We study the effect of financial shocks in labor market dynamics. We build a model with two types of labor, two types of capital and both search and financial frictions. We find that financial shocks, modeled as exogenous disturbances to the borrowing constraint of firms, can generate realistic...

This paper investigates the sources of current account imbalances accumulated within the European Monetary Union before the Great Recession. First, it documents that starting in 1996, before the actual introduction of the euro, countries in the euro area periphery experienced increasing current...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors. The data are quarterly balance for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to...

I study the role of shocks to beliefs combined with Bayesian learning in a standard equilibrium business cycle framework. By adapting ideas from Cogley and Sargent (2008b) to the general equilibrium setting, I am able to study how a prior belief arising from the Great Depression may have...

The 2007 sub-prime crisis in the United States, prolonged by a severe economic recession spread over many countries around the world, has led many economic researchers to focus on the recent fluctuations in housing prices and their relationships with macroeconomics and monetary policies. The...

We use a French firm-level panel data set over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical...

This article aims at estimating leading indicators of the American economy with financial variables. We use two types of hidden Markov chains models, a quantitative one (Krolzig (1997)) and a qualitative one (Gregoir and Lenglart (2000)). These models provide a robust and reliable framework to...

In this paper, we attempt to analyse the relationship between house price developments and the business cycle. Employing a time-varying transition probability Markov switching framework, we provide empirical evidence that house price growth may prove a useful leading indicator for turning point...

Recent macroeconomic evolutions during the years 2008 and 2009 have pointed out the impact of financial markets on economic activity. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the ability of a set of financial variables to forecast recessions in the euro area by using a non-linear binary response...

We uncover technological standardization as a microeconomic mechanism which is vital for the implementation of new technologies, in particular general purpose technologies. The interdependencies of these technologies require common rules (“standardization”) to ensure compatibility. Using...