Long-term real interest rates across the world have fallen by about 450 basis points over the past 30 years. The co-movement in rates across both advanced and emerging economies suggests a common driver: the global neutral real rate may have fallen. In this paper we attempt to identify which...

The world has undergone substantial structural change over recent decades, with profound implications for the long-run policy landscape. We focus on two key trends. First, the secular decline in risk-free interest rates, suggesting a fall in the long-run global equilibrium interest rate, Global...

We use a structural overlapping-generations model to quantify the effects of five exogenous forces that drive the global trend equilibrium real interest rate, Global R*. We use data for 31 countries to extract the global trend components of the five drivers and to derive an empirical estimate of...

This paper analyses how the risk-sharing capacity of the financial system varies over the business cycle, leading to procyclical fragility. We show how financial imperfections contribute to underinsurance by entrepreneurs, generating an externality that leads to the build-up of systematic risk...

Long-horizon interest rates in the major international bond markets fell sharply during 2004 and 2005, at the same time as US policy rates were rising; a phenomenon famously described as a 'conundrum' by Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve Chairman. But it was arguably the decline in...

We present a general equilibrium model of intermediation designed to capture some of the key features of the modern financial system. The model incorporates financial constraints and state-contingent contracts, and captures the spillovers associated with asset fire sales during periods of...

Firms with high pre-crisis cash holdings invested significantly more than their cash-poor rivals during the global financial crisis and especially so during the recovery phase. This resulted in a persistent and growing investment gap between cash-rich and cash-poor firms. Cash especially...

We study exchange rate determination in a 2-country model where domestic banks create each economy's supply of domestic and foreign currency. The model combines the UIP-based and monetary theories of exchange rate determination, but the latter with a focus on private rather than public money...

We show that credit spreads rise after a monetary policy tightening, yet spread reactions are heterogeneous across firms. Exploiting information from a unique panel of corporate bonds matched with balance sheet data for US non-financial firms, we document that firms with high leverage experience...

We develop early warning models for financial crisis prediction using machine learning techniques on macrofinancial data for 17 countries over 1870–2016. Machine learning models mostly outperform logistic regression in out-of-sample predictions and forecasting. We identify economic drivers of...