Andrea Civelli

I am a grad student in Economics at Princeton University and I am very close to finishing my Ph.D. For this year, I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, where I am teaching Intermediate Macro and first year Ph.D. Macro.

I came to Princeton from Como, Italy, where they have the most beautiful lake in the world. Before Princeton I studied at Bocconi University (in Milan, Italy).

Research

My main research focus is in macro and open economy macroeconomics. My main advisor is Prof. Alan Blinder. My other faculty references are Profs. Chris Sims and Nobu Kiyotaki.

JOB MARKET PAPER:

"A Structural Approach to the Globalization Hypothesis for National Inflation Rates" (joint with F. Bianchi) [pdf]

Abstract: This paper studies the relation between globalization and national inflation rates, contributing to the recent debate about the effects of the increasing integration of the world economy on national inflation processes which sees the thesis of Borio and Filardo (07) opposed to that of Ihrig et al. (07). We construct a new dataset, comparable to the one used in Ihrig et al., for a large sample of eighteen countries and we estimate a time varying coefficients VAR for each of them. From the reduced form estimates of the VAR, we find evidence supporting the view against the Globalization Hypothesis. However, the results we obtain from the structural version of the VAR show that globalization has had a significant role in determining the dynamics of inflation for many countries since the 70's. These deeper relations could not emerge from the simple Phillips Curve regressions. The Globalization Hypothesis fails also because the modest increase in openness of the last three decades did not determine any particular time evolution of the structural relations. Finally, a comparison across countries relates the importance of the role of globalization positively to the degree of openness of a country and to the degree of idiosyncrasy of its business cycle.

Download the Technical Note describing the dataset used in the paper and the relative Matlab codes.

WORKING PAPERS:

"International Real Business Cycles, Portfolio Diversification and Valuation Effects" [pdf] [eco-friendly]

Abstract: This paper presents an international real business cycle model in the spirit of Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (92) with endogenously determined portfolio allocations under incomplete markets. It jointly studies the properties of the portfolio side of the economy, which includes the valuation effects, asset returns and portfolio allocations, along with the more typical international macro variables. The model generates a substantial portfolio home bias, which is dependent on the combination of the consumption home bias parameter and the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign traded goods. A higher level of consumption bias determines a higher level of portfolio bias, but the elasticity of substitution must be small in order for the result to hold. The home asset is a good hedge against movements of international prices, which make home physical capital lose value in response to productivity shocks. Using productivity and demand shocks, the model generates also an adequate amount of assets' valuations, which drives the distinction between accounting current account and changes in the foreign net asset position of a country, but does not resolve the Backus-Smith puzzle for standard parameterizations. Adding a further shock to investment absorption does not help in this respect either.

"The Sustainability of US Foreign Debt Position"

Abstract: Starting from the intetemporal budget constraint and the transversality condition of a country in a two-country open economy model, I test for the relative contribution of valuation effects and trade balances to the sustainability of the net debt position of the US.

Professional Activities

Teaching at NC State

Intermediate Macroeconomics EC302 Fall 2009.
Visit the website of my EC302 course! In particular, do not miss the wiki and the glossary sections created by my students and me as useful learning activities.
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I will be teaching first year Ph.D. Macro in the Spring 2010.

Teaching at Princeton (and Bocconi)

Read the evaluation statistics and comments (Section 4 - Andrea Civelli) from my ECO101 Spring 2009 students!

Economics ECO101 in Spring 2009, Prof. Blinder. Set of slides used at my precepts for this course.
Economics ECO100 in Fall 2008, Prof. Farber. Set of slides used at my precepts for this course.
Economics ECO101 in Fall and Spring 2006/2007, Profs. Blinder and Bogan. Set of slides used at my precepts for this course.
Intermediate Macroeconomics ECO302 in Spring 2006, Prof. Krusell.

Applied Econometrics at Bocconi University in Spring 2003, Prof. Favero.

Research Assistantships

I worked for Prof. Marco Battaglini at Princeton in Spring 2008.
I also worked for Prof. Jon Guryan, while he was visiting Princeton from the University of Chicago in 2006/2007.
In the past, I worked for Profs. Carlo Favero, Francesco Giavazzi, and Alex Missale at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. I assisted with work on public debt management, interest rate differentials and policy implications in Brazil.