This paper estimates the long run elasticity of the demand for fixed nonresidential capital (both equipment and structures) to changes in its user cost using a quarterly panel of two-digit manufacturing data from South Africa from 1970 to 2001. Using a difference specification that does not rely...

This paper explores the relationship between the health of the financial sector and the rest of the economy. We develop an indicator of financial sector health using a distance-to-default measure based on a Merton-style option pricing model. Our measure spans over three decades and appears to...

Financial intermediation transforms short-term liquid assets into long-term capital assets. As a result, risk taking, in the form of long-term commitments despite unresolved short-term funding risk, is an essential element of intermediation. If such funding risk must be addressed by costly...

I use micro data to quantify key features of U.S. firm financing. In particular, I establish that a substantial 35% of firms' investment is funded using financial markets. I then construct a dynamic equilibrium model that matches these features and fit the model to business cycle data using...

I develop a macroeconomic model with a financial sector, in which banks can finance risky projects (loans) and can affect their quality by exerting a costly screening effort. Informational frictions regarding the observability of loan characteristics limit the amount of external funds that banks...

We conduct a novel empirical analysis of the role of leverage of financial institutions for the transmission of financial shocks to the macroeconomy. For that purpose we develop an endogenous regime-switching structural vector autoregressive model with time-varying transition probabilities that...

Using the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, we identify six household types as a function of their balance sheet composition. Since 1999, there has been a decline in the share of patient households and an increase in the share of impatient households with negative wealth. Using a DSGE model with...

We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian model where occasional declines in agents' confidence give rise to persistent liquidity trap episodes. There is no straightforward recipe for enhancing welfare in this economy. Raising the inflation target or appointing an...

We examine the effects of the economy on the government budget as well as the effects of the budget on the economy. First, we provide measures of the effects of automatic stabilizers on budget outcomes at the federal and state and local levels. For the federal government, the deficit increases...