We study the role of the balance sheet channel of monetary policy in an environment in which credit plays an important role in the funding of new capital investment. Specifically, we ask whether the transmission mechanism of monetary policy is altered in an environment in which financial intermediation ...

The current crisis has centered on borrower defaults on mortgages and the associated effects on banks’ own credit standing (and in several cases their own default), which in turn led to tightened conditions for lending to new (mortgage) borrowers. Any model that does not incorporate all or most of ...

Household indebtedness in Chile has received considerable attention in recent years because of the financial deepening process underway in the economy. Although various macroeconomic indicators show significant increases in the last decade, there are few tools for evaluating the real vulnerability of ...

Many aspects of financial markets merit monitoring in risk management and portfolio allocation contexts, including (and perhaps especially) in contexts of interest to central banks. Much recent attention, for example, has been devoted to measuring and forecasting return volatilities and correlations, ...

By the mid-2000s both academics and central banks had come to a remarkable consensus on what central banks’ basic strategy should be. However with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 the world of central banking changed forever. The worldwide financial crisis revealed that some of the ...

Policymakers and academics often believe that large capital inflows are associated with booms in asset prices and therefore with a higher risk of financial crisis. The belief is supported by the theoretical works of Krugman (1998) Caballero and Krishnamurthy (2006) Aoki Benigno and Kiyotaki (2009) ...

On September 2008 Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the world became aware that the financial crisis that had been unfolding for months was far more serious than expected. Months later it became clear that the financial crisis of 2008-2009 was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression ...

Commodity prices have experienced significant swings over the past two decades. Real commodity prices have on average more than doubled in the last decade compared to the previous one while the prices of some commodities such as copper and other industrial metals have more than tripled in real terms. ...

In the early 1970s when he had barely turned thirty years old Vittorio Corbo was already a legend of sorts among development economists. His dissertation at M.I.T. became an instant classic a work that had to be read by anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of inflation in developing nations. ...

Structural transformation is a reallocation of labor across sectors. In this paper I investigate the impact of structural transformation in an open economy on sectoral and aggregate productivity with a particular focus on the role of government. While there are potentially many sources of structural ...