The recent financial crisis has highlighted the fragility of the US (and other countries') financial system under several respects. In this paper, the properties of a summary index of financial fragility, obtained by combining information conveyed by the "Agency", "Ted" and "BAA-AAA" spreads,...

Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labour income shocks. This paper brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The...

Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labour income shocks. This paper brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The...

This unique and fascinating book illustrates that the ‘credit crunch’ and the ensuing financial and economic crisis of 2007–2009 did not only strike hard at the economy in the Western world, but also at its policymakers, at economics as a scientific discipline and, more...

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the fragility of the US financial system under several respects. In this paper, the properties of a summary index of financial fragility, timely capturing changes in credit and liquidity risk, distress in the mortgage market, and corporate default...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of both the within-US and international channels of transmission of macroeconomic and financial shocks by means of a 50-country macroeconometric model (estimated over the 1980–2009 period), including measures of excess liquidity and financial...

In this paper international comovements among a set of key real and nominal macroeconomic variables in the US, UK, Canada, Japan and the Euro area have been investigated for the 1980-2005 period, using a factor vector autoregressive approach. We present evidence that comovements in macroeconomic...

In this paper the long-run trend in CPI inflation (core inflation) for Italy is estimate over the 1962-1997 period within the frame work of a multivariate common trends model. In this framework core inflation is directly linked to money and wage growth and interpreted as the long-run forecast of...