Has structural change in consumer credit made consumption smoother? Given recent empirical analysis the consumer's inability to smooth consumption appears as prevalent as ever. In this paper, however, I show that structural change in consumer credit appears to have made consumption smoothing a...

Evidence supporting the positive effects of capital account liberalization on growth is mixed at best. Even after conditioning on the quality of domestic financial institutions, a significant number of studies still find no effect. One possible explanation is reverse causation. If low growth...

In this paper, I build a partial equilibrium model and uncover a relationship between regional macroeconomic fluctuations and bankruptcy resolution capacity that depends on the cyclicality of bankruptcy. If the frequency of bankruptcy is countercyclical, the model predicts that fluctuations are...