Ivan Werning Profile picture
MIT Professor of Economics | Macro, International, Public, Monetary, Taxes, Finance | v = u + β v | Beatles | Boston Argentina
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Aug 18, 2023 20 tweets 5 min read
💵Crónica de una Dolarización Anunciada💵

¿Cuál es el efecto de anunciar una dolarización no inmediata? (con pocos dólares!)

Tema caliente, pero mejor estudiarlo con la cabeza fría.
Te guste la dolarización o no... o ¿no?

Paper:

(pa'🇦🇷 o muy curiosos) https://t.co/xvUf0puec0dropbox.com/scl/fi/0wqfsx9…
Image Abro hilo...

Escena: Un país decide dolarizar, pero a falta de dólares en arcas del Estado, posterga el canje oficial pesos por dólares. Promete realizarlo en una fecha futura (fija por un periodo).

¡Cualquier parecido con la realidad es pura coincidencia! 🤣

Algo crucial...
Jun 2, 2023 29 tweets 6 min read
What are the costs and benefits of giving up your own currency to adopt a foreign one? Of "Dollarizing"?💵

Ecuador, El Salvador, Zimbabwe did it in 2000s. Panama way back. Argentina tangoed with it and recent proposals have gained traction.

A thread on new 🇦🇷⭐️⭐️⭐️paper... Image Two well-known costs are...

1. the transfer of seignorage to foreigners (US with dollar)

2. losing monetary policy independence to stabilize shocks

A great discussion on why seignorage is not trivial is provided by Fischer in this old paper. Image
May 7, 2023 15 tweets 3 min read
Short thread on markups and inflation---dismissive version... greedflation 🎩

Markup rising is not my go to explanation for inflation these days, but I don't think it is logically wrong.

Critics make good points, but some gaps and confusion I think prevails the discussion. First of all, in my view, increase in markups can logically fuel inflation. I don't just mean mechanically raise a few prices of those markup increases, but also leading to other prices and wages to rise, persistently.
Apr 30, 2023 12 tweets 3 min read
Fauci interview “we should have listened to economists”

Painfully takes me back to early 2020…

My coauthors Acemoglu Chernozhukov Whinston and I put out a paper studying costs vs benefits and plus one overlooked essential economic idea: Targeting.

Arguments like these were well received by most economists, rationally considered and discussed. Many other economists made great contributions, especially as data became available.
Apr 6, 2023 37 tweets 8 min read
Inflation, what is its most proximate cause? What is the right general framework to think about this messy phenomenon?

Very excited to put out this new paper exploring a generalized "conflict" perspective as the right answer.

Paper here: economics.mit.edu/sites/default/…

🧵a thread... Image (I release it today because I will present this today at 11 ET in a webinar, details down below)

This is very much a conceptual paper. Economists use certain lenses, frameworks or models to think about the world and policy. We need that!
Jan 31, 2023 11 tweets 4 min read
Don't kid yourself: policy runs on theories (AKA "ideas for how things work").

Famous Keynes quote captures this and I can easily provide many recent examples. We need to interpret the data!

Let me offer a quick theoretical lens on the latest wage growth numbers. Early on in the pick up of inflation, prices outpaced wages on average, so real wages fell.

It is natural to expect wages to bounce back. A standard wage-price feedback. Scarier name for it is "Wage Price Spiral". Image
Jan 3, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
Nice thread by @R2Rsquared discussed the Gali-Gertler-Sbordone theory that a low labor wedge summons higher coming inflation, and how this may be at odds with the data.

Interestingly, our recent paper with @guido_lorenzoni does not make similar predictions. Indeed we show a... ... that a inflation may first rise, faster than wages, lowering the real wage (and labor share), followed by a fall in price inflation as wages rise and the real wage catch back up. So the opposite can happen. This depends on parameters and shock.

Dec 31, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
Olivier is making an important point that inflation comes from distributional conflict, but getting a lot of pushback. In my view misplaced.

This prompts me to share some research that explores this view of inflation with Guido Lorenzoni. The analysis is done with a completely standard component of a macro New Keynesian (Calvo) model, and could be adapted to many other settings.

Inflation emerges from wage and price setters disagreeing on W/P aimed for and try to outdo each other, pushing up nominal prices/wages.
Dec 16, 2022 34 tweets 10 min read
I wanted to make public 3 lectures in open economy macro that I had the pleasure to give at CREI Barcelona (100% based on joint work with Emmanuel Farhi).

Topics: Optimal Currency Areas, Fiscal Unions, Global Financial Cycle, Capital Controls, Mobility, Macropru policies.
1/n🧵 Image I hope to have a manuscript in a few months, for now I will put the slides up at the end of this thread.

Here is a quick summary of what you can find.

The goal is to think of some old and new questions with a new perspective. Deepening previous insights and providing new ones. Image