In this work, we introduce rental markets in a general equilibrium model with borrowing constraints and infinitely lived agents. We estimate our model using standard Bayesian methods and match US data on recent decades. We highlight a crucial relationship that strongly links interest rates, house prices, and rents. It represents agents’ arbitrage when choosing their degree of participation in the housing market (i.e. their real estate holdings). This framework is particularly well suited for explaining how policy-induced changes in households’ preferences have driven house prices up while pushing rent-price ratios down in the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak. It also allows us to parsimoniously track the unequal impact of these changes on agents’ decisions and welfare, which crucially depends on whether they are owners or renters.

In some classes of macroeconomic models with financial frictions, an adverse financial shock successfully explains a decrease in real activity but simultaneously induces a stock price boom. The latter theoretical result is not consistent with data from actual financial crises. This study aims to provide a theoretical explanation for both prolonged recessions and stock price declines. I develop a simple macroeconomic model featuring a banking sector, financial frictions, and R&D-based endogenous growth. Both the analytical and numerical investigations show that endogenous R&D investment and a shock hindering banks’ financial intermediary function can be key to generating both a prolonged recession and a drop in firms’ stock prices.

Carbon pricing aims to shift the risk-adjusted returns on investment in favor of green technologies vis-‘a-vis fossil investment, relying on efficient capital markets to redirect investment accordingly. Capital markets with financial frictions can distort this transmission of climate policy. This study analyses the impact of emission taxes on mitigation and low-carbon investment in the presence of financial frictions. We develop a two-sector environmental dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model calibrated to the Euro Area, to simulate an economic transition in line with the EU climate targets. Financial frictions dampen the response of the economy to the carbon tax such that the emissions target will be missed by 11 percentage points. Moreover, the adverse effects of financial frictions increase when climate policy is delayed. We further identify a volume and a risk effect that drive the impact of a financial wealth shock and an uncertainty shock on emission intensity.

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of seven key TCJA provisions, including the tax cuts for individuals and businesses, the bonus depreciation of equipment, the amortization of R&D expenses, and the limits on interest deductibility. I use a dynamic general equilibrium model with interest deductibility and accelerated depreciation. I find that, initially, the tax reform had a small positive effect on output and investment. In the medium term, however, the effect on output will diminish, and the effect on investment will turn negative. The tax reform will depress investment in R&D. Government debt will surge.

This paper quantitatively examines the macroeconomic effects of size-dependent financial frictions on capital misallocation and aggregate total factor productivity. Based on panel data from China’s manufacturing sector, I find that among non-state-owned enterprises, (i) the dispersion of the marginal product of capital is large and persistent and (ii) large firms tend to have higher leverage, and lower mean and dispersion of the marginal product of capital than their small counterparts. This paper analyzes a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and size-dependent financial frictions. By calibrating the model to a Chinese firm-level dataset, I show that in addition to matching the aforementioned stylized facts, the economy with a size-dependent borrowing constraint is able to reproduce the observed negative correlation between firm size and the marginal product of capital, as well as generate quantitatively modest TFP loss. Furthermore, ignoring firms’ size-dependent financing patterns may lead to an overstatement of TFP loss due to financial frictions.

We assess the effects of financial shocks on inflation, and to what extent financial shocks can account for the “missing disinflation” during the Great Recession. We apply a Bayesian vector autoregressive model to US data and identify financial shocks through a combination of narrative and short-run sign restrictions. Our main finding is that contractionary financial shocks temporarily increase inflation. This result withstands a large battery of robustness checks. Negative financial shocks help therefore to explain why inflation did not drop more sharply in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Our analysis suggests that higher borrowing costs after negative financial shocks can account for the modest decrease in inflation after the financial crisis. A policy implication is that financial shocks act as supply-type shocks, moving output and inflation in opposite directions, thereby worsening the trade-off for a central bank with a dual mandate.

The deleterious effect of debt restructuring on banks’ balance sheets and, consequently, on the economy as a whole has been a key policy issue. This paper studies how post-default fiscal policy interacts with this sovereign-bank loop and shape the response of a model economy. Calibration of the model matches characteristics of the Greek economy at the time of the bond exchange. Debt restructuring in place of higher lump-sum taxation or lower nonproductive government spending harms the economy even if no other cost of default is considered. However, the sovereign-debt loop is less costly to the economy than increases in labor or capital taxes to service debt. Even so, if fiscal policy is too responsive, a crowding-out effect inhibits the recovery of capital markets, hence a more conservative fiscal stance is desirable. Thus, how diabolic the post-default sovereign-bank loop is depends to a large extent on the way fiscal policy responds.

