Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

We present a model in which temporary shocks can permanently scar the economy's productive capacity. Unemployed workers lose skill and are expensive to retrain, generating multiple steady state unemployment rates. Large temporary shocks push the economy into a liquidity trap, generating...

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

We use a cross-country sample of monthly observations for quantitative easing (QE) treatments in order to study the causal effect of such policies on a large set of economic and financial outcome variables. We address potential endogeneity by re-randomising the sample and applying the augmented...

This paper builds a database of idiosyncratic shocks (events) in global banks and car manufacturers (as representative of non-financial firms), and focuses on how these influence a number of macroeconomic and firm-specific variables in the short- and medium-term. We find that these shocks spawn...

This paper studies the international spillovers of US monetary policy shocks on a number of macroeconomic and financial variables in 36 advanced and emerging economies. In most countries, a surprise US monetary tightening leads to depreciation against the dollar; industrial production and real...

This paper estimates and compares the international transmission of European Central Bank (ECB) and Federal Reserve System monetary policy in a unified and methodologically consistent framework. It identifies pure monetary policy shocks by purging them of the bias stemming from contemporaneous...

In this paper we investigate how income growth rates in one country are affected by growth rates in partner countries, testing for the importance of pairwise country links as well as characteristics of the receiving country (trade and financial open- ness, exchange rate regime, fiscal...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutions are fundamental for a country's prosperity. The paper focuses on political events in Italy over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 has helped insulate Italy's financial...