This study shows that the presence of imperfect competition in the banking system propagates external shocks and amplifies the business cycle. Strategic limit pricing, aimed at protecting retail niches from potential competitors, generates countercyclical bank markups. Markup increments during...

We build a model with a traditional banking system, endogenous entry of firms and fintech intermediaries, and firm heterogeneity in credit access and usage to study the credit-market, macroeconomic, and business cycle implications of the recent sizable growth in the number of fintech...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the microfoundations of the observed asymmetric movement in aggregate unemployment rates. Using U.S. data, we find that individual labor force participation responds asymmetrically to changes in local labor market conditions, consistent with the pattern of...

Higher oil-price shocks benefit unskilled workers relative to skilled workers: At the businesscycle frequency, energy prices and the skill premia display a strong, negative correlation. We assess the robustness of this negative correlation using several methods and data sources, including...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

Previous studies on financial frictions have been unable to establish the empirical significance of credit constraints in macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper argues that the muted impact of credit constraints stems from the absence of a mechanism to explain the observed persistent comovements...

We integrate the housing market and the labor market in a dynamic general equilibrium model with credit and search frictions. The model is confronted with the U.S. macroeconomic time series. Our estimated model can account for two prominent facts observed in the data. First, the land price and...

In the U.S. economy during the past 25 years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents, and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight connection...

We incorporate remittances and microentrepreneurship (self-employment) into a small openeconomy business cycle model with capital and labor market frictions. Countercyclical remittances moderate the decline of households' consumption during recessions. These remittances also are used to finance...

Much of the macroeconomics literature dealing with wealth distribution has abstracted from modeling housing explicitly. This paper investigates the properties of the wealth distribution and the portfolio composition regarding housing and equity holdings and their relationship to macroeconomic...