This paper empirically evaluates the impact of bank capital on lending patterns of commercial banks in the United States. We construct an unbalanced quarterly panel of around seven thousand medium sized commercial banks over sixty quarters, from 1996 to 2010. Using two different measures of...

We explore the use of univariate low-frequency filters in macroeconomic forecasting. This amounts to targeting only specific fluctuations of the time series of interest. We show through simulations that such approach is warranted and, using US data, we confirm empirically that consistent gains...

What are the macroeconomic implications of higher leveraged borrowing? To address this question, we develop a business cycle model with credit frictions in which firms reallocate capital among themselves through the credit market. We find that looser collateral requirements moderate the...

Population ageing is a key trend in Western economies. The impact of this trend will be widespread, affecting investment and saving decisions over the next decades, and represents a major challenge to policymakers. Debt sustainability issues in euro area economies may (re)emerge, particularly...

This paper uses firm level survey data from Portugal to investigate how firms adjust their labour costs in the presence of wage rigidities. We document that Portuguese firms, besides reducing employment or freezing nominal base wages, also make frequent use of other cost-cutting strategies, like...

Using micro-level data on the entire population of business loans of a bank-based economy, we empirically test some of the core predictions of the SME financing literature, examining banks’ lending specializations in firm size and lending technologies. Rejecting the conventional belief that...