Research

Job Market Paper:

"Who's Right in the Inflation Targeting Debate in Emerging Markets?" (draft is coming soon)

Abstract: As the inflation targeting (IT) policy spread globally over the last three decades, it produced a large literature examining its effects. The results vary dramatically, with existing estimates of IT’s impact on average inflation in emerging economies ranging from -11% to +1%. This paper investigates the sources of this variation and identifies the most reliable estimates. Applying common econometric techniques to 42 emerging markets (1985-2019), I show how methodological choices drive these conflicting conclusions. Monte Carlo simulations evaluate estimation methods in terms of both bias and precision, revealing systematic identification challenges coming from an endogenous choice of IT adoption and mean-reverting inflation dynamics. Importantly, the estimators produce consistently ordered results: two-way fixed effects shows the largest negative impact, serving as the upper bound of IT’s inflation-reducing effect, and system GMM yields the smallest effect, providing a lower bound - a pattern that appears in simulations, empirical applications, and previous literature. Under the most credible methods, I find that IT reduced average inflation in emerging markets by approximately 1.2-1.5 percentage points. These results provide a more accurate IT assessment and contribute to the toolkit for evaluating monetary policy frameworks.

Pre-Doctoral: 

“The Effect of Terrorism on Foreign Direct Investment Inflows: A Cross-Country Analysis Over Time” 

(with Paul Yoon and MiaoMiao Xu), Issues in Political Economy, vol. 28(1), 2019.