I construct an economy with heterogeneous agents that mimics the time-series behavior of the earnings distribution in the United States from 1963 to 2003. Agents face aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks and accumulate real and financial assets. I estimate the shocks that drive the model using...

I develop a general equilibrium model with sticky prices, credit constraints, nominal loans and asset (house) prices. Changes in house prices modify agents' borrowing capacity through collateral value; changes in nominal prices affect real repayments through debt deflation. Monetary shocks move...

In this paper we re-examine commercial banks' lending behavior taking into account changes in the stance of monetary policy in conjunction with changes in financial sector uncertainty. Using a very large data set covering all banks in the US between 1986-2000, we show that financial uncertainty...

This paper tests a credit channel of monetary policy (especially a bank-lending channel) in the housing market. We argue that the relevance of the credit channel depends on the structural features of the housing finance system, in particular efficiency and institutional organisation. We employ a...

This paper develops an affine model of the term structure of interest rates in which bond yields are driven by observable and unobservable macroeconomic factors. It imposes restrictions to identify the effects of monetary policy and other structural disturbances on output, inflation, and...

This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) downgrade announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA...

The macroeconomic evidence on the short-term impact of exchange rates on exports and prices is notoriously weak. In this paper I examine the micro-foundations of this disconnect by looking at firms' export and price setting decisions in response to fluctuations in exchange rates and credit...

I characterize cyclical fluctuations in the cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Using the estimated dispersion, or "risk," stochastic process as an input to a baseline DSGE financial accelerator model, I assess how well the model reproduces...

One of the more dramatic financial events of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the surge in Japanese stock prices that was immediately followed by a very sharp decline of more than 50 percent. While the unprecedented fluctuations in Japanese stock prices were domestic financial shocks, the...

This paper shows that the recent literature that tests for a long-run Fisher relationship using cointegration analysis is seriously flawed. Cointegration analysis assumes that the variables in question are I(1) or I(d) with the same d. Using monthly post-war U.S. data from 1959-1997, we show...