We study the monetary-transmission mechanism with a data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured U.S. commercial bank from 1976 to 1993. We find that the impact of monetary policy on lending is stronger for banks with less liquid balance sheets—i.e., banks with lower ratios of securities to assets. Moreover, this pattern is largely attributable to the smaller banks, those in t...

We analyze the impact of news (information shocks) in economies where liquidity plays a role. While we also consider news about real factors, like productivity, one motivation is that central bank announcements evidently affect markets, as taken for granted by advocates of forward guidance policy. The dynamic effects can be complicated, with information about monetary policy or real factors aff...

This paper uses a new time series dataset of shareholder protection consisting of 60 annual legal indicators for the period 1970-2005 for France, Germany, the UK and the US. On the basis of these data it examines developments in shareholder protection and reassesses the claims that common-law countries have better shareholder protection than civil law countries. Furthermore it examines the rela...

We develop a new general equilibrium growth accounting framework that features increasing returns to scale, imperfect competition and incorporates technological revolutions into the description of technical progress. We propose a way to tell apart revolutionary changes in technology and incremental innovations using stock market data. We use our framework to jointly estimate the overall embodie...

We develop and analyze a simple financial equilibrium model with capital market imperfections. We allow agents to choose on which side of the market they participate. We also allow for the co-existence of bank loans and direct finance. Our findings suggest that financial development depends on both the initial level of aggregate wealth and its distribution among the agents in the economy. We al...

This paper studies how default varies with aggregate income. We analyze a model in which optimal contracts enable risk sharing of privately observed, idiosyncratic income by allowing for default. Default provisions allow agents with low idiosyncratic income realizations to repay less and thus provide insurance. Default penalties ensure that only these agents default. We show that default can oc...

This paper investigates how financial-sector leverage affects macroeconomic instability and welfare. In the model, banks borrow (use leverage) to allocate resources to productive projects and provide liquidity. When banks do not actively issue new equity, aggregate outcomes depend on the level of equity in the financial sector. Equilibrium is inefficient because agents do not internalize how th...

This paper revisits the uncovered interest parity relation. It supplements existing work in two ways: It focuses on long instead of short-term interest rates, and, related to that, employs exchange rate expectations derived from purchasing power parity (PPP) instead of actual outcomes. Among the major ̄oating currencies over the period 1975± 1997, the paper cannot support the notion of further ...

In the nineteenseventies, James Tobin suggested the introduction of a transaction tax on the currency market to cope with exchange rate volatility. We investigate the consequences of the introduction of such a tax on an asset market model from a game-theoretic and an experimental point of view. Our main results include in respect to our model that contrary to the situation in game-theoretic equ...

I study asset prices in a two-agent production economy in which the worker has private information about her labor productivity. The shareholder offers an incentive compatible long-term labor contract, which partially insures the worker against labor income risk. I compare the model’s performance to settings with a competitive labor market, and with static labor contracts. My model successfully...