Foreign direct investment inflows are positively related to growth across developing countries - but so are savings in excess of investment. I develop an explanation for this well-established puzzle by focusing on the limited availability of consumer credit in developing countries together with...

Using a novel data set for 17 countries dating from 1900 to 2013, we characterize business cycles in both small developed and developing countries in a model with financial frictions and a common shock structure. We estimate the model jointly for these 17 countries using Bayesian methods. We...

This paper develops a model of an economy where bank credit supports both productive investment and individual consumption smoothing in the face of idiosyncratic income risk. Bank credit is constrained by bank equity capital. When policy-makers inject equity capital during financial crises, they...

We study constrained-efficient bank capital regulation in a model with market-imposed equity requirements. Banks hold equity buffers to insure against sudden loss of access to funding. However, in the model, banks choose to only partially self-insure because equity is privately costly. As a...

This paper studies optimal bank capital requirements in a model of endogenous bank funding conditions. I find that requirements should be higher during good times such that a macroprudential "buffer" is provided. However, whether banks can use buffers to maintain lending during a financial...

Countercyclical bank capital requirements have emerged as a popular regulatory tool to help smooth financial cycles. The idea is to reduce capital requirements when exogenous shocks cause aggregate bank capital to decrease so that regulation does not needlessly constrain banks' supply of credit....

Prospective economic developments depend on the behavior of consumer spending. A key question is whether private expenditures recover once social distancing restrictions are lifted or whether the COVID-19 crisis had a sustained impact on consumer confidence, preferences, and hence, spending. The...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

This paper examines the transmission of U.S. real and financial shocks to Canada and, in particular, the role of financial frictions in affecting the transmission of these shocks. These questions are addressed within the Bank of Canada's Global Economy Model (de Resende et al. forthcoming), a...

I build a Heterogeneous Agents New Keynesian model with rich labor market dynamics. Workers search both off- and on-the-job, giving rise to a job ladder, where employed workers slowly move toward more productive and better paying jobs through job-to-job transitions, while negative shocks...