This paper introduces cash transfers targeting the poor in an incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents facing idiosyncratic risk. These transfers change the degree of insurance in the economy and aect precautionary motives asymmetrically, leading the poorest households to decrease...

A public job can be seen as a source of insurance against income risk. Indeed, many public employees have job stability, which is compounded with a less volatile and more compressed wage distribution. Hence, by increasing its number of public employees, the government enhances the overall degree...

Financial crises appear to persist if banks fail to be recapitalized quickly after large losses. I explain this impediment through a model where banks provide intermediation services in asset markets with informational asymmetries. Intermediation is risky because banks take positions over assets...

powerful and persistent source of aggregate fluctuations.

We develop a new framework for studying the implementation of monetary policy through the banking sector. Banks are subject to a maturity mismatch problem leading to precautionary holdings of reserves. Through various instruments, monetary policy alters tradeos banks face between lending,...

We show that the organization of production among firms in an economy has important implications for the impact of financial frictions. We set up a model in which firms use output of other firms as inputs for their own production. We allow for arbitrary network structures such that aggregate...