Ricardo J Caballero
Biographic Data
| ID | 1454865 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ricardo J Caballero |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ricardo J |
| FAMILY NAME | Caballero |
| SIGNATURE | CABALLERO R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7507-5451 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Policies, incentives, and faculty participation in the Institutional sustainability of public higher education in Panama
This qualitative study analyzes determining factors in the achievement of scientific and academic research in Panama’s public universities through methodological and data triangulation. The research explored academics’perceptions about the research ecosystem considering data from a national survey (ENACT; n = 565 responses analyzed), six semi-structured interviews, and an exploratory post-seminar perception poll completed by 117 academics. Findin…
A Model of Fickle Capital Flows and Retrenchment
We develop a model of gross capital flows and analyze their role in global financial stability. In our model, consistent with the data, when a country experiences asset fire sales, foreign investments exit (fickleness), while domestic investments abroad return home (retrenchment). When countries have symmetric expected returns and financial development, the benefits of retrenchment dominate the costs of fickleness and gross flows increase fire-sa…
The Safe Assets Shortage Conundrum
A safe asset is a simple debt instrument that is expected to preserve its value during adverse systemic events. The supply of safe assets, private and public, has historically been concentrated in a small number of advanced economies, most prominently the United States. Over the last few decades, with minor cyclical interruptions, the supply of safe assets has not kept up with global demand. The reason is straightforward: the collective growth ra…
Effective labor regulation and microeconomic flexibility
Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome
The recent financial crisis has damaged the reputation of macroeconomics, largely for its inability to predict the impending financial and economic crisis. To be honest, this inability to predict does not concern me much. It is almost tautological that severe crises are essentially unpredictable, for otherwise they would not cause such a high degree of distress. What does concern me about my discipline is that its current core -by which I mainly …
Trade and Capital Flows: A Financial Frictions Perspective
The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to flow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous financial development, a very different conclusion emerges. In particular, in less financially developed economies (South), trade and capital mobility are complements in the sense tha…
Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan
Large Japanese banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (which we call zombies). We examine the implications of suppressing the normal competitive process whereby the zombies would shed workers and lose market share. The congestion created by the zombies reduces the profits for healthy firms, which discourages their entry and investment. We confirm that zombie-dominated industries e…
An Equilibrium Model of “Global Imbalances” and Low Interest Rates
The sustained rise in US current account deficits, the stubborn decline in long-run real rates, and the rise in US assets in global portfolios appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional models. This paper rationalizes these facts as an equilibrium outcome when different regions of the world differ in their capacity to generate financial assets from real investments. Extensions of the basic model generate exchange rate and foreign di…
Hedging sudden stops and precautionary contractions
The Cost of Recessions Revisited: A Reverse-Liquidationist View
The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This paper proposes an alternative perspective. Based on a combination of theory with empirical evidence on gross job flows and on financial and labour market…
The Macroeconomics of Specificity
Specific quasi rents arise in a variety of economic relationships and are exposed to opportunism unless fully protected by contract. Rent appropriation has important macroeconomic consequences. Resources are underutilized, factor markets are segmented, production suffers from technological "sclerosis," job creation and destruction are unbalanced, recessions are excessively sharp, and expansions run into bottlenecks. While, depending on the shock,…
On the Ills of Adjustment
Small Sample Bias and Adjustment Costs
The response of most stock variables (e.g., capital, housing, consumer durables, and prices) to exogenous impulses involves a dynamic-or 'short-run' - reaction, and a target - or 'long-run' - reaction. The difference between these two is typically attributed to some form of adjustment cost. In this paper I argue that the small sample problems of cointegrating procedures used to estimate the ' long'-run component are particularly severe when adjus…
Durable Goods: An Explanation for Their Slow Adjustment
Aggregate expenditure on durable goods responds too slowly to wealth and other aggregate innovations to be consistent with the simplest frictionless version of PIH (permanent income hypothesis). In this paper I present a model of aggregate expenditure on durab1es that builds up from the lumpy nature of microeconomic purchases, and provide evidence supporting its contribution to the resolution of the ?slowness? puzzle. The paper also contains seve…
Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome
The recent financial crisis has damaged the reputation of macroeconomics, largely for its inability to predict the impending financial and economic crisis. To be honest, this inability to predict does not concern me much. It is almost tautological that severe crises are essentially unpredictable, for otherwise they would not cause such a high degree of distress. What does concern me about my discipline is that its current core -by which I mainly …
The Safe Assets Shortage Conundrum
A safe asset is a simple debt instrument that is expected to preserve its value during adverse systemic events. The supply of safe assets, private and public, has historically been concentrated in a small number of advanced economies, most prominently the United States. Over the last few decades, with minor cyclical interruptions, the supply of safe assets has not kept up with global demand. The reason is straightforward: the collective growth ra…
Trade and Capital Flows: A Financial Frictions Perspective
The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to flow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous financial development, a very different conclusion emerges. In particular, in less financially developed economies (South), trade and capital mobility are complements in the sense tha…
