This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level data set that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

We propose measures of financial market stress for forty-six countries and regions across the world. Our measures indicate that worldwide financial market stresses rose significantly in March following the widespread economic shutdowns in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, hardly...

With business leverage at record levels, the effects of corporate debt overhang on growth and investment have become a prominent concern. In this paper, we study the effects of corporate debt overhang based on long-run cross-country data covering the near-universe of modern business cycles. We...

We show that "zombie credit" - cheap credit to impaired firms - has a disinflationary effect. By helping distressed firms to stay afloat, such credit creates excess production capacity, thereby putting downward pressure on product prices. Granular European data on inflation, firms, and banks...

We explore how the sources of shocks driving interest rates, country vulnerabilities, and central bank communications affect the spillovers of U.S. monetary policy changes to emerging market economies (EMEs). We utilize a two-country New Keynesian model with financial frictions and partly...

We document a new set of facts regarding the impact of referrals on labor market outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of referrals-those from family and friends and those from business contacts-and different occupations. Then we develop an...

I exploit a natural experiment in South Korea to examine the real effects of macroprudential foreign exchange (FX) regulations designed to reduce risk-taking by financial intermediaries. By using crossbank variation in the regulation's tightness, I show that it causes a reduction in the supply...

Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the...

In March 2020, massive customer selling of U.S. Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed dealers' capacity to intermediate trades, contributing to a marked deterioration of market functioning. The Federal Reserve promptly took...

This paper reviews the theoretical literature at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance to draw lessons on the connection between vulnerabilities in the financial system and the macroeconomy, and on how monetary policy affects that connection. This literature finds that financial...