Given the unobserved nature of expectations, this paper employs latent variable analysis to examine three financial instability models and assess their out-of-sample forecasting accuracy. We compare a benchmark linear random walk model, which implies exogenous instability phenomena, with a...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

We build a tractable stylized model of external sovereign debt and endogenous international interest rates. In corrupt economies with rent-seeking groups stealing public resources, a politico-economic equilibrium is characterized by permanent fiscal impatience which leads to excessive issuing of...

European banks have been criticized for holding excessive domestic government debt during the recent Eurozone crisis, which may have intensified the diabolic loop between sovereign and bank credit risks. By using a novel bank-level dataset covering the entire timeline of the Eurozone crisis, I...

What went wrong? Why did seemingly rational bond investors continue to purchase Puerto Rican debt with only a modest risk premium, even though the macroeconomic fundamentals were dismal? Why did financial markets fail to exercise market discipline and restrict capital flows to Puerto Rico? Given...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. We compile a new database of 220,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering 91 countries. Our main insight is that, as in equity...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

Covid-19 hit firms by surprise. In a high frequency, representative panel of German firms, the business outlook declined and business uncertainty increased only when the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic led to domestic policy changes: The announcement of nation-wide school closures on March 13...

We examine forecast accuracy and efficiency of the Social Security Administration’s projections for cost rate, trust fund balance, trust fund ratio made during 1980-2020 with horizons up to 95 years. We find that the reported deterioration in the accuracy of the forecasts during 2010’s has...

Major economic reforms have been carried through in Sweden during the last two decades. Most of the reforms have been made in response to long-standing rather than to acute problems. There has usually been a strong perception among economists, policy makers and the general public of the problems...