The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioral frictions. Undersaving can have important welfare consequences: variable consumption, low resilience to shocks, and foregone profitable investments. We lay out five sets of constraints th...

This paper evaluates the empirical relation between the level of "nancial intermediary development and (i) economic growth, (ii) total factor productivity growth, (iii) physical capital accumulation, and (iv) private savings rates. We use (a) a pure cross-country instrumental variable estimator to extract the exogenous component of "nancial intermediary development, and (b) a new panel techniqu...

We analyze the impact of capital adequacy regulation on bank insolvency and aggregate investment. We develop a model of the banking system that is characterized by the interaction of many heterogeneous banks with the real sector, interbank credit relations as a consequence of bank liquidity management and an insolvency mechanism. This allows us to study the impact of capital adequacy regulation...

Evidence suggests that banks, like firms, face financial frictions when raising funds. The authors develop a quantitative, monetary business cycle model in which agency problems affect both the relationship between banks and firms and the relationship between banks and their depositors. As a result, bank capital and entrepreneurial net worth jointly determine aggregate investment, and are impor...

This paper extends Nolan and Thoenissen (2009), hence NT, model with an explicit financial intermediary that transfer funds from households to entrepreneurs subject to a well defined loan production function. The loan productivity shock is treated as the supply side financial disturbance. Together with NT’s net worth shock that resembles the credit demand perturbation, both of the two-sided sho...

We study the reaction of commercial banks to external macroeconomic shocks using panel data from over 120 banks in Argentina for the period 1996-1999. We show that all banks reduce lending when systemic risk increases and that this reaction is driven by credit supply decisions by banks, beyond and above the impact of reduced credit demand or increased regulatory pressure. However, the underlyin...

in the recent economic literature, an important finding is the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth. before the 1970s, the most of economists believed that economic growth could be reached only by accumulation of physical capital. in the 1970s and after the pioneering works of mckinon (1973) and shaw (1973), this orthodox view was criticized by a vast amount of ...

We present a model of flight to quality episodes that emphasizes financial system risk and the Knightian uncertainty surrounding these episodes. In the model, agents are uncertain about the probability distribution of shocks in markets different from theirs, treating such uncertainty as Knightian. Aversion to this uncertainty generates demand for safe financial claims. It also leads agents to r...

Many U.S. states imposed temporary moratoria on farm and nonfarm residential mortgage foreclosures during the Great Depression. This article describes the conditions that led some states to impose these moratoria and other mortgage relief during the Depression and discusses the economic effects. Moratoria were more common in states with large farm populations (as a percentage of total state pop...