Classic models of fire-sales that emphasize liquidity-constrained natural buyers can-notfully account for the asset fire-sales during the Financial Crisis of 2008. I present a modelto demonstrate that fire-sales may happen even when there is a sizable pool of naturalbuyers and in the absence of...

The study documents evidence of a quality effect of financial liberalization on allocative efficiency, which is measured by the dispersion in Tobin's Q across firms. Based on a simple model, the authors predict that financial liberalization, by equalizing access to credit, reduces the variation...

Has monetary policy in advanced economies been less effective since the global financial crisis because of deteriorating household balance sheets? This paper examines the question using household data from the United States. It compares the responsiveness of household consumption to monetary...

We revisit the empirical relationship between private/public debt and output, and build a model that reproduces it. In the model, the government provides financial assistance to credit-constrained agents to mitigate deleveraging. As we observe in the data, surges in private debt are potentially...

We confirm the negative relationship between household debt and future GDP growth documented in Mian, Sufi, and Verner (2017) for a wider set of countries over the period 1950-2016. Three mutually reinforcing mechanisms help explain this relationship. First, debt overhang impairs household...

Debt amortization requirements have been suggested as a way to reduce household indebtedness. However, a closer look reveals that amortization requirements may create incentives for both borrowers and lenders to borrow and lend more rather than less. Suppose that a household plans to finance a...

Historically high household debt in several economies is calling for a deleveraging, but according to some economists, this adjustment can slow GDP growth by weighing on consumption. Using a sample of advanced and emerging market economies, this paper finds evidence of a negative relationship...

This paper provides empirical evidence that the size of the spillovers from U.S. monetarypolicy to non-oil GDP growth in the GCC countries depends on the level of oil prices. Thepotential channels through which oil prices could affect the effectiveness of monetary policyare discussed. We find...

State-contingent debt instruments such as GDP-linked warrants have garnered attention as a potential tool to help debt-stressed economies smooth repayments over business cycles, yet very few studies of the empirical properties of these instruments exist. This paper develops a general f ramework...

We study a monetary, general equilibrium economy in which banks exist because they provide intertemporal insurance to risk-averse depositors. A quot;banking crisisquot; is defined as a case in which banks exhaust their reserve assets. Under different model specifications, the banking industry is...