Financial factors and the international transmission mechanism

The aim of this paper is to investigate theoretically how financial factors affect the international transmission mechanism. We build a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky prices and financial frictions. To add to the literature we extend the model to include two types of credit spread shocks that are micro-founded; a mean preserving shock to the dispersion of firms idiosyncratic productivity (risk shock) and a shock to financial agents net worth (financial wealth shock). We find that the source of the shock to the credit spread matters; credit spread shocks of equivalent size, but driven by different innovations, have different consequences for output and inflation in the home and foreign economy. In general risk shocks generate more realistic spillovers to activity than a financial wealth shock.