Using a large database of bank financial statements, this paper investigates the determinants of the bank lending channel (BLC) of monetary transmission in Brazil between 1995 and 2012. I extend the standard empirical approach in two main ways. First, I apply a micro-founded strategy for...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

Estimating a forward-looking monetary policy rule by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) has become a popular approach since the influential paper by Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (1998). However, an abundant econometric literature underlines the unappealing small-samples properties of GMM...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we ex-plore...

In general, empirical studies having evaluated with firm individual data the effects of structural labour market reforms in European countries do not reach unambiguous conclusions. In particular, they find that reforms increasing incentives to lower the number of temporary labour contracts do...

The entropy principle yields, for a given set moments, a density that involves the smallest amount of prior information. We first show how entropy densities may be constructed in a numerically efficient way as the minimization of a potential. Next, for the case where the first four moments are...

Recent portfolio choice asset pricing and option valuation models highlight the importance of skewness and kurtosis. Since skewness and kurtosis are related to extreme variations they are also important for Value-at-Risk measurements. Our framework builds on a GARCH model with a condi-tional...

Correlations between international equity markets are often claimed to increase during periods of high volatility, therefore the benefits of international diversification are reduced when they are most needed, i.e. during crises. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between...