The recent crisis in the United States has often been associated with substantial amounts of policy uncertainty. In this paper we ask how uncertainty about fiscal policy affects the impact of fiscal policy changes on the economy when the government tries to counteract a deep recession. The...

We provide an analysis that might help distinguish rationally justified movements in house prices from potentially non-rational movements, using a two-sector business cycle model, in which investment in housing is subject to collateral constraints. A large portion of the evolution of U.S. house...

Since 1991, survey expectations of long-run output growth for the U.S. relative to the rest of the world exhibit a pattern strikingly similar to that of the U.S. current account, and thus also to global imbalances. We show that this finding can to a large extent be rationalized in a two-region...

This paper examines to what extent the build-up of 'global imbalances' since the mid-1990s can be explained in a purely real open-economy DSGE model in which agents' perceptions of long-run growth are based on filtering observed changes in productivity. We show that long-run growth estimates...

The pattern of financial linkages is important in many areas of banking and finance. Yet bilateral linkages are often unknown, and maximum entropy serves as the leading method for estimating unobserved counterparty exposures. This paper proposes an efficient alternative that combines...

In this paper, we report a descriptive investigation of the structural evolution of two of the most important over-the-counter markets for liquidity in Germany: the interbank market for credit and for derivatives. We use end-of-quarter data from the German large credit register between 2002 and...

When banks choose similar investment strategies, the financial system becomes vulnerable to common shocks. Banks decide about their investment strategy ex-ante based on a private belief about the state of the world and a social belief formed from observing the actions of peers. When the social...

This paper provides evidence that interbank markets are tiered rather than flat, in the sense that most banks do not lend to each other directly but through money center banks acting as intermediaries. We capture the concept of tiering by developing a core-periphery model, and devise a procedure...

We study the liquidity allocation among European banks around the Lehman insolvency using a novel dataset of all interbank loans settled via the Eurosystem's payment system TARGET2. Following the Lehman insolvency, lenders in the overnight segment become sensitive to counterparty characteristics...

In this paper, we focus on the interconnectedness of banks and the price they pay for liquidity. We assess how the concentration of credit relationships and the position of a bank in the network topology of the system influence the bank's ability to meet its liquidity demand. We use quarterly...