How important are financial and labor market frictions for the business cycle dynamics of a small open economy? What are the quantitative effects of increased financial risk on output and inflation? What drives the variation in the intensive and extensive margin of labor supply? What are the...

Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

Financial markets are central to the transmission of uncertainty shocks. This paper documents a new aspect of the interaction between the two by showing that uncertainty shocks have radically different macroeconomic implications depending on the state financial markets are in when they occur....

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...

This paper provides a stylized model of the workings of a global economy where one of its key driving factors is economic agents' continuous struggle to find assets in which to park financial resources. This struggle naturally comes with euphoria and disappointments, as many of the "parking...

The finance literature looks at a number of factors to explain risk premia in corporate debt, such as liquidity effects, jump-to-default risk, and contagion risk. Stochastic re-covery rates as a source of systematic risk have not received much attention so far, most likely due to the...

This article implements the minimum variance frontier for the stochastic discount factor, according to both Hansen and Jagannathan (1991) and Cochrane and Hansen (1992), for the Brazilian stock market. Two approaches are considered in terms of equity returns and equity premium, respectively, the...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavy tail...

We use a standard consumption-based asset pricing model incorporating conditioning information to explain the risk-return profile of currency carry trade portfolios. We use a scaled stochastic discount factor instead of scaled or managed portfolio returns as in previous work. Our conditioning...