This paper develops a theory of the secondary market trading of financial securitities in which endogenous asset market dynamics generate periods of growing aggregate credit volumes and falling credit standards even in the absence of "financial shocks." Falling credit standards in turn lead to...

This paper reconsiders the role of macroeconomic shocks and policies in determining the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery in the US. The Great Recession was mainly caused by a large demand shock and by the ZLB on the interest rate policy. In contrast with previous findings, the...

Failing to account for joint dynamics of credit and asset prices can be hazardous for countercyclical macroprudential policy. We show that composite financial cycles, emphasising expansions and contractions common to credit and asset prices, powerfully predict systemic banking crises. Further,...

I propose and estimate a dynamic model of financial intermediation to study the different roles of the condition of banks' and firms' balance sheets in real activity. The net worth of firms determines their borrowing capacity both from households and banks. Banks provide risky loans to multiple...

This paper investigates the role of fiscal policies over the aggregate EMU business cycle. Previous studies, based on the assumption of non-separability between public and private consumption, obtain a large public consumption multiplier, a small fraction of non-Ricardian households and,...

Systemic risk refers to the risk of financial system breakdown due to linkages between institutions. This risk cannot be assessed by looking at how individual institutions manage risks but instead requires a full understanding of how the system as a whole operates. At present, the data available...

This paper measures the joint default risk of financial institutions by exploiting information about counterparty risk in credit default swaps (CDS). A CDS contract written by a bank to insure against the default of another bank is exposed to the risk that both banks default. From CDS spreads we...