In this paper we study how credit shocks, that is, shocks affecting the ability to raise external funds for borrowers, affect macroeconomic fluctuations. A positive credit shock leads to a typical macroeconomic boom, with an expansion in consumption, investment, labor, output and productivity....

We study a model with repeated moral hazard where financial contracts are not fully indexed to inflation because nominal prices are observed with delay as in Jovanovic & Ueda (1997). More constrained firms sign contracts that are less indexed to the nominal price and, as a result, their...

One key feature of the 2008-2009 crisis has been its international dimension, as most countries have experienced large synchronous contractions. The recent crisis has also been characterized by a sharp fall in employment but not in productivity. These two characterizing features of the recent...

Two observations suggest that financial globalization played an important role in the recent financial crisis. First, more than half of the rise in net borrowing of the U.S. nonfinancial sectors since the mid 1980s has been financed by foreign lending. Second, the collapse of the U.S. housing...