The process of globalization encompasses economic and financial integration. The abolition of capital controls and the dismantling of barriers of different kinds will expose previously sheltered companies to shocks on the global economic arena. Policy-makers in already globalized countries have...

The paper examines changes in the Bulgarian economy following the global financial and economic crisis of 2008. The discussion is primarily based on the behavior of economic agents in the crisis – households and companies. The paper also seeks to address the changes in the external and fiscal...

In this work we study the granular origins of business cycles and their possible underlying drivers. As shown by Gabaix (2011), the skewed nature of firm size distributions implies that idiosyncratic (and independent) firm-level shocks may account for a significant portion of aggregate...

This paper investigates the microeconomic origins of aggregate economic fluctuations inEurope. It examines the relevance of idiosyncratic shocks at the top 100 large firms (thegranular shocks) in explaining aggregate macroeconomic fluctuations. The paper alsoassesses the strength of spillovers...

There have been heated debates on the negative interest rate policy (NIRP) since it was first introduced in major economies. Critics argue that deposit interest rates cannot break through the zero lower bound (ZLB) and that banks' interest margins can be heavily squeezed under the NIRP. The...

While Brazil's deep recession has been broad based, it has been marked by a particularlylarge fall in investment. Real investment fell by around 30 percent between the beginningof 2014 and the beginning of 2017. This paper finds that a variety of factors contributed tothe investment decline,...