How did the Spanish money supply evolve in the aftermath of the discovery of large amounts of precious metals in Spanish America? We synthesize the available data on the mining of precious metals and their international flow to estimate the money supply for Spain from 1492 to 1810. Our estimate...

Can fixed exchange rate regimes cause output divergence among member states? We show that such divergence is a long-run equilibrium characteristic of a two-region model with fixed exchange rates, heterogeneous labor markets, and endogenous growth. Under flexible exchange rates, monetary policy...

We estimate the contribution of the American precious metal windfall to West Europe's growth performance in the early modern period. The exogenous nature of American money arrivals allows for identification of monetary effects. We find that more than half of West Europe's growth can be...

When designing schemes to help SMEs survive crises, the government typically faces asymmetric information, so that it cannot target the SMEs most worth saving. We show that the government can exploit the information in the borrower loan demand to improve policy targets compared with existing...

Since the Eurozone Crisis of 2010-12, a critical debate on the viability of a currency union has focused on the role of a fiscal union in adjusting for country heterogeneity. However, a fully-fledged fiscal union may not be politically feasible. This paper develops a two-country general...

We develop a New Keynesian model where all payments between agents require bank deposits through deposits-in-advance constraints, bank deposits are created through disbursement of bank loans, and banks face a convex lending cost. At the zero lower bound on deposit rates (ZLBD), changes in policy...

A sizeable proportion of enterprises, especially SMEs, in receipt of financial assistance from the government, will fail to repay. In this paper we asked whether, and to what extent, it may be beneficial to apply a screening mechanism to deter those mostly likely to fail to repay from seeking...

The Basel Committee proposed the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) to curb excessive maturity mismatch of the banking sector. However, it remains to be ascertained as to what are the financial and real effects of the NSFR on banks' credit quality, investment, and the pass-through of monetary...