Jeff Cheung

I am an international macroeconomist studying how global financial markets propagate and amplify shocks from advanced economies to emerging markets. My job market paper uses a shift-share design—endogenous currency shares interacted with exogenous monetary shocks—to causally estimate the cost of sovereign default, finding sizable yet temporary cumulative output losses (8% initially; peaks at 18%; fades to zero by year 6) with more severe effects under pegged exchange rate regimes. 

I specialize in using applied methods—IV, DiD, Bayesian analysis—to answer macro questions across sovereign debt, inflation target credibility, and exchange rate puzzles. I mentor undergraduate in economic research through the “Global Price Initiative”, which builds time-geography-product level price datasets from historical newspaper advertisements to study the distributional effects of policy shocks. All my work highlights the heterogeneous nature of international shock transmission and the importance of macroprudential policies in safeguarding local financial stability.