Firms in poor countries often tend to rely on alternative sources of financing different than banks. We show that borrowing constraints lead to financial arrangements between firms that can amplify the effect of liquidity or productivity shocks in the economy. In particular, we focus on the...

How do the liquidity functions of banks affect investment and growth at different stages of economic development? How do financial fragility and the costs of banking crises evolve with the level of wealth of countries? We analyze these issues using an overlapping generations growth model where...

The events of the 1990s, which led to the collapse of the banking sector in many countries around the world, have renewed the need to devise some preventive policies. However, the success of these preventive measures is contingent on the predictability of the crisis both in nature and extent....

This paper examines the effects that capital inflows have on the financial system in a Diamond-Dybvig environment. Here, an adverse-selection problem arises where short-term capital has the incentive to enter the domestic banking system while long-term capital chooses to stay out. Then,...

We investigate the extent to which firm-level data are consistent with the microeconomic foundations of the benchmark financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999). To that purpose, we construct a new dataset that directly links firm-specific balance sheet variables to...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of bankruptcy over relatively long time horizons, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and macroeconomic covariates. We find evidence in the U.S. industrial machinery and instruments sector, based on...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of bankruptcy over relatively long time horizons, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and macroeconomic covariates. We find evidence in the U.S. industrial machinery and instruments sector, based on...

Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

This paper uses the neoclassical growth model to identify the effects of technological change on the US business cycle. In the model there are two sources of technological change: neutral, which affects the production of all goods homogeneously, and investment-specific. Investment-specific...

This paper adopts Friedman’s Plucking Markov Switching Model to decompose G7 real GDPs into common permanent components, common transitory components, infrequent Markov Switching negative shock and domestic idiosyncratic components. The findings show that the common components explain a...