Empirical measures of world consumption growth risk have failed to rationalize the cross-section of country equity returns. We propose a new factor, termed "the global consumption factor", to explain the patterns in risk premiums on international equity markets. We identify this factor as the...

We analyse the poisonous interaction between bank rescues, financial fragility and sovereign debt discounts. In our model balance sheet constrained financial intermediaries finance both capital expenditure of intermediate goods producers and government deficits. The financial intermediaries face...

This paper studies the optimality of a banking union in a setting with cross-country liquidity spillovers and moral hazard. Generally, the banking union improves welfare by efficiently providing liquidity to banks, thus limiting spillovers from bank defaults across the member countries. At the...

We investigate the effectiveness of "Keynesian" fiscal stimuli when government deficits and debt rollovers are (possibly partially) financed by balance sheet constrained financial intermediaries. Because financial intermediaries operate under a leverage constraint, deficit financing of fiscal...

Entry requires external finance, especially for less wealthy entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection limits competition. We model how incumbents lobby harder to block access to finance to entrants when politicians are less accountable to voters. In a broad cross-section of countries and...

In this note I argue that the desirability of fiscal policy in response to the current crisis depends on whether one views the current crisis as a temporary deviation from a unique equilibrium or as a bad equilibrium out of multiple equilibria. The paper presents a simple Diamond (1982) type of...

We study the dependence between the downside risk of European banks and insurers. Since the downside risk of banks and insurers differs, an interesting question from a supervisory point of view is the risk reduction that derives from diversification within large banks and financial...

In this paper, we analyze the interaction between an incumbent firm's financial contract with abank and its product market decisions in the face of the threat of entry, in a dynamic model.The main results of the paper are: there exists a separating equilibrium with no limit pricing; thelow-cost...