The Great Depression stopped the economic expansion that the Colombian economy experienced in the 1920s. The collapse of the world economy was transmitted to the country's financial system through two mechanisms: the dramatic reduction in the prices of coffee, the main export, and the sudden...

Sovereign debt crises have regained attention since the recent crises in several European countries. This paper focuses on a particular aspect of the debt crisis literature: the impact of sovereign default on economic growth. Previous research agrees on the negative impact, but not on size and...

We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data?...

The recent global recession requires policy makers to identify the relative importance of shock transmission mechanisms in each region and devise counter policy measures against future idiosyncratic shocks. In the last decade, world dynamics have changed considerably due to increased openness...

This paper shows how risk may aggravate fluctuations in economies with imperfect insurance and multiple assets. A two period job matching model is studied, in which risk averse agents act both as workers and as entrepreneurs. They choose between two types of investment: one type is riskless,...

The authors compute the potential economic benefits that would accrue to a typical pre-WWII era U.S. worker from the post-WWII macroeconomic policy regime. The authors assume that workers face undiversifiable income risk but can self-insure by saving in nominal assets. The worker's average...

The current study points out that the derivation of the aggregate demand curve based on theory of consumer behavior has a fundamental flaw, from which the Giffen product has to be inferior good and has been always regarded as an exception of law of demand is therefore not convincing. The current...

We investigate whether business cycle fluctuations affect the degree of excess sensitivity of private consumption growth to disposable income growth. Using multivariate state space methods and quarterly US data for the period 1965-2000 we find that excess sensitivity is significantly higher...

In spite of two decades of financial globalization, consumption-based indicators do not seem to signal more international risk sharing. We argue that consumption risk sharing among industrialised countries has actually increased - in particular since the 1990s - but that standard...