Browsing by Author "Vicondoa, Alejandro"

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    Are the effects of uncertainty shocks big or small?
    (2023) Alessandri, Piergiorgio; Gazzani, Andrea; Vicondoa, Alejandro
    Previous works have reached widely divergent conclusions on the macroeconomic relevance of uncertainty shocks. We show that this disagreement reflects identification problems linked to the use of financial data in low-frequency VAR models. To bypass this difficulty, we identify uncertainty shocks using daily data and use their monthly averages as instruments in VARs. This novel identification approach captures within-month interactions between uncertainty and asset prices, providing a full picture of the pivotal role of financial markets in propagating uncertainty to the real economy. Once these interactions are accounted for, the disagreement disappears: uncertainty shocks have a small but significant impact on economic activity across specifications and identification schemes.
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    The Micro-D Classification: A New Approach to Identifying Differentiated Exports
    (BROOKINGS INST PRESS, 2018) Bernini, Federico; Gonzalez, Julia; Carlos Hallak, Juan; Vicondoa, Alejandro
    It is common to assess the evolution of a country's export structure as a manifestation of the extent of progress or stagnation in its development process. Performing this exercise requires determining which features of exported products denote higher stages in that process. We argue that exports of differentiated products, especially when sold to developed countries, signal the acquisition of valuable knowledge that reflects development progress. We propose a new classification, denoted Micro-D, that works at the finest aggregation level in customs nomenclatures to provide a more precise identification of differentiated products. Specifically, the classification uses package size as a proxy for product differentiation to identify differentiated food and beverage exports. Thus, it is especially-though not exclusively-suited to capturing export upgrading in land-abundant developing countries. We apply the Micro-D classification to Argentina in 1998-2011 to deliver a new picture of the country's sources of export upgrading in this period.