Workers’ remittances have become the second largest source of net financial flows to developing countries. However, the main motives for sending remittances remain controversial. This paper examines the importance of altruistic versus investment motives using a new panel data set of bilateral...

Workers' remittances have become the second largest source of net financial flows to developing countries. However, the main motives for sending remittances remain controversial. This paper examines the importance of altruistic versus investment motives using a new panel data set of bilateral...

This paper surveys intergenerational altruism in neoclassical growth models. It first examines Barro's approach to intergenerational altruism, whereby successive generations are linked by recursive altruistic preferences. Individuals have an altruistic concern only for their children, who in...

This paper investigates the costs and benefi ts of liquidity regulation. We find that liquidity tools are bene ficial but cannot completely remove the need for Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) interventions by the central bank. Full compliance with current Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) and Net...

The main result in Svensson (2017) and its previous versions is that, given current knowledge and empirical estimates, the cost of using monetary policy to “lean against the wind” for financial-stability purposes exceeds the benefit by a substantial margin. Adrian and Liang (2016a) conduct a...

This paper proposes a tractable New Keynesian (NK) economy with endogenous adjustment in product quality that nests the canonical framework. Endogenous quality choice reduces the slope of the traditional NK Phillips curve and amplifies the economy’s response to productivity shocks. This leads...

We consider a standard result of customer market theory: if firms have stable customer relations and face financial frictions, they may keep prices relatively high on their locked-in shoppers to maintain short-term profits at the expense of future market shares in times of low demand and vice...

Survey results in 15 European countries for almost 15,000 firms reveal that Belgian firms react more than the average European firm to adverse shocks by reducing permanent and temporary employment. On the basis of a firm-level analysis, this paper confirms that the different reaction to shocks...

How do prices react to large aggregate shocks? Our new micro-data evidence on value-added tax changes shows that prices react (i) flexibly and (ii) asymmetrically to large positive and negative shocks. We use it to quantitatively evaluate the performance of prominent pricing models. We show that...

We model retail price stickiness as the result of errors due to costly decision-making. Under our assumed cost function for the precision of choice, the timing of price adjustments and the prices firms set are both logit random variables. Errors in the prices firms set help explain micro...