Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption "habits" to explain the substantial persistence of macroeconomic consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in the microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...

We assess the impact of credit constraints on investment, inventories and other working capital and firm growth with a large panel of small and medium-sized enterprises from 12 European countries for the period 2014-2016. The data come from the Survey on the access to finance of enterprises...

We study the transmission of liquidity shocks in a dynamic general equilibrium model where firms and households are subject to liquidity risk. The provision of liquidity services is undertaken by financial intermediaries that allocate the stock of liquid asset between the different sectors of...

Standard accounts of the Great Depression attribute an important causal role to monetary policy errors in accounting for the catastrophic collapse in economic activity observed in the early 1930s. While views vary on the relative importance of money versus credit contraction in the propagation...

To identify credit availability we analyze the extensive and intensive margins of lending with loan applications and all loans granted in Spain. We find that during the period analyzed both worse economic and tighter monetary conditions reduce loan granting, especially to firms or from banks...

We study the dynamics of a Lucas-tree model with finitely lived agents who "learn from experience." Individuals update expectations by Bayesian learning based on observations from their own lifetimes. In this model, the stock price exhibits stochastic boom-and-bust fluctuations around the...

The world recently experienced several rare events with disastrous consequences: the global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the Fukushima nuclear accident. These events have in common that key decision-makers were unprepared for them, which aggravated these events. We...

In this paper we discuss the role of the cross-sectional heterogeneity of beliefs in the context of understanding and assessing macroeconomic vulnerability. Emphasis lies on the potential of changing levels of disagreement in expectations to influence the propensity of the economy to switch...

This paper extends the New Keynesian model to allow for stochastic shifts in the monetary policy regime. Agents cannot observe the regime and use a Bayesian learning rule to make optimal inferences. Price setting is adapted to this environment: lagged expectations about monetary policy influence...