We consider a model with on-the-job search where current wages depend only on current aggregate labor market conditions and idiosyncratic match-specific productivities. We show theoretically that the model replicates the findings in Bils (1985) and Beaudry and DiNardo (1991) on the history...

We analyze the impact of monetary policy on the supply of bank credit. Monetary policy affects both loan supply and demand, thus making identification a steep challenge. We therefore analyze a novel, supervisory dataset with loan applications from Spain. Accounting for time-varying firm...

Countercyclical risk aversion can explain major puzzles such as the high volatility of asset prices. Evidence for its existence is, however, scarce because of the host of factors that simultaneously change during financial cycles. We circumvent these problems by priming financial professionals...

This paper argues that the extent of financial contagion exhibits a form of phase transition: as long as the magnitude of negative shocks affecting financial institutions are sufficiently small, a more densely connected financial network (corresponding to a more diversified pattern of interbank...

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again after 1980; (ii) most of these variations can be...

The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can be caused by changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase in debt leverage of low- and...

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an economy made entirely of idiosyncratic sectoral or firm-level shocks. Fundamental volatility...

We examine the evolution of real per capita GDP around 100 systemic banking crises. Part of the costs of these crises owes to the protracted nature of recovery. On average, it takes about 8 years to reach the pre-crisis level of income; the median is about 6.5 years. Five to six years after the...