Central banks are viewed as having a demonstrated ability to lower long-run inflation. Since the financial crisis, however, the central banks in some jurisdictions seem almost powerless to accomplish the opposite. In this article, we offer an explanation for why this may be the case. Because...

When young individuals face binding debt constraints, their human capital investments will be insufficiently financed by private creditors. If generations overlap, then a well-designed fiscal policy may be able to improve human capital investments by replacing missing capital markets with an...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm-size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business, we show that, by reducing...