This paper studies the welfare properties of competitive equilibria in an economy with incomplete markets subject to idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks. We focus on the role of securitization, whereby borrowers can reduce idiosyncratic asset risk, which enables increased leverage and investment....

During the first two years of monetary union, the euro's weakness surprised most market participants. Explanations proliferated ranging from fundamentals such as differences in growth prospects to psychological factors such as herd behaviour, but no single story fully accounts for the observed...

The authors study the capital accumulation and welfare implications of ceilings on loan interest rates in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Binding ceilings on loan rates reduce the probability of bankruptcy. Lower bankruptcy rates result in lower bankruptcy and liquidation costs. The authors...

We analyze whether variation in systemic risk in the banking system (also known as “bank systemic risk”) can explain corporate investment. We show that in a sample of publicly listed firms in 10 advanced and emerging markets economies during the period 1990–2013, bank systemic risk is...

In this paper, we use three measures that arguably capture two dimensions of “bank systemic risk”, namely, (1) bank funding maturity and (2) bank asset commonality, to empirically test whether bank systemic risk has a positive effect on corporate investment. We document that in a sample of...

Do portfolio shifts by the world's largest asset owners respond procyclically to past returns, or countercyclically to valuations? And if countercyclical investment (with both market-stabilizing and return-generating properties) is a public and private good, how might asset owners be empowered...

The economy of the European Union has not recovered from the impact of the economic and financial crisis. Growth rates remain low and investment activity is weak. This questions current economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union, known as austerity. In opposition to fiscal contraction...