This paper establishes that the profit-seeking activities of private intermediaries can ensure Pareto efficiency in the standard pure-exchange monetary overlapping generations economy without the need for government monetary or fiscal policy intervention. Moreover, these profit-seeking activities are shown to rule out all aperiodic and kperiodic cycles for k greater than 2. Contrary to much rec...

We examine investment behavior when firms face costs in the access to external funds. We find that despite the existence of liquidity constraints, standard investment regressions predict that cash flow is an important determinant of investment only if one ignores q. Conversely, we also obtain significant cash flow effects even in the absence of financial frictions. These findings provide suppor...

Adopting an asset-market view of international risk sharing, we identify various sources of macroeconomic risk faced by international investors using a structural Vector Autoregression model. We find that most of the risk of exogenous financial market shocks are shared by international investors through the existing asset markets. However, other macroeconomic risks such as those associated with...

This paper unifies the recent analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations of [Brunnermeier and Sannikov(2012)], in which firms subject to financing constraints can sell capital in order to avoid liquidation, with the earlier related paper of [Milne and Robertson(1996)], in which firms manage cash flow, output and investment decisions in order to lower the probability of liquidation. This yields more...

Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while fairly safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper embeds a trade-off theory of capital structure into a real business cycle model with a small,...

I develop and estimate a monetary business cycle model with nominal loans and collateral constraints tied to housing values. Demand shocks move housing and nominal prices in the same direction, and are amplified and propagated over time. The financial accelerator is not uniform: nominal debt dampens supply shocks, stabilizing the economy under interest rate control. Structural estimation suppor...

The note is a review of the literature on the quantitative methods used to assess the vulnerabilities of financial systems to risks. In particular, the author focuses on the role of system-wide stress testing. He summarizes the recent developments in the literature, highlighting topics relevant for the Czech case. He presents the key concepts relating to systemwide stress tests, overviews the s...

This study investigates whether personal taxes are related to asset valuations. The effective tax rate of investment income fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced. The main result of the paper demonstrates that there is an economically and statistically significant relationship between asset valuations and personal tax rates. Stock valuations tend to be higher when t...

Financial frictions affect the way in which different macroeconomic series respond to a monetary policy shock. We embed the financial accelerator of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) into a medium-scale DSGE model and evaluate the relative importance of financial frictions in explaining monetary transmission. Specifically, we apply minimum distance estimation based on impulse responses for...

We consider a stochastic overlapping generations model for a continuum of individuals with finite lives in presence of a financial market. In this paper, agent’s heterogeneity is given by the dates of birth of the households, on the contrary to standard models, in which each agent has his own aversion coefficient on his utility function. By means of the martingale arguments, we compute the agen...