Recent macroeconomic evolutions during the years 2008 and 2009 have pointed out the impact of financial markets on economic activity. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the ability of a set of financial variables to forecast recessions in the euro area by using a non-linear binary response...

This paper makes a case that the global imbalances of the 2000s and the recent global financial crisis are intimately connected. Both have their origins in economic policies followed in a number of countries in the 2000s and in distortions that influenced the transmission of these policies...

A striking feature of many financial crises is the collapse of exports relative to output. In the 2008 financial crisis, real world exports plunged 17 percent while GDP fell 5 percent. This paper examines whether the drying up of trade finance can help explain the large drops in exports relative...

We study the macroeconomic effects of rational asset bubbles in an overlapping-generations economy where asset trading requires specialized intermediaries and where agents freely choose between working in the production or in the financial sector. Frictions in the market for deposits create...

This paper examines asset prices when risk-sharing externalities are incorporated into an infinite-horizon model where consumers are exposed to the endogenous income risks. It is shown that there exist multiple types of equilibria depending on the degree of market participation. Under incomplete...

We examine the effect of U.S. branch banking deregulations on the entry size of new firms, using micro-data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We find that the average entry size for startups did not change following the deregulations. However, among firms that survived at least four years, a greater...

This lecture examines the causes of the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession. On the macroeconomic side, the Great Moderation encouraged an overly optimistic assessment of risk. Combined with low interest rates, reflecting both loose monetary policy and relatively high Asian savings...

This paper examines weak form efficiency in the stock markets of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh; and the linkages between these four markets. The Augmented Dicky Fuller (ADF-1979), the Phillip-Perron (PP-1988), the Dicky-Fuller Generalized Least Square (DF-GLS 1996) and...

I study the impact of net foreign wealth on the optimal monetary policy of an open economy in a two-country DSGE model with incomplete markets, sticky prices and deviations from the Law of One Price. I find that by optimally manipulating monetary policy, central banks can affect the timing of...

This paper studies the impact of dividend and corporate income taxes on investment and asset returns in a stochastic general equilibrium model. Under the "new" view of dividend taxation (e.g. Poterba and Summers, 1985), proportional dividend taxes do not distort investment decisions, and thus...