To trace out the dynamics of monetary policy shocks on firms, we employ a panel data Local
Projection Instrumental Variable (LP-IV) approach on Compustat quarterly balance sheet data
on nonfinancial listed firms for 49 countries (23 EMs and 26 AEs) over 2000-2019. We resort
to US monetary policy shocks to identify exogenous variation in monetary policy conditions
around the world. US monetary policy has been shown to drive the global financial cycle, and
is arguably exogenous to changes in economic conditions in the rest of the world (Rey 2013,
Bruno and Shin 2015, Cesa-Bianchi et al. 2018, Kalemli-Özcan 2019, Bräuning and Ivashina
2020, Miranda-Agrippino and Rey 2020b, Cesa-Bianchi and Sokol 2022, Miranda-Agrippino and
Nenova 2022).
Cross-border financial linkages in the international transmission of US monetary policy seem
to have become more important due to growing globalization trends. To be sure, spillovers
originating from US monetary policy via the financial channel, operating mainly through the
risk-taking channel and portfolio rebalancing, tend in fact to dominate the trade and exchange
rate channels from the Mundell-Fleming canonical model (Fleming 1962, Mundell 1963).
2
This
motivates our choice for focusing on the financial channel of unanticipated US interest rate
changes, through which US monetary policy affects monetary conditions abroad, after control-
ling for other channels. A contractionary US monetary policy shock transmits to higher foreign
interest rates along the yield curve and leads to lower prices of risky assets, as a result of changes
in risk perceptions and portfolio rebalancing by investors.
In our empirical setting, we use US high-frequency monetary policy surprises as the external
instrument for the country-specific monetary policy indicator, proxied with the local one-year
sovereign bond yields (Gürkaynak et al. 2005, Gertler and Karadi 2015, Nakamura and Steinsson
2018). This first-stage IV is carried out separately for each country, instead of pooling the data
across all countries, to allow the cost of borrowing in a given country to respond differentially
to US monetary policy shocks. This is consistent with research documenting considerable
differences in the transmission of US monetary policy shocks to foreign interest rates across
countries (Kalemli-Özcan 2019, De Leo et al. 2023, Kearns et al. 2023). We use one-year bond
yields as the monetary policy indicator, and not shorter rates (policy rate or money market
rates), as the former also incorporates changes in risk premia. This allows longer-dated yields
to reflect more accurately the underlying changes in a country’s borrowing costs, after controlling
2
See, for instance, Borio and Zhu (2012), Rey (2013), Bruno and Shin (2015), Passari and Rey (2015), Kalemli-
Özcan (2019), Bräuning and Ivashina (2020), Degasperi et al. (2020), Miranda-Agrippino and Rey (2020b), Kearns
et al. (2023).
3