The recent financial crisis has shown that financial frictions such as asset bubbles and liquidity spirals have important consequences not only for the financial sector, but also more generally for the macro economy. It forces economists to reevaluate firmly held beliefs about market efficiency, as well as convictions about the appropriate regulation of financial markets and approaches to macro...

Why doesn’t capital flow into fast-growing countries? This paper provides a model incorporating heterogeneous producers and underdeveloped domestic financial markets to study the joint dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and capital flows. When a large-scale reform eliminates idiosyncratic distortions and liberalizes capital flows, the TFP of our model economy rises gradually and capita...

We study the influence of financial frictions on the cyclical dynamics of producer prices. Empirical results show that the response of industry-specific PPI inflation to changes in aggregate financial conditions depends importantly on differences in the ease of access to external finance across industries: In industries in which firms face a high likelihood of financial constraints, inflation i...

a borrowing limit—and find that when the model must match the observed distribution of the growth rate of the output of individual firms, the contribution of market imperfections to TFP is rather small. In “Middlemen in Limit-Order Markets,” Jovanovic and Menkveld analyze the role of middlemen in asset markets who are assumed to have superior information and, hence, potentially improve the allo...

Financial frictions can reduce aggregate productivity, in particular when firms with high productivity cannot borrow against their profits. This paper investigates the quantitative importance of this form of borrowing constraint using a large panel of firms in Japan. The firms are young and unlisted, precisely the firms for which credit frictions are expected to be the most severe. In this data...

We introduce intermediation frictions into a Lucas (1978) asset pricing model in order to study the effects of low capital in the intermediary sector on asset prices. Our model shows that low intermediary capital can increase risk premia, Sharpe ratios, volatility and comovement among intermediated assets. Reductions in intermediary capital also lead to a flight-to-quality in which intermediari...

Although theory emphasizes the role of financial market frictions in explaining income inequality, there is little empirical research exploring how financial development and financial sector reforms influence the evolution of income inequality. This paper examines how finance impacts on income inequality in India using annual time series data for over half a century. The results indicate that w...

The interaction between credit frictions, financial innovation, and a switch from optimistic to pessimistic beliefs is thought to have played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. This paper uses a quantitative general equilibrium framework in which this interaction drives the financial amplification mechanism to study macro-prudential policy. Financial innovation enhances the ability of...