We find that declining bank credit to the private sector will not necessarily constrain the economic recovery after output has bottomed out following a financial crisis. To obtain this result, we examine data from 39 financial crises, which – as the current one – were preceded by credit booms. In these crises the change in bank credit, either in real terms or relative to GDP, consistently did n...

The productivity-driven Mortensen-Pissarides model predicts that labor productivity, defined as the ratio of output to employment, is strongly correlated with employment, unemployment, vacancies and wages whereas these correlations were argued to be much weaker in the data, especially since the mid 1980s. We first document that the size of these discrepancies between the data and the model beco...

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...

Macroeconomic Volatilities and the Labor Market: First Results from the Euro Experiment This paper analyzes the effects of different labor market institutions on inflation and output volatility. The eurozone offers an unprecedented experiment for this exercise: since 1999, no national monetary policies have been implemented that could account for volatility differences across member states, but...

The Great Moderation refers to the fall in U.S. output growth volatility in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the United States experienced a moderation in inflation and lower average inflation. Using annual data since 1890, we find that an earlier, 1946 moderation in output and consumption growth was comparable to that of 1984. Using quarterly data since 1947, we also isolate the 1969–83 Great ...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. The recent recovery in Latin America has been impressive but ...

Piece Work Pay and Hourly Pay over the Cycle This paper investigates the relative cyclical behavior of the pay of piece workers and hourly paid workers. It uses a unique data set of blue-collar workers in British engineering between 1926 and 1966. The statistics are obtained from the payrolls of firms belonging to the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF). Roughly, the EEF accounted for one-th...

Much of the macroeconomics literature dealing with wealth distribution has become abstracted from modeling housing explicitly. This paper investigates the properties of the wealth distribution and the portfolio composition regarding housing and equity holdings and their relationship to macroeconomic shocks. To this end, I construct a business cycle model in which agents differ in age, income, a...

Using a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set for Portugal over the 1986-2005 period, this study analyzes the heterogeneity in wages responses to aggregate labor market conditions for newly hired workers and existing workers. Controlling simultaneously for worker and firm specific effects, the results show that entry wages are much more procyclical than current wages. A one-point incr...

Many emerging economies have experienced current account reversals followed by large declines in economic activity. These sudden stops are reflected in their real interest rates, which alternate between tranquil times, when the level is relatively low and stable, and crises, during which interest rates are higher and more volatile. We embed an estimated regime switching process of interest rate...