Assistant Professor
New Economic School
Office 1721-9
Nakhimovsky
pr, 47
Moscow 117418, Russia
Tel: (+7-495) 129-1700 ext. 124
Fax:
(+7-495) 129-3722
E-mail: deviatov(at)nes.ru
Home page: http://www.nes.ru/~deviatov/
Curriculum vitae: pdf
Teaching
at NES
see homepage
for course syllabi
Monetary
Theory; Recursive Macroeconomics; Macroeconomics 5; Macroeconomics 4
Profile
Assistant
Professor of the New Economic School, Alexei Deviatov received his Ph.D. in Economics
from the Pennsylvania State University (2002). He graduated from the New Economic
School (M.A. in Economics, Master Thesis with Distinction) in 1996 and from the
Moscow State University (B.Sc. in Mechanics and Applied Mathematics) in 1992.
Research
see homepage
for detailed list of publications and other activities
The
research agenda of Dr. Deviatov is in monetary theory, international economics,
and transition. One direction of his research is to study welfare effects of money
creation in models with heterogeneous agents. It is known that heterogeneity in
asset holdings may lead to non-optimality of the Friedman rule via an extensive
margin (the distribution of assets). In his dissertation Dr. Deviatov studies
welfare effects of expansionary policies in environments where money is essential.
The focus is to look at optimal allocations under various notions of implementability.
The main motivation behind looking at the optima is that in models which use particular
rules to divide the gains from trade, expansionary policy can be beneficial simply
because it helps to reduce inefficiencies resulting from the use of those rules.
Working with optima ensures that the benefits of money creation often found in
heterogeneous agent models by various authors are not a consequence of particular
trade mechanisms used by those people.
Another direction of Dr. Deviatov's
research is exchange rate economics. It is widely believed that most of the (short
run) volatility of both nominal and real exchange rates comes from sources other
than fundamentals. The existing models seem to dichotomize along the two dimensions.
Models, which can produce real exchange rate dynamics consistent with main empirical
exchange-rate facts (determination and excess volatility puzzles), emphasize imperfections
in financial markets such as search frictions, asymmetric information, and irrational
expectations of traders. In such models volatility of exchange rates is the reflection
of volatility of fundamentals. Models, where exchange-rate volatility is non-fundamental
(e.g. driven by an extraneous sunspot variable) fail to account for the behavior
of real exchange rates. The objective here is to contribute to the latter literature
by building a model (where exchange-rate uncertainty is driven by a sunspot pertaining
to the division of the gains from trade), consistent with main exchange-rate facts:
determination and excess volatility puzzles, close similarity in behavior of nominal
and real exchange rates, and failure of volatility conservation.
The
next line of Dr. Deviatov's research is the role of reputation in economies in
transition. One of the key problems in transition from planned to market economies
is the so-called soft-budget constraint. The syndrome is essentially a commitment
problem: enterprise management expects to be bailed out by the state in bad circumstances,
which then impacts on incentives; conditional on bad outcome the state cannot
keep its promise to liquidate ineffective enterprises. The main focus here is
to find out whether development of reputation can help harden the budget constraint.
The answer seems to depend on how far an economy advances towards market; in early
transition lenders have substantial difficulties with taking over projects they
liquidate as well as with the interpretation of financial information. That resembles
a situation where corporate debt is very much like sovereign debt, so that a well-known
argument of Bulow and Rogoff applies. As transition proceeds, reputation becomes
more important in mitigating the soft-budget constraint.
