This paper creates a simple model to describe the relationships between, banks, mortgage agencies, mortgage arrangers, and aspiring home owners. Using this model, the author illustrates how slight changes in real estate appreciation assumptions would reverberate through the collateralized debt...

This paper will discuss how the Financial Crisis of 2008 has thrown neoliberalism into a deep legitimation crisis. Over the past four decades the neoliberal ethic of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has permeated American life both public and private. The principles of the laissez faire...

In this paper we present a model of fire sales and market breakdowns, and of the financial amplification mechanism that follows from them. The distinctive feature of our model is the central role played by endogenous uncertainty. As conditions deteriorate, more “banks” within the financial...

During extreme financial crises, all of a sudden, the financial world that was once rife with profit opportunities for financial institutions (banks, for short), becomes exceedingly complex. Confusion and uncertainty follow, ravaging financial markets and triggering massive flight-to-quality...

Somebody must step up. Somebody must call out the stabilization irrelevance of the American Economic Association's signature macro journal, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. The on-going failure of the nine-year-old journal is most egregiously illustrated by its treatment of the Great...

Crises have cleansing effects: Low-quality firms face greater financial shortfalls and invest less than high-quality firms. Public liquidity support preserves the overall production capacity. However, by dampening the cleansing effects, it distorts the quality distribution and reduces the total...

The last few years have seen a significant re-evaluation of the models used to analyze crises in emerging markets. Recent models typically stress financial constraints or distorted financial incentives. While this certainly represents progress, these models share a weakness with the earlier...

Firms in emerging markets are exposed to severe financial frictions and credit constraints, that are exacerbated by the sudden stop of capital inflows. Can monetary policy offset this external credit squeeze? We show that although this may be the case during moderate contractions (or in partial...

During emerging market crises, domestic agents might have sufficient collateral to borrow from the other domestic agents, but they are unable to borrow from foreigners because the country, as a whole, lacks international collateral. In this setting, we show that an (ex-post) optimizing central...

The last few years have seen a significant re-evaluation of the models used to analyze crises in emerging markets. Recent models typically stress financial constraints or distorted financial incentives. While this certainly represents progress, these models share a weakness with the earlier...