This paper analyses the path of private consumption and its main macroeconomic determinants. These are related to the life-cycle approach which helps explaining consumption smoothing. In that respect, it is important to go beyond the simple correlation between current disposable income and...

A prolonged low-interest-rate environment presents a significant challenge to banks and is likely to entail major changes to their business models over the long-run. Lower returns to maturity transformation in the face of flatter yield curves and an inability to offer deposit rates significantly...

We propose a worldwide-based loan portfolio to measure banks’ sectoral concentration that features prominently in episodes of bank specialization. We use the banks’ real loan allocation worldwide instead of the in-sample data to compute a bank specialization. We find that firms borrowing...

This paper revisits the macroeconomic effects of government consumption in the neoclassical growth model augmented with idiosyncratic investment (or entrepreneurial) risk. Under complete markets, a permanent increase in government consumption has no long-run effect on the interest rate, the...