to impact negatively in growth in capital ratios and bank income, in keeping with expanded foreign subsidiary activity. However, income responses to negative home country rates are mixed, in a manner suggestive of sophisticated adjustment of global bank balance sheets to changes in relative home and host country monetary policy stances. Overall, our findings confirm that the bank lending channel for global monetary policy spillovers was active during the pandemic crisis.