Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2013, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t-2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t through t+2. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. That is, when our sentiment...

The paper draws lessons from the experience of the past year for the conduct of central banks in the pursuit of macroeconomic and financial stability. Macroeconomic stability is defined as either price stability or as price stability and sustainable output or employment growth. Financial...

The recent crisis underlined that proper estimation of distress-dependence amongst banks in a global system is essential for financial stability assessment. We present a set of banking stability measures embedding banks’ linear (correlation) and nonlinear distress-dependence, and their changes...

Firms with limited internal liquidity significantly increased prices in 2008, while their liquidity unconstrained counterparts slashed prices. Differences in the firms' price-setting behavior were concentrated in sectors likely characterized by customer markets. We develop a model, in which...

We explore a view of the crisis as a shock to investor sentiment that led to the collapse of a bubble or pyramid scheme in financial markets. We embed this view in a standard model of the financial accelerator and explore its empirical and policy implications. In particular, we show how the...

Balance sheet recessions result from concentration of macroeconomic risks on the balance sheets of leveraged agents. In this paper, I argue that information dispersion about the future states of the economy combined with trading frictions in financial markets can explain why such concentration...

Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...

I revisit the Great Inflation and the Great Moderation. I document an immoderation in corporate balance sheet variables so that the Great Moderation is best described as a period of divergent patterns in volatilities for real, nominal and financial variables. A model with time-varying financial...

Estimated dynamic models of business cycles in emerging markets deliver counterfactual predictions for the country risk premium. In particular, the country interest rate predicted by these models is acyclical or procyclical, whereas it is countercyclical in the data. This paper proposes and...

This paper proposes an alternative explanation to recurrent hyperinflations other than bounded rationality by explicitly considering the global dynamics of an economy with credit market frictions. In this paper we show that hyperinflations are self-generated and are manifestations of the...