We provide empirical evidence to support the calibration of a limit on household indebtedness levels, in the form of a cap on the debt-service-to-income (DSTI) ratio, in order to reduce the probability of borrower defaults in Romania. The analysis establishes two findings that are new to the...

We describe a tractable way to jointly study macroeconomic quantities, welfare and asset prices in real business cycle models featuring affine structure of shocks and Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences. Our solution is analytical, log-linearized and adjusted for risk by exploiting log-normality....

This paper develops a model that relates businesses’ entry into the underground economy to tax rates and the need to access the banking system. The model uses a dynamic approach in which both firms and banks optimize and in which the benefits to a firm of accessing the banking system are...

We construct a Financial Conditions Index (FCI) for Greece as a surveillance tool to quantify the degree of the stress in the financial sector. We use principal component analysis to capture the information content of several financial indicators through a single index. We also construct an...

This paper analyzes certain policies that are typical of a number of rapidly growing East Asian countries in which a fixed exchange rate, combined with a surplus labor market, has made domestic assets relatively inexpensive, generating high rates of FDI as well as domestic capital formation....

In this paper I study the effect of imperfect central bank commitment on inflationary outcomes. I present a model in which the monetary authority is a committee that consists of members who serve overlapping, finite terms. Older and younger generations of Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members...

This paper analyzes certain policies that are typical of a number of rapidly growing East Asian countries in which a fixed exchange rate, combined with a surplus labor market, has made domestic assets relatively inexpensive, generating high rates of FDI as well as domestic capital formation....

Reconciling the high frequency of price changes at the micro level and their apparent rigidity at the aggregate level has been the subject of considerable debate in macroeconomics recently. In this paper I show that incorporating production chains in a standard New- Keynesian model replicates...

We examine the implications of introducing anticipated productivity shocks for the ability of a real-business-cycle model to explain asset prices. Our theoretical framework is a real-business-cycle model in which agents receive news about future productivity shocks. We show that incorporating...

This paper analyzes certain policies that are typical of a number of rapidly growing East Asian countries in which a fixed exchange rate, combined with a surplus labor market, has made domestic assets relatively inexpensive, generating high rates of FDI as well as domestic capital formation....