On February 24, the New Economic School and the Central Bank of Russia held a joint research workshop "Financial Dollarization: Causes and Consequences", which was attended by experts from the Central Banks of Argentina, Armenia and Russia, as well as NES and HSE professors.
In his opening speech, Alexander Morozov, Director of the Research and Forecasting Department of the Bank of Russia, noted that it was the second event of the kind, and the organizers are planning to have a series of such workshops. Their goal is to bring together experts from the Bank of Russia, NES and other institutions to discuss theoretical and practical issues, related to regulators’ activities and attracting researchers’ attention. Talking about the topic of the workshop, Alexander Morozov said that for developing countries in general and for Russia in particular, dollarization is an urgent and important issue that is discussed not only by financial authorities, regulators and scholars, but also in society in general.
The moderator of the first session, dedicated to the dollarization of deposits, was the MOEX named professor - NES professor Anna Obizhaeva. Armen Nurbekyan (Central Bank of Armenia) presented a research "Deposit Dollarization in Emerging Markets: Efficient Risk Sharing or Prescription for Disaster?" (with coauthors), that was discussed by HSE Professor Udara Peiris. Alexey Ponomarenko (Bank of Russia) talked about the paper “An Empirical Behavioral Model of Households’ Deposit Dollarization”, and Horacio Aguirre (Central Bank of Argentina) became his discussant.
In the second session, moderated by Andrey Sinyakov (Bank of Russia), NES professor Konstantin Egorov presented his joint research "Firms' Debt: Currency Choice and Exchange Rate Pass-through", and Eduardo Corso (Central Bank of Argentina) spoke about his paper “Financial Dollarization in Argentina: Historical Perspective and Analytical Approaches”. Their discussants were NES professor Konstantin Styrin and Alexey Ponomarenko, respectively.
“This workshop is another initiative within the cooperation framework between the Bank of Russia and NES, aimed at raising the level of expert discussion in the field of finance and macroeconomics. The first workshop in this series was dedicated to research done by macroeconomists using microdata, that is, detailed data on each individual loan issued by banks in different countries. This time we discussed the dollarization of deposits in developing countries, the role of the dollar in the corporate debt market and in the financial sector of individual countries. I am sure that in the near future, together with the Bank of Russia experts and researchers from other organizations, we will continue to discuss topics that are important for our country,” professor Anna Obizhaeva said.
The full program of the workshop is available here, and the video is here.