This study explains the intensity of redistributive policies of Latin American leftist governments during the so-called "left turn" in the region. Based on theoretical models that analyze the implications of inequality in democracies with different economic and institutional structures, it...

This study investigates the macroeconomic implications of financial intermediation of international capital inflows in a small open economy (SOE). The interplay between financial intermediation and macroeconomic fluctuations is studied under alternative representations of the relationship...

This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are...

The term Systemic Risk belongs to the standard rhetoric of economic policy discussions related to the banking industry. Besides of the goal of protecting small depositors control of systemic risk is given as one of the main arguments for banking regulation. Various recent financial crises have...

Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for...

We investigate a banking system subject to repeated macroeconomic shocks and show that without deposit rate control, the banking system collapses with certainty. Any initial level of reserves will delay the collapse but not avoid it. Even without a banking collapse, the economy still converges...