Credit Frictions and 'Sudden Stops' in Small Open Economies: An Equilibrium Business Cycle Framework for Emerging Markets Crises

Financial frictions are a central element of most of the models that the literature on emerging markets crises has proposed for explaining the Sudden Stop' phenomenon. To date, few studies have aimed to examine the quantitative implications of these models and to integrate them with an equilibrium business cycle framework for emerging economies. This paper surveys these studies viewing them as ability-to-pay and willingness-to-pay variations of a framework that adds occasionally binding borrowing constraints to the small open economy real-business-cycle model. A common feature of the different models is that agents factor in the risk of future Sudden Stops in their optimal plans, so that equilibrium allocations and prices are distorted even when credit constraints do not bind. Sudden Stops are a property of the unique, flexible-price competitive equilibrium of these models that occurs in a particular region of the state space in which negative shocks make borrowing constraints bind. The resulting nonlinear effects imply that solving the models requires non-linear numerical methods, which are described in the survey. The results show that the models can yield relatively infrequent Sudden Stops with large current account reversals and deep recessions nested within smoother business cycles. Still, research in this area is at an early stage and this survey aims to stimulate further work.

An analysis of spending behaviour under liquidity constraints with an application to financial hedging

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Interbank Lending and the Demand for Central Bank Loans - a Simple Microfoundation

The paper presents a simple model of banking behavior where portfolio, liquidity, and liability management determine simultaneously the demand and supply of borrowed reserves on the interbank market. As the central bank is one player in this market due to its refinancing policy, it is able to determine the interest rate and henceforth the residual demand for central bank loans. Comparative static analysis shows how external or monetary policy shocks affect the behavior on the interbank market, the volume as well as the structure of the bank's balance sheet. It turns out that the banking firm behavior is non-linear and partially non-monotonous, indicating that the transmission of monetary measures is more complex when endogeneous banking behavior is taken into account.banking firm, balance sheet, interbank market, borrowed reserves, central banking, liquidity, transmission