We study the role of firm heterogeneity in affecting business cycle dynamics and optimal stabilization policy. Firms differ in their degree of cyclicality, and hence, exposure to aggregate risk, leading to firm-specific risk premia that influence resource allocations. The heterogeneous firm...

The US banking industry offers a unique, natural and fertile environment to study geography's effects on banks' behavior and performance. The literature on banks' operating performance, while extensive, says little about the influence of spatial interactions on banks' performance. We compute and...

Financial intermediation and bank spreads are important elements in the analysis of business cycle transmission and monetary policy. We present a simple framework that introduces lending relationships, a relevant feature of financial intermediation that has been so far neglected in the monetary...

The last global crisis brought the monetary policy risk-taking channel to the fore, arguing that lingering low interest rates might affect not only the quantity, but the quality of credit extended as well. In line with this debate, this paper is the first effort to empirically investigate the...

A BMW model is augmented with a credit market affected by banks' balance sheet and used to assess the dynamic performance of an economy in the face of demand and financial shocks under different assumptions about the interactions between monetary and macroprudential policy. We show that the...

We identify the effects of monetary policy on credit risk-taking using a unique dataset covering the population of corporate borrowers in Norway. We find that a lower benchmark interest rate (interbank rates or overnight rates) induces the average bank to grant more loans to risky firms. We also...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of delegation in solving the time inconsistency problem of monetary policy using a microfounded general equilibrium model where delegation and reappointment are explicitly included into the government's strategy. The method of Chari and Kehoe (1990) is...

In this paper, we investigate the responsiveness of financial markets to monetary policy expectations in Turkey. According to the efficient markets hypothesis, financial markets respond to anticipated policy actions prior to a policy announcement. As a result, they are expected to respond only...

This paper estimates the path of inflation persistence in the United States over the last 50 years and draws implications about the evolution of the Federal Reserve's monetary-policy preferences. Standard models of central bank optimization predict that the central bank's preference for output...

Several European countries have followed the United States in introducing prospective payment for hospitals with the expectation of achieving cost efficiency gains. This article examines whether theoretical expectations of cost efficiency gains can be empirically confirmed. In contrast to...