This paper quantitatively examines the macroeconomic and welfare effects of macroprudential policies in open economies. We develop a small open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, where banks choose their funding sources (domestic vs. foreign deposits) and are subject to financial constraints. Our model predicts that banks reduce leverage in response to a macroprudential policy tightening, but increasingly rely on foreign funding. This endogenous shifts of funding composition significantly undermine the stabilizing effect and welfare gains of macroprudential policies. Our results also suggest macroprudential policies are less effective in financially more open economies, and optimal policy should take capital flows into consideration. Finally, we find empirical support for the model predictions in a group of developing and emerging economies.

This paper investigates how a combination of monetary and macroprudential policies might affect the dynamics of a small open economy (SOE) with financial frictions under alternative discretionary shocks. Discretionary shocks in productivity and domestic and foreign monetary policies identify the roles of alternative interest rate and reserve requirement rules to stabilize the economy. The model is calibrated for the Brazilian economy. The exchange rate channel of transmission is relevant for foreign but not for domestic shocks. The interest rate rule should target domestic inflation and should not react to the exchange rate. The countercyclical reserve requirements rule, in its turn, should aggressively react to the credit-gap and not include a fixed component. Under both domestic and foreign shocks, the countercyclical effectiveness of the macroprudential policy improves when the degree of openness increases. There is a complementarity between monetary and macroprudential policy rules to stabilize the SOE.

We consider a New-Keynesian model with financial and labor market frictions where firms borrowing is limited by the enforcement constraint. The wage is set in a bargaining process where the firm's shareholder and worker share the production surplus. As debt service is considered to be a part of production costs, firms borrow to reduce the surplus which allows to lower the wage. We study the model's response to financial shock under two Taylor-type interest rate rules: first one responds to inflation and borrowing, second one to inflation and unemployment. We have found that the second rule delivers better policy in terms of the welfare measure. Additionally, we show that the feedback on unemployment in this rule depends on the extent of workers' bargaining power.

The financial crisis has led to a change in the mix of capital and labour employed in the UK and a sharp decline in total factor productivity. This has meant that labour productivity has not recovered to any great degree since the financial crisis. We explore the role of overall and sectoral productivity in explaining the fall in labour productivity, but also question the extent to which productivity in the service sector may be measured with error. We outline the links between a constrained financial sector and a fall in overall productivity – in which intangible capital seems to play an important role – and illustrate how a financial sector providing intermediate services may act to amplify the business cycle impetus from a total factor productivity shock within the context of a calibrated model.

A general equilibrium model with financial frictions in which individuals may encounter unobservable investment opportunities is developed along the lines of Kiyotaki and Moore (2012). I study efficiency properties induced by money and monetary policy when financial frictions prevent optimal equilibrium allocations. By providing closed-form solutions to all prices, allocations, welfare, and, especially, the distribution of individuals with respect to assets, I show that the Friedman rule achieves maximal social welfare, independent of how tight the financial constraints may be. The same level of welfare would be induced by an omniscient central planner able to verify who has an investment opportunity.

Two essential imperfections determine the degree of the financial sector development in an economy: lending frictions, which constrain the ability to extend loans to borrowers; and, trading frictions, which constrain the trading of these loans in secondary markets. I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where long-term investment is the engine of growth to study macroeconomic consequences of financial development. In the model, long-term loans are extended to entrepreneurs in a primary market and then traded in a secondary market among financiers. In competitive equilibria, reductions in either lending or trading frictions enlarge the financial sector. Although financial deepening through low-cost lending is always welfare improving, financial deepening stimulated by low-cost trading could be detrimental to the society. I illustrate that a model qualitatively consistent with the U.S. financial development episode of the last 30 years should exhibit disproportionately large reductions in trading frictions relative to lending frictions.

This paper assesses the empirical relevance of financial frictions in the Euro Area (EA) and the United States (US). It provides a comprehensive set of comparisons between two models: (i) a Smets and Wouters (SW) [F. Smets and R. Wouters, Shocks and frictions in US business cycles: A Bayesian DSGE approach, American Economic Review 97(3), 586–606 (2007)] model with financial frictions originating in nonfinancial firms and (ii) a SW model with frictions originating in financial intermediaries. The introduction of financial frictions in either way improves the models' fit compared to a standard SW model, and the empirical comparisons reveal that the latter model outperforms the former both in the euro area and in the United States. Two main factors explain this result: first, the magnitude of the financial accelerator effect, and second, the role of the investment-specific technology shock in affecting financial variables.

