We provide broad-based evidence of a firm size premium of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Europe after the Global Financial Crisis. The TFP growth of smaller firms was more adversely affected and diverged from their larger counterparts after the crisis. The impact was progressively...

In recent years, Fund staff has prepared cross-country analyses of macroeconomic vulnerabilities in low-income countries, focusing on the risk of sharp declines in economic growth and of debt distress. We discuss routes to broadening this focus by adding several macroeconomic and macrofinancial...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This systemic risk like no other at a time of record-breaking debt levels, especially among nonfinancial firms across the world, could exacerbate corporate vulnerabilities, deepen macro-financial...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To assess the likely evolution of nonfinancial corporate performance going forward, this paper investigates empirically the impact of past pandemics using firm-level data on more than 537,000 companies...

We introduce unFEAR, Unsupervised Feature Extraction Clustering, to identify economic crisis regimes. Given labeled crisis and non-crisis episodes and the corresponding features values, unFEAR uses unsupervised representation learning and a novel mode contrastive autoencoder to group episodes...

Rather than taking on more risk, US insurers hit hard by the crisis pulled back from risk taking, relative to insurers not hit as hard by the crisis. Capital requirements alone do not explain this risk reduction: insurers hit hard reduced risk within assets with identical regulatory treatment....

Why did the Great Recession lead to such a slow recovery? I build a model whereheterogeneous firms invest in physical and intangible capital, and can default on their debt. Incase of default, intangible assets are harder to seize by creditors. Hence, intangible capitalfaces higher financing...

A thorough analysis of risks in the banking system requires incorporating banks' inherent heterogeneity and adaptive behavior in response to shocks and changes in business conditions and the regulatory environment. ABBA is an agent-based model for analyzing risks in the banking system in which...

This paper develops a theoretical framework to study the impact of bonus caps on banks' risk taking. In the model, labor market price adjustments can offset the direct effects of bonus caps. The calibrated model suggests that bonus caps are only effective when bank executives' mobility is...

Nonfinancial private sector debt increased significantly in advanced economies prior to the global financial crisis and, with a few exceptions, deleveraging has been limited. Furthermore, in some countries households and corporations have continued to accumulate debt. Drawing on the literature,...