The Japanese economy has experienced an unprecedented period of macroeconomic turbulence over recent years. Even before the 1997 Asian crisis, this had led to a sharp rise in the number of financial institutions experiencing bankruptcy, including a number of large regional banks and an international stockbroking firm. The question we seek to address is, What effect has this economic turbulence ...

We develop and estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that features sticky prices, a variable elasticity of demand facing firms and firm-specific labor. While reconciling to a good extent the micro and macro evidence on the behavior of prices, the model offers an accurate account of the dramatic increase in macroeconomic stability from the Great Inflation (1948:I-1979:II) to th...

The significant amplification effect of collateral constraints in Kiyotaki and Moore (1997) for adverse shocks depends on the assumption that there is no default ex post, even when the outstanding debt is larger than the value of collateral assets. We show that allowing for explicit default eliminates the dynamic amplification effects in their setup. When there is specificity in the use of prod...

This paper builds a dynamic forward-looking model describing the approximate ten-year cattle cycle. The theoretical model improves on existing models by (1) keeping track of the age distribution of the capital stock, (2) allowing for heterogeneous expectations, and (3) recognizing that cow-calf operators make investment decisions on both the cow and calf margins. The structural parameters are e...

The author develops the first comparative empirical study of bank failures during the nineties between East Asia and Latin America using bank-level data, in order to address the following two questions: (i) To what extent did individual bank conditions explain bank failures? (ii) Did mainly the weakest banks, in terms of their fundamentals, fail in the crisis countries? The main results for Eas...

In this paper we modify the method of Blanchard and Quah (1989) in order to estimate a structural VAR model appropriate for a small open economy. In this way we identify shocks to output and prices in the members of the two monetary unions that make up the African CFA Franc Zone. The costs of monetary union membership will depend on the extent to which price and output shocks are correlated acr...

This paper investigates the linear and nonlinear effects of financial regulation policy uncertainty shocks on US macroeconomic aggregates within a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) framework. Financial regulation policy uncertainty (FRPU) is quantified with a news-based index developed by Baker et al. (2013). Particular attention is paid to the reaction of corporate credit spreads to FRPU shocks. The...

Much of the current debate on reforming the international financial architecture is aimed at reducing the risks of contagion—best defined as a significant increase in cross-market linkages after a shock to an individual country (or group of countries). This definition highlights the importance of other links through which shocks are normally transmitted, including trade and finance. During time...