This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between credit shocks, firm defaults and volatility, and to study the impact of credit shocks on business cycle dynamics. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firm-specific...

The author proposes a micro-founded framework that incorporates an active banking sector into a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with a financial accelerator. He evaluates the role of the banking sector in the transmission and propagation of the real effects of aggregate shocks, and...

This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous investment projects and asymmetric information about the quality of securitized assets. I show that when retaining part of the risk, the issuer of securitized assets may credibly...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity using a quarterly VAR with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and thus the impact of oil price...

Traditional structural models cannot distinguish whether changes in activity are a function of altered expectations today or lagged responses to past plans. Polynomial-adjustment-cost (PAC) models remove this ambiguity by explicitly separating observed dynamic behaviour into movements that have...

The international business cycle is very important for Latin America’s economic performance as the recent global crisis vividly illustrated. This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission mechanism of...

This paper proposes a Markov-switching framework to endogenously identify the following: (1) regimes where economies synchronously enter recessionary and expansionary phases; and (2) regimes where economies are unsynchronized, essentially following independent business cycles. The reliability of...

This paper provides a framework for the early assessment of current U.S. nominal GDP growth, which has been considered a potential new monetary policy target. The nowcasts are computed using the exact amount of information that policy-makers have available at the time predictions are made....