We study the cyclical fluctuations of leverage and assets of financial intermediaries and GDP in the United States. Leverage and assets are several times more volatile than GDP, and experience larger fluctuations for unregulated (‘shadow’) intermediaries than for regulated ones. While the...

We document the cyclical dynamics in the balance sheets of US leveraged financial intermediaries in the post-war period. Leverage has contributed more than equity to fluctuations in total assets. All three variables are several times more volatile than GDP. Leverage has been positively...

New evidence suggests that individuals “learn from experience,” meaning they learn from events occurring during their lives as opposed to the entire history of events. Moreover, they weigh more heavily recent events compared to events occurring in the distant past. This paper analyzes the...

This paper analyses the long-run growth rates of advanced economies, based on demographic factors. To this end, growth is broken down into two components: growth in productivity (GDP per working-age person) and the projected rate of growth of the working-age population. Productivity is assumed...

We document the twin crisis that affected Spain in the mid-1860s. First, we trace back its origins to the international crisis of 1864-66. Next, we describe the particular banking sector of Spain, characterized by the coexistence of the Bank of Spain with multiple local banks of issue. We...

This paper introduces the problem of a planner who wants to control a population of heterogeneous agents subject to idiosyncratic shocks. The agents differ in their initial states and in the realization of the shocks. In continuous time, the distribution of states across agents is described by a...

We present a general equilibrium model of the global oil market, in which the oil price, oil production, and consumption, are jointly determined as outcomes of the optimizing decisions of oil importers and oil exporters. On the supply side the oil market is modelled as a dominant firm – Saudi...