Recent developments in macroeconomic theory emphasize that transient economic fluctuations can arise as responses to changes in long run factors -- in particular, technological improvements -- rather than short run factors. This contrasts with the view that short run fluctuations and shifts in...

This paper develops a simple model of macroeconomic behavior which incorporates the impact of financial market quot;imperfections,quot; such as those generated by asymmetric information in financial markets. These information asymmetries may lead to breakdowns in markets, like that for equity,...

This paper examines micro data on U.S. firms' inventories during different macroeconomic episodes. Much of the analysis focuses on the 1981-82 recession, a recession that was apparently precipitated by tight monetary policy. We find important cross-sectional effects in this period: firms that...

We build a variation of the neoclassical growth model in which both wealth shocks (in the sense of wealth destruction) and financial shocks to households generate recessions. The model features three mild departures from the standard model: (1) adjustment costs make it difficult to expand the...

Financial intermediaries borrow in order to lend. When credit is increasing rapidly, the traditional deposit funding (core liabilities) is supplemented with other funding (non-core liabilities). We explore the hypothesis that monetary aggregates reflect the size of non-core and core liabilities...

This paper presents a modeling framework that delivers joint forecasts of indicators of systemic real risk and systemic financial risk, as well as stress-tests of these indicators as impulse responses to structural shocks identified by standard macroeconomic and banking theory. This framework is...

A review of major lines of thinking about developments in the 1980s bearing on the likelihood of a financial crisis in the United States supports four principal conclusions:First, financial crises have historically played a major role in large fluctuations in business activity. A financial...

Similarities between the Great Depression and the Great Recession are documented with respect to the behavior of financial markets. A Great Depression regime is identified by using a Markov-switching VAR. The probability of this regime has remained close to zero for many decades, but spiked for...

This article evaluates a large collection of systemic risk measures based on their ability to predict macroeconomic downturns. We evaluate 19 measures of systemic risk in the US and Europe spanning several decades. We propose dimension reduction estimators for constructing systemic risk indexes...

The importance of information asymmetries in the capital markets is commonly accepted as one of the main reasons for home bias in investment. We posit that effects of such asymmetries may be reduced through relationships between banks established through bank-to-bank lending and provide evidence...