Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez

Exchange Rates and Financial Market Liquidity

While at CESifo, Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez will be working on a project on the relevance of liquidity in financial markets for the international allocation of economic activity and the determination of exchange rates. It is well established that asset liquidity is a priced attribute, with both public assets (such as US Treasury bonds) and private assets (such as equity and corporate bonds) providing liquidity services. Mr Rodriguez-Lopez' project introduces a market for liquid assets into a standard model of trade to determine how the liquidity market affects the size and productivity of the sector that generates liquid assets, to assess the impact of public liquidity on the amount of private liquidity and to study the effects of trade liberalisation in the presence of liquidity differences across countries. He then embeds the previous structure into an open-economy macroeconomic model of exchange-rate determination. In that model, and in accordance with empirical evidence on exchange-rate movements during liquidity crises, a country's ability to generate liquid assets for the world financial system is directly related to the value of its currency.

Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez' areas of interest are international trade, open-economy macroeconomics and the combination of both. His previous research includes papers on how exchange-rate changes affect trade flows and prices, the effects of trade liberalisation on wages and the impact of offshoring on labour markets.

Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Statistics, also from UCB. His MA in Economics is from El Colegio de México and his BA in Economics from ITESM, Campus Monterrey. His other current position is as Executive Director, California-Irvine Federal Statistical Research Data Center. He was previously Consultant at the OECD and Visiting Scholar in the Research Department of the IMF.