This thesis contains three chapters on macroeconomics. The first chapter examines quality of information at the country level in relation to international capital flows. The chapter finds that in times of high financial stress, emerging countries that are more transparent with information suffer a smaller reduction in gross capital flows than countries with low quality of information. Also, transparency has a stabilizing effect on net flows in both emerging and advanced economies. The second chapter studies the effect of population aging on house prices using two alternative definitions of old age, one based on a distance to life expectancy and the other on effective retirement age. It shows that the explanatory power of a negative effect of aging mainly comes from people near their life expectancy. The scenario analysis for future real house prices indicates that the alternative definitions of old age predict only a limited negative effect on house prices. The final chapter investigates how different forms of debt financing impacted firms’ sales performance during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 using Korean firms-level data. This chapter finds that a negative relationship between sales growth and firm leverage during the crisis was driven by trade credit, which is credit extended by firms’ suppliers, with short-term bank credit also playing a role. Comparing firms with different degrees of financial access, the chapter shows that bank credit was negatively associated with the sales growth only of firms with limited financial access, while trade credit was associated with the sales performance of a wider range of firms, including those with better financial access.