In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable...

Credit rationing in the presence of asset inequality affects production and trade pattern in this paper, but not in the conventional way. A Ricardian general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous levels of asset ownership is developed to show that more equal asset distribution may contract...

We study the role of labour and credit market imperfections in the determination of equilibrium unemployment. In the credit market, loan contracts are negotiated between financiers and firms, both of which have bargaining power, while firms and organized labour bargain over the base wage. The...

This paper uses data from a panel of more than 400 Italian banks for the period 2001-2012 to examine the main determinants of loan loss provision (LLP), which are classified as either discretionary (income smoothing, capital management, signalling) or non-discretionary (related to the business...

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment,...

This paper explores empirically the link between French equities returns Value-at-Risk (VaR) and the state of financial markets cycle. The econometric analysis is based on a simple vector autoregression setup. Using quarterly data from 1970Q4 to 2008Q3, it turns out that the k-year VaR of French...