Even well managed emerging market economies are exposed to significant external risk, the bulk of which is financial. At a moment's notice, these economies may be required to reverse the capital inflows that have supported the preceding boom. While capital flows crises are sudden nonlinear...

Although internal policy mismanagements can be cited in most recent emerging market crises, they seldom account fully for the severity of these crises. The reluctance of international investors to provide the resources that would limit the extent of the reversal almost invariably plays a key...

We explore the consequences of safe asset scarcity on aggregate demand in a stylized IS-LM/Mundell Fleming environment. Acute safe asset scarcity forces the economy into a "safety trap" recession. In the open economy, safe asset scarcity spreads from one country to the other via capital flows,...

This paper assembles elements that are essential in forming an integral picture of the way a churning' economy functions and of the disruptions caused by transactional difficulties in labor and financial markets. We couch our analysis in a stochastic equilibrium model anchored with US evidence...

Specific quasi-rents build up in a wide variety of economic relationships, and are exposed to opportunism unless fully protected by contract. The recognition that such contracts are often incomplete has yielded major insights into the organization of microeconomic exchange. Rent appropriation,...

Should monetary policy have a prudential dimension? That is, should policymakers raise interest rates to rein in financial excesses during a boom? We theoretically investigate this issue using an aggregate demand model with asset price booms and financial speculation. In our model, monetary...

The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This...

This article summarizes empirical research on the interaction between monetary policy and asset markets, and reviews our previous theoretical work that captures these interactions. We present a concise model in which monetary policy impacts the aggregate asset price, which in turn influences...

Central banks (the Fed) and markets (the market) often disagree about the path of interest rates. We develop a model that explains this disagreement and study its implications for monetary policy and asset prices. We assume that the Fed and the market disagree about expected aggregate demand....

Most economists and observers place the lack of fiscal discipline at the core of the recent Argentine crisis. This begs the question of how countries like Belgium or Italy (pre-Maastricht) could run large fiscal deficits and accumulate debts far beyond those of Argentina, without experiencing...