The global financial crisis has reopened the debate on the potential spillover effects from the financial sector to the real economy. This paper adds to that debate by providing new evidence on the link between finance and firm-level productivity, focusing on the case of Estonia. We contribute...

Little progress has been made so far in addressing—in a comprehensive way—the externalities caused by impact of the interconnectedness within institutions and markets on funding and market liquidity risk within financial systems. The Systemic Risk-adjusted Liquidity (SRL) model combines...

We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate's long stability (from the 1960s through the early 1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s - 2007), and recent substantial increase (2008 - 2011) can all be interpreted using a parsimonious 'buffer stock' model of optimal consumption in the presence...

Japan seems to be turning less Ricardian, a trend set to continue. First, the discount wedge seems to have risen, suggesting that consumers have become more myopic. Second, some evidence points to the possibility that an increasing number of households are liquidity constrained. If these...

We study how financial frictions amplify labor supply shocks in a macroeconomic model with occasionally binding financing constraints. Workers supply labor to entrepreneurs who borrow to purchase factors of production. Borrowing capacity is restricted by the value of capital, generating a...

We examine the effects of various borrower-based macroprudential tools in a New Keynesian environment where both real and nominal interest rates are low. Our model features long-term debt, housing transaction costs and a zero-lower bound constraint on policy rates. We find that the long-term...