Effective labor regulation and microeconomic flexibility
Hedging sudden stops and precautionary contractions
The Macroeconomics of Specificity
Specific quasi rents arise in a variety of economic relationships and are exposed to opportunism unless fully protected by contract. Rent appropriation has important macroeconomic consequences. Resources are underutilized, factor markets are segmented, production suffers from technological "sclerosis," job creation and destruction are unbalanced, recessions are excessively sharp, and expansions run into bottlenecks. While, depending on the shock,…
Durable Goods: An Explanation for Their Slow Adjustment
Aggregate expenditure on durable goods responds too slowly to wealth and other aggregate innovations to be consistent with the simplest frictionless version of PIH (permanent income hypothesis). In this paper I present a model of aggregate expenditure on durab1es that builds up from the lumpy nature of microeconomic purchases, and provide evidence supporting its contribution to the resolution of the ?slowness? puzzle. The paper also contains seve…
Durable Goods: An Explanation for Their Slow Adjustment
Aggregate expenditure on durable goods responds too slowly to wealth and other aggregate innovations to be consistent with the simplest frictionless version of PIH (permanent income hypothesis). In this paper I present a model of aggregate expenditure on durab1es that builds up from the lumpy nature of microeconomic purchases, and provide evidence supporting its contribution to the resolution of the ?slowness? puzzle. The paper also contains seve…
Small Sample Bias and Adjustment Costs
The response of most stock variables (e.g., capital, housing, consumer durables, and prices) to exogenous impulses involves a dynamic-or 'short-run' - reaction, and a target - or 'long-run' - reaction. The difference between these two is typically attributed to some form of adjustment cost. In this paper I argue that the small sample problems of cointegrating procedures used to estimate the ' long'-run component are particularly severe when adjus…
On the Ills of Adjustment
The Macroeconomics of Specificity
Specific quasi rents arise in a variety of economic relationships and are exposed to opportunism unless fully protected by contract. Rent appropriation has important macroeconomic consequences. Resources are underutilized, factor markets are segmented, production suffers from technological "sclerosis," job creation and destruction are unbalanced, recessions are excessively sharp, and expansions run into bottlenecks. While, depending on the shock,…
The Cost of Recessions Revisited: A Reverse-Liquidationist View
The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This paper proposes an alternative perspective. Based on a combination of theory with empirical evidence on gross job flows and on financial and labour market…
Hedging sudden stops and precautionary contractions
Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan
Large Japanese banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (which we call zombies). We examine the implications of suppressing the normal competitive process whereby the zombies would shed workers and lose market share. The congestion created by the zombies reduces the profits for healthy firms, which discourages their entry and investment. We confirm that zombie-dominated industries e…
An Equilibrium Model of “Global Imbalances” and Low Interest Rates
The sustained rise in US current account deficits, the stubborn decline in long-run real rates, and the rise in US assets in global portfolios appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional models. This paper rationalizes these facts as an equilibrium outcome when different regions of the world differ in their capacity to generate financial assets from real investments. Extensions of the basic model generate exchange rate and foreign di…
Trade and Capital Flows: A Financial Frictions Perspective
The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to flow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous financial development, a very different conclusion emerges. In particular, in less financially developed economies (South), trade and capital mobility are complements in the sense tha…
Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome
The recent financial crisis has damaged the reputation of macroeconomics, largely for its inability to predict the impending financial and economic crisis. To be honest, this inability to predict does not concern me much. It is almost tautological that severe crises are essentially unpredictable, for otherwise they would not cause such a high degree of distress. What does concern me about my discipline is that its current core -by which I mainly …
Effective labor regulation and microeconomic flexibility
The Safe Assets Shortage Conundrum
A safe asset is a simple debt instrument that is expected to preserve its value during adverse systemic events. The supply of safe assets, private and public, has historically been concentrated in a small number of advanced economies, most prominently the United States. Over the last few decades, with minor cyclical interruptions, the supply of safe assets has not kept up with global demand. The reason is straightforward: the collective growth ra…
A Model of Fickle Capital Flows and Retrenchment
We develop a model of gross capital flows and analyze their role in global financial stability. In our model, consistent with the data, when a country experiences asset fire sales, foreign investments exit (fickleness), while domestic investments abroad return home (retrenchment). When countries have symmetric expected returns and financial development, the benefits of retrenchment dominate the costs of fickleness and gross flows increase fire-sa…
Policies, incentives, and faculty participation in the Institutional sustainability of public higher education in Panama
This qualitative study analyzes determining factors in the achievement of scientific and academic research in Panama’s public universities through methodological and data triangulation. The research explored academics’perceptions about the research ecosystem considering data from a national survey (ENACT; n = 565 responses analyzed), six semi-structured interviews, and an exploratory post-seminar perception poll completed by 117 academics. Findin…
Economics (13 works) · Economic theories and models (7 works) · Monetary economics (7 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (6 works) · Finance (6 works) · Market economy (6 works) · Microeconomics (6 works) · Econometrics (5 works) · Global Financial Crisis and Policies (5 works) · Macroeconomics (5 works)