The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

As part of its response to the global banking crisis and a sharp downturn in domestic economic prospects, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) began a programme of large-scale asset purchases (commonly referred to as quantitative easing or QE) in March 2009, with the aim of...

This work develops an empirical study of the credit channel in Chile. We found that the interest rate has a positive effect in the long run credit supply. Nevertheless, the disequilibrium in the short run credit supply has a significant negative effect on economic activity. This is most marked...

Uncertainty about the riskiness of a new financial environment was an important factor behind the U.S. credit crisis. We show that a boom-bust cycle in debt, asset prices and consumption characterizes the equilibrium dynamics of a model with a collateral constraint in which agents learn "by...

This paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model where asymmetric information about asset quality leads to asset illiquidity. Banking arises endogenously in this environment as banks can pool illiquid assets to average out their idiosyncratic qualities and issue liquid liabilities backed...

Financial frictions are known to raise the volatility of economies to shocks (e.g. Bernanke and Gertler 1989). We follow this line of research to the labor literature concerned by the volatility of labor market outcomes to productivity shocks initiated by Shimer (2005): in an economy with search...

We are interested in the macroeconomic implications of the separation of ownership and control. An alternative decentralized interpretation of the stochastic growth model is proposed, one where shareholders hire a self-interested manager who is in charge of the firm’s hiring and investment...

We use portfolio theory to quantify the efficiency of state-level sectoral patterns of production in the United States. On the basis of observed growth in sectoral value-added output, we calculate for each state the efficient frontier for investments in the real economy. We study how rapidly...

We develop and compute a dynamic equilibrium model where economies differ on the relative efficiency of financial intermediaries and, therefore on households portfolios and currency holdings. Our model economies have some of the features of the different financial structures in countries of the...

Empirical evidence shows that macroeconomic fundamentals have little explanatory power for nominal exchange rates. On the other hand, the recent ‘microstructure approach to exchange rates’ has shown that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flows....