Currently, many monetary and fiscal policy measures are aimed at preventing the financial market meltdown that started in the US subprime sector and has spread worldwide as a great recession. Although some slow recovery appears to be on the horizon, it is worthwhile exploring the fragility and...

Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper we study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent impacts on...