Between 2000 and 2012, the Portuguese economy grew less than the United States during the Great Depression and less than Japan during its lost decade. This paper asks why this happened, with a particular focus on the slump between 2000 and 2007. It describes the main facts of Portugal's recent...

We propose a novel identification scheme for a non-technology business cycle shock, that we label "sentiment." This is a shock orthogonal to identified surprise and news TFP shocks that maximizes the short-run forecast error variance of an expectational variable, alternatively a GDP forecast or...

This paper explores implications of non-separable preferences with home production for international business cycles. Home production induces substitution effects that break the link between market consumption and its marginal utility and help explain several stylized facts of the open economy....

We examine the evolution of real per capita GDP around 100 systemic banking crises. Part of the costs of these crises owes to the protracted nature of recovery. On average, it takes about eight years to reach the pre-crisis level of income; the median is about 6 ½ years. Five to six years after...

While the 2008-2009 financial crisis originated in the United States, we witnessed steep declines in output, consumption and investment of similar magnitudes around the globe. This raises two questions. First, given the observed strong home bias in goods and financial markets, what can account...

This paper is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation of...

A large share of dollar-denominated lending is done by non-U.S. banks, particularly European banks. We present a model in which such banks cut dollar lending more than euro lending in response to a shock to their credit quality. Because these banks rely on wholesale dollar funding, while raising...

International financial integration helps to diversify risk but also may increase the trans- mission of crises across countries. We provide a quantitative analysis of this trade-off in a two-country general equilibrium model with endogenous portfolio choice and collateral con- straints....

The elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods is one of the most important parameters in international economics. The international macro literature, which is primarily concerned with short-run business cycle fluctuations, assigns a low value to this parameter. The international...

This paper provides a theoretical framework for quantitatively investigating the optimal accumulation of international reserves as a hedge against rollover risk. We study a dynamic model of endogenous default in which the government faces a tradeoff between the insurance benefits of reserves and...