The securitization boom in the United States mortgage market from 2000 to 2005 was enormous (figure 1). According to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) new issuance of securities backed by mortgages that were not insured by the U.S. government rose by a factor of twelve ...

Events in financial markets before and during the crisis of late 2008 have stimulated renewed interest in modeling trade with asymmetric information. Robert Shimer’s contribution to this volume joins the literature focusing on trade in securities that are claims on mortgages where issuers of the ...

A characteristic of the current crisis in Europe is that countries in its periphery have found themselves increasingly cut off from international financial markets. In the present study we ask how such changes in the financial structure influence the welfare consequences of maintaining a fixed exchange ...

The Book Series on “Central Banking, Analysis, and Economic Policies” of the Central Bank of Chile publishes new research on central banking and economics in general, with special emphasis on issues and fields that are relevant to economic policies in developing economies. The volumes are published ...

We seek to develop a business cycle model with a financial sector which can be used to study the consequences of policies to restrict the leverage of financial institutions (banks). Because we wish the model to be consistent with basic features of business cycle data we introduce our banking system ...

The paper by Christiano and Ikeda in this volume is one of the first efforts to quantify the welfare gains of leverage constraints in a macroeconomic model with a banking sector. Unlike other models their answer is that they can be even more desirable when banks hold little equity and intermediation ...