The last decade has witnessed two groundbreaking developments in monetary economics: The growth in digital private currencies and negative interest rate policies (NIRP), leaving the zero lower bound no longer binding. These developments have introduced two parallel discussions surrounding the...

Abstract Negative interest rates policies (NIRP), usually depicted in economic textbooks as an impossibility due to the prospect of infinite demand for money, are now a reality in several countries due to different reasons. But while the ZLB has been surpassed when it comes to Central Banks, it...

We derive a measure of the degree of inefficiency of the production structure of an economy by casting its optimal sectoral composition as the outcome of a portfolio allocation problem, in the spirit of Koren and Tenreyro (2004). We use the framework to construct measures of inefficiency using...

Expansionary fiscal policies have been advocated to induce output expansions and inflation in deep recession or deationary episodes. We show that, in a fiscalist setup, an increase in deficits can trigger a stagation by negatively affecting financial intermediation of resources to investments....

This paper explores the interaction between a credit crunch and the maturity of government debt, focusing on its impacts on an economy with heterogeneous households. We find that an increase in debt maturity helps softening the economic slump that follows a credit crisis. We show that,...