I develop an overlapping-generations framework in which changes in lending standards generate endogenous cycles. In my economy, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow funds. Intermediaries screen entrepreneurs both through the amount of investment undertaken and through the level of entrepreneurial net worth. I show that endogenous regime swi...

Research on wealth inequality and accumulation and the data upon which it relies have expanded substantially in the twenty-first century. While the field has experienced rapid growth, conceptual and methodological challenges remain. We begin by discussing two major unresolved methodological concerns facing wealth research: how to address challenges to causal inference posed by wealth's cumulati...

Wemodel a credit network characterized by credit relationships connecting (i) downstream (D) and upstream (U) firms and (ii) firms and banks. The net worth of D firms is the driver of fluctuations. The production of D firms and of their suppliers (U firms) in fact, is constrained by the availability of internal finance—proxied by net worth—to the D firms. The structure of credit interlinkages c...

Figure 1 documents a strong negative relation in the United States between wealth (household net worth, from the Federal Reserve Flow of Funds, as a fraction of GDP) and aggregate volatility, measured as standard deviation of real GDP growth rate. Periods when net worth is high, reflecting high prices for housing and/or stocks, tend to be periods of low volatility in aggregate output, employmen...

This paper documents the evolution of the inequalities between generations in Spain, analyzing the trends of income and net worth during the last decade for households headed by adults of different age cohorts. Using data from the Spanish Survey of Household Finance (EFF) we document a deterioration of the situation of the young in terms of mean and median income and net worth in 2011 compared ...

Working papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views stated herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank...

Sustaining efficiency and stability by properly controlling the equity to asset ratio is one of the most important and difficult challenges in bank management. Due to unexpected and abrupt decline of asset values, a bank must closely monitor its net worth as well as market conditions, and one of its important concerns is when to raise more capital so as not to violate capital adequacy requireme...