While high uncertainty is an inherent implication of the economy entering the zero lower bound, deflation is not, because agents are likely to be uncertain about the way policymakers will deal with the large stock of debt arising from a severe recession. We draw this conclusion based on a...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of US uncertainty shocks on GDP growth in nine small open economies: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We compare the impact of two types of shocks: i) stock market volatility shocks and ii)...

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great...

This paper empirically examines the benefits of relationship banking to banks, in the context of consumer credit markets. Using a unique panel dataset that contains comprehensive information about the relationships between a large bank and its credit card customers, we estimate the effects of...

Hedge fund managers differ in ability and investors want to distinguish good ones from bad. Via the design of their investment strategies, better fund managers want to ease this inference problem while worse fund managers want to complicate it. We impose only the minimal restrictions on the...

This research provides a grasp of China's energy needs and their implications for SSA countries in order to give a balanced and better understanding of its role on the continent. More specifically, the aim is to understand why and how China is involved in the SSA energy sector and what are the...

We provide firm-level evidence that Federal Open Market Committee announcements have real effects by changing expectations of firm profitability. We use an existing decomposition of a monetary policy shock into a central bank information component (CBI) and a conventional monetary component...

Assuming some fixed cost to information acquisition, diffuse shareholders in publicly held firms have little incentive to produce information that can substitute for the services of financial analysts. However, we argue that concentrated shareholdings, either by outsiders like institutions or by...

This paper develops a model in which firm managers maximize their own compensation by using accruals to manage reported earnings. The results of the model suggest that the form of the managerial compensation function and managerial time preferences may have an important influence on the...