Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

This paper estimates the contribution of financial shocks to fluctuations in the real economy by augmenting the standard macroeconomic vector autoregression (VAR) with five financial variables (real stock prices, real house prices, term spread, loans-to-GDP ratio and loans-to-deposits ratio)....

Although oil price shocks have long been viewed as one of the leading candidates for explaining U.S. recessions, surprisingly little is known about the extent to which oil price shocks explain recessions. We provide the first formal analysis of this question with special attention to the...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

I estimate the dynamic effects of respectively traditional interest rate innovations and unconventional monetary policy actions on the Euro area economy. The results show that the Eurosystem can stimulate the economy beyond the policy rate by increasing the size of its balance sheet. The...

This paper analyzes the interactions between business and financial cycles using an extensive database of over 200 business and 700 financial cycles in 44 countries for the period 1960:1-2007:4. Our results suggest that there are strong linkages between different phases of business and financial...

This paper takes the view that a major contributing factor to the financial crisis of 2008 was a failure to correctly assess and price the risk of default. In order to analyse default risk in the macroeconomy, a simple general equilibrium model with banks and financial intermediation is...

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption. This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of consumption...

The crisis of the advanced economies in 2008-09 has focused new attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countries over the...