| One of the most salient aspects of economic "globalization" in the past 30 years has been the formidable growth of international trade, Foreign Direct Investment and foreign production and sales of multinational enterprises. The massive growth of multinational activities has passed virtually unnoticed in open economy macroeconomic theory to the extent that we currently know almost nothing about the properties of the models we use to study various macroeconomic phenomena once we introduce multinational sales explicitly.;The first part of this dissertation contributes to filling this gap by focusing on the role of multinational sales in altering the transmission of business cycles across countries. I develop, solve and simulate two dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the first with only multinational sales and the second with both exports and multinational sales, to study the mechanisms of transmission of productivity shocks across countries in a stylized world where firms can produce and sell directly in the destination country. These models have the novel feature of introducing multinational sales as a possible strategy to sell in foreign market in a dynamic general equilibrium setting a la Ghironi and Melitz (2005) where firms are characterized by idiosyncratic heterogeneity in their labor productivity. Once I allow for con current entry (and exit) of multinationals and exporters over the business cycle, the consumption-output anomaly disappears and I can successfully replicate the ranking of cross-country correlations of output and consumption found in the data. Second, I show that the model with heterogeneous multinationals is capable of bringing the simulated volatility of the Real Exchange Rate much closer to the data than previous models with either representative or heterogeneous exporters.;In the second part of this dissertation I provide a rigorous comprehensive characterization of the cyclical properties of capital flows disaggregated by type (Foreign Direct Investment, Foreign Portfolio Investment, and Debt) and sign (Inward and Outward) for the G7 countries. I show how taking into consideration the heterogeneity of flows can lead to substantial differences in inference with respect to what we consider stylized fact when we model capital flows in a dynamic setting.;Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment, Firm Heterogeneity, International Business Cycle, Capital Flows. |
