The assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit has been an implicit or explicit theoretical foundation of many empirical studies on remittances. This paper directly tests this assumption by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households...

Recent regulatory efforts aim at lowering the cyclicality of bank lending because of its potential detrimental effects on financial stability and the real economy. We investigate the cyclicality of SME lending by local banks with vs. without a public mandate, controlling for location, size, loan...

By combining the approaches of Gertler and Karadi (2011) and Bernanke et al. (1999), I develop a DSGE model with leverage constraints both in the banking and in the non-financial firm sector. I calibrate this "full model" to US data. In a world with only a monetary policy and a productivity...