UCLA

This dissertation consists of three chapters on financial intermediation and international finance that contribute to our understanding and identification of the transmission of aggregate shocks in imperfect financial markets. The first chapter studies the effect of an aggregate funding supply shock in a lending network in times of distress in a quantitative framework for the money market funds industry in the U.S. The second chapter identifies the effect of cross-border banking flows on macroeconomic and financial outcomes for emerging economies. The third chapter studies the identification of the impact of foreign exchange interventions under a limited risk-bearing capacity of financial intermediaries.

The first chapter studies the implications of network frictions for the allocative efficiency of funding provision of the U.S. Money Markets Funds Industry. I build a tractable model of financial intermediation that features an incomplete network of counterparties and bilateral bargaining within a network. I use the quantitative model to assess the effect of a large supply shock of funding in the money market funds industry. I provide an identification framework to estimate the model's parameters and discipline the model using portfolio data of the money market funds industry. I assess a counterfactual taking as primitives the drop in assets under management at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and show that the model can account for price dispersion and funding allocation observed in the data.

The second chapter assesses the effect of capital flows in emerging countries. We focus on the impact of cross-border banking flows and leverage the size distribution at the bilateral level to construct an instrument for capital inflows. We build a granular instrumental variable to identify the effects on macroeconomic and financial conditions for 22 emerging countries. Cross-border bank credit causes higher domestic activity in EMEs and looser financial conditions. We also show that the effect is heterogeneous across different levels of capital inflow controls.

The third chapter studies the effects of foreign exchange intervention. We estimate the causal effect of foreign exchange intervention. Theoretically, the impact of foreign exchange intervention depends on the imperfect asset substitution that relates to the limited risk-bearing capacity of financial intermediaries. To identify the risk-bearing capacity, we use the variation from information free flows of passive investors around rebalancing dates. These flows are plausibly exogenous with respect to domestic conditions and act as a shock to the risk held by financial intermediaries. We show that information-free flows have effects on UIP and CIP deviations. Our preliminary estimates show that the required foreign exchange intervention to achieve a 10% foreign exchange depreciation in one week is between $0.02-$5.06 billion dollars.