Essays on international macroeconomics

Defence date: 23 September 2008Examining board: Prof. Giancarlo Corsetti, (EUI, Supervisor); Prof. Alejandro Cunat, (London School of Economics); Dr. Luca Dedola, (European Central Bank); Prof. Salvador Ortigueira, (EUI)This thesis deals with different topics on international macroeconomics, in particular on business cycles in small open economies, the motives for net foreign asset accumulation and the transmission of shocks in an international framework. The three chapters deal with very different issues and different degrees of modeling complexity. There is an eternal discussion between the trade-off between simple models that target to understand a little piece of the macroeconomic mechanism and more complex models that are closer to reality. The first two chapters are more simple and their main contribution relies on the analysis of very particular issues, such as the role of expectations and the role of risk aversion. The last chapter tackles with a sophisticated 2-country model with vertically integrated firms to analyze the transmission of shocks