This paper analyzes the cyclical effects of bank capital requirements in a simple model with credit market imperfections. Lending rates are set as a premium over the cost of borrowing from the central bank, with the premium itself depending on firms’ effective collateral. Basel I- and Basel...

What was the impact of Brazil's 1998-99 currency crisis-which resulted in a change of exchange rate regime and a large real devaluation-on the occupational structure of the labor force and the distribution of incomes? Would it have been possible to predict such effects ahead of the crisis? The...

The authors aim at contributing to understand the dispersion of returns from policy reforms using cross-country regressions. The authors compare the"before reform"with"after reform"GDP growth outcome of countries that undertook import-liberalization and fiscal policy reforms. They survey a large...