This paper explores whether foreign banks stabilise or destabilise lending to the real economy in the presence of sovereign stress in the domestic economy and abroad. In this context, the presence of foreign intermediaries poses a fundamental, yet unexplored, trade-off. On the one hand, domestic...

An apparent disconnect has taken place between inflation and economic activity in the US over the last 25 years, with price inflation remaining remarkably stable in spite of large fluctuations in the output gap and other measures of economic slack. This observation has led some to believe that...

Are recessions drivers of structural change? Here we investigate the resilience of cities, and argue that a re-allocation of labour between industrial sectors in times of crisis induces an acceleration in structural change. Using UK data, we find that cities experienced a sharp increase in...

We study a competitive banking sector in which banks choose the level of risk of their asset portfolios and, upon the public disclosure of stress test results, raise funding by promising investors a repayment. We show that competition forces banks to choose risky assets so as to promise...

We examine a propagation mechanism that arises from households' long-term borrowing and show empirically that it has sizable real effects. The mechanism recognises that when there is long-term debt, an impulse to new borrowing generates a predictable hump-shaped path of future debt service. We...

Financial shocks generate a protracted and quantitatively important effect on real economic activity and financial markets only if the shocks are both negative and large. Otherwise, their role is quite modest. Financial shocks have become more important for economic fluctuations after the 2000...