Mortality and economic contraction during the 1918-1920 Great Influenza Epidemic provide plausible upper bounds for outcomes under the coronavirus (COVID-19). Data for 43 countries imply flu-related deaths in 1918-1920 of 39 million, 2.0 percent of world population, implying 150 million deaths...

Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

We study the effects of macroeconomic shocks on several measures of economic inequality obtained from U.S. survey data. To identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, and monetary policy shocks, we estimate structural vector autoregressions and impose sign and zero restrictions on impulse...

Based on empirical evidence, I propose a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two financial sectors to analyze the role of corporate debt composition (bank versus bond financing) in the transmission of economic shocks. It is shown that in the presence of monetary and financial...