The 2007-2008 financial crisis has made it painfully obvious that markets may quickly turn illiquid. Moreover, recent experience has shown that distress and lack of active trading can jump 'around' between seemingly unconnected parts of the financial system contributing to transforming isolated...

We provide a model with endogenous portfolios of secured and unsecured household debt. Secured debt is collateralized by durables whereas unsecured debt can be discharged in bankruptcy procedures. We show that the model matches the main quantitative characteristics of observed wealth and debt...

The 2007-2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent anemic recovery have rekindled academic interest in quantifying the impact of uncertainty on macroeconomic dynamics. This paper studies the interrelation between financial markets volatility and economic activity assuming that both...

In March 2015, a new international blueprint for disaster risk reduction (DRR) has been adopted in Sendai, Japan, at the end of the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR, March 14 - 18, 2015). We review and discuss the agreed commitments and targets, as well as the...

Thinly traded securities exist in both emerging and well developed markets. However, plausible estimations of market risk measures for portfolios with infrequently traded securities have not been explored in the literature. We propose a methodology to calculate market risk measures based on the...

This paper estimates the impact on the US economy of four types of uncertainty about (i) government spending, (ii) tax changes, (iii) public debt sustainability and (iv) monetary policy. Following a one standard deviation shock, uncertainty about debt sustainability has the largest and most...