Empirical evidence shows that sovereign defaults are associated with significant downturns in economic activity in defaulting countries. However, the existing literature on sovereign debt and default mainly analyzes endowment economies and, therefore, does not address the relationship between...

Unconventional monetary policy such as Quantitative Easing (QE) is often considered to have considerable spillover effects on emerging market economies (EME). Aims at quantifying these effects so far mostly use high-frequency data around announcement dates, panels or VAR models. This paper...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

The interaction between credit frictions, financial innovation, and a switch from optimistic to pessimistic beliefs played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. This paper develops a quantitative general equilibrium framework in which this interaction drives the financial amplification...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

Credit constraints that link a private agent's debt to market-determined prices create a systemic credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and (constrained) socially optimal equilibria, which induces private agents to "overborrow". We quantify the effects of this externality in...

Are unregulated capital flows excessive during a stagflation episode? We argue that they likely are, owing to a macroeconomic externality operating through the economy's supply side. Inflows raise domestic wages through a wealth effect on labor supply and cause unwelcome upward pressure on...

An assessment is presented of whether Greece's current plight is a harbinger of similar adverse conditions likely to directly impact the United States in the intermediate- to long-term future.Long-term deficits projected for 2020 and beyond, under the assumption that the economy is in full...

This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of a DSGE model with an endogenous collateral constraint are consistent with key features of the emerging markets' Sudden Stops. Business cycle dynamics produce periods of expansion during which the ratio of debt to asset values raises enough to...

We propose a model that solves the crucial disconnect between business cycle models that treat default risk as an exogenous interest rate on working capital, and sovereign default models that treat output fluctuations as an exogenous process with ad-hoc default costs. The model explains observed...