Truly honored to present our new NBER paper, written with Joshua Aizenman, Donghyun Park, Gazi Salah Uddin and Irfan Qureshi, at the International Monetary Fund’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department (MCM) Policy Forum: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32303
The Performance of Emerging Markets During The Fed’s Easing and Tightening Cycles: A Cross-Country Resilience Analysis
We investigate the determinants of emerging markets performance during five U.S. Federal Reserve monetary tightening and easing cycles during 2004–2023. We study how macroeconomic and institutional conditions of an Emerging Market (EM) at the beginning of a cycle explain EM resilience during each cycle. More specifically, our baseline cross-sectional regressions examine how those conditions affect three measures of resilience, namely bilateral exchange rate against the USD, exchange rate market pressure, and country-specific Morgan Stanley Capital International index (MSCI). We then stack the five cross-sections to build a panel database to investigate potential asymmetry between tightening versus easing cycles. Our evidence indicates that macroeconomic and institutional variables are associated with EM performance, determinants of resilience differ during tightening versus easing cycles, and institutions matter more during difficult times. Our specific findings are largely consistent with economic intuition. For instance, we find that current account balance, international reserves, and inflation are all important determinants of EM resilience.
