The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase in debt leverage of the...

Macroeconomic volatility, both a source and a reflection of underdevelopment, is a fundamental concern for developing countries. Their high aggregate instability results from a combination of large external shocks, volatile macroeconomic policies, microeconomic rigidities, and weak institutions....

Macroeconomic Volatility and Welfare in Developing Countries: An Introduction Norman V. Loayza, Romain Ranciere, Luis Serven, ` and Jaume Ventura Macroeconomic volatility, both a source and a reflection of underdevelopment, is a fundamental concern for developing countries. This article provides...

We propose a novel identification scheme for a non-technology business cycle shock, that we label "sentiment." This is a shock orthogonal to identified surprise and news TFP shocks that maximizes the short-run forecast error variance of an expectational variable, alternatively a GDP forecast or...

One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. We find that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall economic activity is far...

This paper uses a database covering the universe of French firms for the period 1990--2007 to provide a forensic account of the role of individual firms in generating aggregate fluctuations. We set up a simple multi-sector model of heterogeneous firms selling to multiple markets to motivate a...

"One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. We find that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall economic activity is far...