Lucy Qian Liu

This paper studies the main factors that explain the low regional mobility in Spain, with a view to identifying policy options at the regional and central level to promote labor mobility. The empirical analysis finds that house prices, labor market conditions, and the pervasiveness of labor market duality at the regional level are the main determinants for Spain’s regional mobility, while labor market institutions and policies play an important role at the national level. Policies that facilitate wage setting flexibility and reduce labor market duality could help enhance the functioning of the labor market, thereby promoting labor mobility. There may be also room for policies to incentivize people to move and provide support through targeted active labor market policies.

Regional Labor Mobility in Spain

Seung Jung Lee

Viktors Stebunovs

We study how low interest rates in the United States affect risk taking in the market of crossborder leveraged corporate loans. To the extent that actions of the Federal Reserve affect U.S. interest rates, our analysis provides evidence of a cross-border spillover effect of monetary policy. We find that before the crisis, lenders made ex-ante riskier loans to non- U.S. borrowers in response to a decline in short-term U.S. interest rates, and, after it, in response to a decline in longer-term U.S. interest rates. Economic uncertainty and risk appetite appear to play a limited role in explaining ex-ante credit risk. Our results highlight the potential policy challenges faced by central banks in affecting credit risk cycles in their own jurisdictions.

Evidence from Decades in the Global Syndicated Loan Market

Risk Taking and Interest Rates

Liang Wang

Randall Wright

We develop a theory of money and credit as competing payment instruments, then put it to work in applications. Buyers can use cash or credit, with the former (latter) subject to the inflation tax (transaction costs). Frictions that make the choice of payment method interesting also imply equilibrium price dispersion. We deliver closed-form solutions for money demand. We then show the model can simultaneously account for the price-change facts, cash-credit shares in micro payment data, and money-interest correlations in macro data. We analyze the effects of inflation on welfare, price dispersion and markups. We also describe nonstationary equilibria as self-fulfilling prophecies, which is standard, except here it entails dynamics in the price distribution.

Lucy Qian Liu

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