The impact of currency collapses (i.e. large nominal depreciations or devaluations) on real output remains unsettled in the empirical macroeconomic literature. This paper provides new empirical evidence on this relationship using a dataset for 108 emerging and developing economies for the period...

Since 2009, central banks in the major advanced economies have held interest rates at very low levels to stabilize financial markets and support the recovery of their economies. Based on a Mises-Hayek-BIS view on credit booms and Mises' law of unintended consequences, this paper suggests that...

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...

In this paper we assess the hypothesis that the unprecedented stability of the United States economy, in the decades preceding the outbreak of the financial crisis in August 2007, caused a relatively low output volatility in other national economies. The results of the time series analysis of 97...

Cyclical fluctuations in nominal variables|aggregate price levels and nominal interest rates are documented to be substantially more synchronized across countries than cyclical fluctuations in real output. A transparent mechanism that can account for this striking feature of the nominal...

Empirical evidence demonstrates that credit standards, including lending margins and collateral requirements, move in a countercyclical direction. In this study, we construct a small open economy model with financial frictions to generate the countercyclical movement in credit standards. Our...

All types of recessions, on average, not just those associated with financial and political crises (as in Cerra and Saxena, AER 2008), lead to permanent output losses. These findings have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. A new paradigm of the business cycle needs to account for...

We estimate the causal impact of countercyclical interest rates on macroeconomic outcomes in open economies. To identify countercyclical interest rates, we construct a new database of short-term interest rates, principal exports, and international commodity prices for 40 economies from 1870 to...

It is widely believed that, in the wake of the dot.com crash, the Fed kept the federal funds target rate too low for too long, inadvertently contributing to the subprime boom. We attribute this and other Fed departures from a "neutral" policy stance to the Fed's failure to respond appropriately...

In this paper we estimate a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with factor stochastic volatility in the error term to assess the effects of an uncertainty shock in the Euro area. This allows us to treat macroeconomic uncertainty as a latent quantity during estimation. Only a limited number of...