Essays in international portfolio choice and monetary policy

Empirical evidence shows that equity home bias is a prevailing fact for most countries, but standard international monetary business cycle models with nominal bonds hardly generate equity home bias for plausible preference parameter values. By incorporating inflation-indexed bonds, I show in chapter 2 that international monetary business cycle models can explain home bias in equities. Inflation-indexed bonds can hedge real exchange rate risk and domestic equities serve as a hedge against domestic labor income risk conditional on real exchange rates. Moreover, this chapter accounts for counter-cyclical movements of net foreign asset positions. These results are robust in environments either with complete markets or with incomplete markets. How does international financial market integration alter international risk sharing? Chapter 3 develops a tractable center-periphery model with portfolio choice to investigate this issue. I compare three stages of financial integration. The first stage is financial autarky. The second stage is the central country becomes financially integrated with peripheral countries, but there is no financial integration between peripheral countries. The third stage is all financial markets are integrated into each other. From financial autarky to partial financial integration, volatility of consumption in all countries drops. From partial financial integration to full financial integration, volatility of consumption in peripheral countries decreases; however, consumption volatility rises in the central country when the central country is relatively large. When peripheral countries are large, the degree of international risk-sharing for all countries increases in the process of financial integration. What's the optimal monetary policy in an economy with financial frictions? Chapter 3 investigates optimal monetary policies in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky prices, sticky wages and credit-market imperfections. Credit frictions distort allocations and prices, and generate large volatility of aggregate variables via the financial accelerator. Policy-makers can take advantage of a debt deflation channel to push down volatility of endogenous variables through the financial decelerator. In the optimized linear interest rate rule, interest rate decreases in asset prices but the response is quantitatively small. This optimized rule exhibits high persistence. Within a class of simple linear interest rate rules, a strict inflation-targeting rule has a larger welfare loss.Arts, Faculty ofVancouver School of EconomicsGraduat