This paper embeds labor market search frictions into a New Keynesian model with financial frictions. The econometric estimation establishes that labor market frictions substantially improve the empirical fit of the model. The effect of the interaction between labor and financial frictions on aggregate fluctuations depends on the nature of the shock. For monetary policy, technology, and entrepreneurial wealth shocks, labor market frictions amplify the effect of financial frictions, because robust changes in hiring lead to persistent movements in employment and return on capital that reinforce the original effect of financial frictions. For cost-push, labor supply, marginal efficiency of investment, and preference shocks, labor market frictions dampen the effect of financial frictions by reducing the real cost of repaying existing debt, which lowers the external finance premium.

This paper develops a model to assess the quantitative effects of entry costs and financial frictions on cross-country income and total factor productivity (TFP) differences, with a primary focus on the interaction between entry costs and financial frictions. The model is calibrated to match the establishment-level statistics for the U.S. economy, assuming a perfect financial market. The simulations based on the calibrated model show that entry costs and financial frictions together account for 55% and 46% of the cross-country variation in output and TFP in the data. Moreover, a substantial portion of the variation is accounted for by the interaction between entry costs and financial frictions. The main mechanism is that financial frictions amplify the effect of entry costs.

We focus on the interaction of frictions both at the firm level and in the banking sector in order to examine the transmission mechanism of the shocks and to reflect on the response of the monetary policy to increases in interest rate spreads, using DSGE models with financial frictions. However, VAR models are linear and the solutions of DSGEs are often linear approximations; hence they do not consider time variation in parameters that could account for inherent nonlinearities and capture the adaptive underlying structure of the economy, especially in crisis periods. A novel method for time-varying VAR models is introduced. As an extension to the standard homoskedastic TVP-VAR, we employ a Markov-switching heteroskedastic error structure. Overall, we conduct a comparative empirical analysis of the out-of-sample performance of simple and hybrid DSGE models against standard VARs, BVARs, FAVARs, and TVP-VARs, using data sets from the U.S. economy. We apply advanced Bayesian and quasi-optimal filtering techniques in estimating and forecasting the models.

Based on a dynamic open-economy macroeconomic model, this paper analyzes the motive for foreign reserve accumulation in fast-growing emerging economies. The demand for foreign reserves stems from the interaction between productivity growth and underdevelopment of the domestic financial market. As domestic firms are credit-constrained, domestic saving instruments are necessary to increase their retained earnings in order to invest in capital. The central bank plays the role of a financial intermediary and provides liquid public bonds while investing the bond proceeds abroad in the form of foreign reserves. Foreign reserve accumulation is thus part of a catching-up strategy in an economy facing financial frictions. During economic transition, foreign reserve accumulation is proved to be welfare-improving as long as private capital flows are controlled. This joint strategy enables the central bank to channel sufficient external funding to the domestic economy while keeping domestic interest rates under control to cope with positive productivity shocks.

This paper develops a bank model to study supply-driven contractions in credit or credit crunches. In the model, the bank is affected by financial frictions in raising external funds. These frictions imply that the bank repairs its balance sheet only gradually following a negative shock that weakens the bank's capital position. Consequently, there is persistency in the response of bank lending even when the original shock (productivity or interest rate) is i.i.d. The nonlinear nature of these financial frictions also generates (i) a precautionary motive even with risk-neutral shareholders: the bank increases its desired level of capital if risk increases; (ii) an asymmetric response of lending: negative disturbances can have a bigger impact than positive ones; and (iii) volatility clustering in risk spreads and the bank's share price.

This paper proposes a tractable sudden stop model to explain the main patterns in firm-level data from a sample of Southeast Asian firms during the Asian crisis. The model incorporates trend shocks and financial frictions, features that have so far been used separately in the literature on emerging markets. A negative shock to trend productivity growth can account, in our model, for the drop in output and its swift recovery together with the sizable and persistent downward adjustment in firms' Tobin's Q and debt levels. These patterns are broadly shared by most sudden stop episodes as documented in the literature. Trend shocks can also generate, in our model, strong leverage effects in line with the firm-level data and other observations from the literature.